A series of short, vividly descriptive essays and sketches that record Parisian street life, foreign characters in the Quartier, theatrical anecdotes, and curious press investigations; the narrator observes exotica — a black man in a white panama, Asians, Levantines — notes social manners and fashions, recounts rumor-rich journalistic inquiries about a vanished nobleman and the mysteries around his identity, and offers lyrical, ironic reflections on modern urban cosmopolitanism, cultural collisions, and the performative aspects of appearance.