It is quiet in the house of the playwright. The wife is in the hospital, and he and their daughter remain at home in their studies between visits to her. The worst seems inevitable. However, unexpectedly, the severe illness of his beloved wife presents the playwright with a way out. A way out of the creative crisis that has tormented him since his plays have only been performed within the Swiss borders for political reasons, and since he has been forced to earn his living with commissioned works that ruin his reputation as an artist. Thus, he begins to work on the final scene of his own life. The story is told from the perspective of the daughter, for whom her parents have great plans: she is to become an artist in Paris. While the daughter prepares her drawings for the Paris Academy of Art—postponing her departure for now—she reflects on the past and contemplates the events of these last days of waiting. The ultimately failing playwright is clearly modeled after the writer Cäsar von Arx (1895-1949). The novel traces an artist's biography but is also the story of the symbiotic love between two people and an extraordinary father-daughter relationship.