After a thirty-year absence Christopher Turner returns to Paris. He is here to extricate his best friend’s son Eric from the mercenary machinations of some Parisian gold-digger – or so it is assumed, at home in South Africa. Christopher, with melancholy memories of Paris, is deeply ambivalent about the city; and, as for the young Eric, Christopher remembers him as a brutish lout with little to recommend himself. But both the city and the young man take Christopher by surprise: far from having been corrupted by the place, Eric turns out to have been immeasurably improved by it. The spoilt son has become a considerate and attentive host with charming manners. Furthermore, as Christopher is gradually introduced to Eric’s associates, he finds to his dismay that he likes them – likes, above all, the beautiful Beatrice du Plessis, in her day a supermodel, now the mother of a young daughter apparently destined to follow in her mother’s footsteps. And Paris exerts her spell anew ...