Hugo-Paul de Weydroos, forger who manages to mystify the most renowned experts, is an attractive man, not without talent but paranoid and megalomaniac. He lived a childhood in the Paris of the 1920s, upset by his love of drawing and painting thwarted by an abusive mother. Delivered to his own fantasies, the hero indulges in the most disordered introspection and will end up consuming himself to become the reincarnation of the one he is trying to copy: Hans Pauli Weyergans, painter of the 18th century.