Thanks to a series of fortuitous encounters and circumstances, a writer falls victim to an obsessive curiosity about a famous artist, Julian Sax. He would like to meet Sax, but the great painter is surrounded by an almost impenetrable protective screen. The writer's wife, the charming and sensuous Rossa, eventually takes him to Tony's tea room in London where Sax spends a few hours of each day, accompanied by his children, models, and friends. The narrator begins to fear that his wife Rossa might succumb to the charm of this seductive man who attracts women, paints them, and then discards them. In an unpredictable sequence of events, Elkann weaves a fascinating web, blending reality and fiction and drawing the reader into the lives of characters who will prove hard to forget.