Through the lens of its protagonist, a forty-something who has never quite recovered from his experiences in the First World War, Aragon's novel depicts a forgotten and wayward inter-war generation, devoid of any definite identity.

The action unfolds against a backdrop of the famous Roaring Twenties (complete with cameos from Picasso and the Dadaists in Pigalle, mentions of the backlash against Cocteau, and allusions to fashionable outings in the Bois de Boulogne).

Despite the meaningless pursuits that surround him, Aurélien becomes swept up in an all-consuming, tortuous and impossible love for Bérénice, a young woman fresh from the provinces with a husband and a "taste for the extreme" ("le goût de l'absolu").

Bérénice eventually returns to her provincial existence, leaving Aurélien to embrace a life of disaffection and hedonism with renewed vigour.

In his 1969 essay Je n'ai jamais appris à écrire ou les Incipit ("I never learned to write, or Incipits"), Aragon describes Aurélien as having stemmed from a single sentence that came to him while he was walking in Nice: "La première fois qu'Aurélien vit Bérénice, il la trouva franchement laide" ("The first time Aurélien saw Bérénice, he found her downright ugly").