Clara Bardés, granddaughter of a famous painter who is now deceased, was hired to restore a series of paintings, some dating from the Middle Ages, kept in the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris. In this particular setting, she met an unusual man: "He was an imposing, enormous old man, whose size was striking even when seen from the top of the scaffolding in which she found herself. He wore the traditional black dress down to the heels of conservative ecclesiastics, on which shone, almost, a hair that was a little fine and trembling, but of an incredible whiteness. However, what was most striking about him was the irregular geometry of her formidable face Indeed, her ciliary arches had such a marked disproportion that they absolutely decomposed the harmony of the whole, dehumanizing her, giving her the vague appearance of a monstrous and gigantic batrachian. In fact, at that precise moment, Clara had begun to call him, in her heart, Monseigneur Batrachien. However, his eyeballs, slow and voluminous like two full moons, reflected an intelligence. superhuman." But he will not be the only excessive character to appear in this novel: During a visit that she makes alone in the upper part of the building, when the tourists have already left, she notices the deformed silhouette of Ergaster, a perverse torturer whom she believed to be dead and of whom she could have been, three years previously, another victim, with Professor Alba Longa, without the last-minute intervention of Commissioner Tynianov. The cathedral closed behind her and the criminal, who apparently had not seen her, remained inside. Once in her apartment, terrified, she called Alba Longa and he contacted Tynianov. Between the three, pulling the thread of the presence in the cathedral of this murderer, specialist in the so-called “death of a thousand cuts”, they discover a terrible conspiracy, the disastrous consequences of which are expected in the coming days.

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