In the small provincial town of Parisey at the foot of the Vosges Mountains, the world still appears to be in order. Surrounded by shimmering poplar groves and cool pebble lakes, its friendly inhabitants still live in a 19th century dream, and they consider legends and sagas to be far more important than politics from the city. Rue St-Sauveur is a particularly harmonious street. This is where the town's nobility lives, a number of elderly gentlemen with turbulent histories: Lorain the power station director, for example, and Gibet the mayor, Delmont the printing press proprietor and a few others. Tolerated rather than esteemed, mother and daughter Pasteur have lived out a shadowy existence in the town ever since René Pasteur lost his life under mysterious circumstances during the final days of the war. And then one day it becomes known that Mayor Gibet is to receive the Cross of the Legion of Honour. Someone breaks his silence, and two old men start an astonishing war against each other, almost a holy war, in which the insanity of the last days of the war is relived. A story, told with the poetic charm of the 19th and the urgency of the 20th century, in which a place and its inhabitants are as vividly alive as one's own next-door neighbours.