A young officer follows a respectable married woman into a street where no respectable woman goes, and pulls the thread of a secret that leads to the Dévorants — a criminal brotherhood with a chief who was once a convict. Balzac worked at night on fifty cups of coffee a day and died at fifty-one, having built the Human Comedy; this is the first part of his Thirteen, and Paris in it is a city where the streets themselves have a moral character.