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.

A radiant autumn day, mist hanging low over the lake, a railway carriage. Two women discover that they are making the same journey: Lindau–Basel–Paris. They join forces in smuggling the heavy handbag belonging to one of them through the customs. Its contents? Bars of marzipan. Mainly for her son. The two women lose sight of each other when changing trains – only to land once more in the same compartment. All at once, they start talking. Secrets are divulged which are usually only entrusted to a father confessor – or, precisely, to a stranger. What is the truth about the model son, the recipient of the marzipan? The fact of the matter is that he broke off his contact with his mother several years ago. And while one of them talks, the other discovers, suddenly, a terrible familiarity in the other's narration. Thus a place usually connected with transience and fleetingness becomes the scene of a life drama. With shrewd irony and composure, Sibylle Mulot describes the ability which is as essential to human beings as the air is to breathing: the art of self-deception.

Fourteen-year-old Mimi does not just love her two elder sisters, she worships them: the beautiful, cosmopolitan Deïna with her enveloping tenderness and the cool, inscrutable Astrid who believes she could not live without Deïna. Mimi's world is in order as long as the three sisters are together, as long as they do things together, discuss everything and share everything: their childhood, the family rituals, even their anger at their mother Marga who, amusing, tyrannical and full of vitality, has her own very definite ideas about her daughters. The harmony among the three sisters is stronger even than delicate and important issues such as the first balls, the first parties, the first admirers… Until someone comes along whose love they cannot share. Mimi foresees the catastrophe, but she is paralysed by the dilemma of not knowing which sister to support. She is traumatised by the fact that those who used to love each other have become deadly enemies, and that she cannot comfort or reconcile them. For half a lifetime.