In the year 1850, a number of people travel to the French port of Boulogne-sur-Mer. One is a reporter, John Sharp, from the Yorkshire Post, a newspaper based in Leeds, while another is Elisha Graves Otis, a young American keen to sell his new safe passenger elevator. Then there is President Louis Napoleon, anxious to let France see that he is fit to become emperor and restore the Bonaparte dynasty. The President is protected by the feared Sret Nationale, in the person of the sinister Inspector Foucauld. In an apartment on the Rue Talleyrand there live an old man, his devoted daughter, Maria, and their maid, Madeleine. The old man, a general and liberator of three South American countries, now lives in exile, forgotten, waiting to die.