In 1959, twenty-year-old Michel Contat sets off for Paris, the city of dreams, fame, and disillusionment. He enrolls at the Sorbonne and shares a room with his friend Michel Thévoz. Their landlady, like in wartime, hides newspapers under her clothes to keep warm and leaves them books by Marx and Engels at their door. They struggle through "Being and Nothingness," shivering in the Café Bonaparte with the vague hope of seeing Sartre, who lives on the third floor. They go to the cinema, to the theater, spend nights in jazz clubs, and even form a bebop quintet. They disdain de Gaulle and protest against the Algerian War. When Contat's father travels to Berlin with him to dissuade him from leftist ideas, Contat takes a taxi to the Berliner Ensemble for Brecht's productions while his father watches television in the hotel.