[3] Dr. François Mahé, on vacation on the island of Porquerolles with his wife and children, has to interrupt an unsuccessful fishing trip to visit a dying woman.

When he arrives at her home, the woman is already dead, her husband Frans Klamm has left for a trip to Toulon, and her three children, thin, dirty, and neglected, are alone.

The dead woman's household has by now been taken over by Elisabeth who takes in sewing, looks after her siblings, and occasionally is able to get some money from her absentee father who does various odd jobs around the island when he is not getting drunk.

As his mother's health declines, François becomes aware of the hold that she has exerted over his entire life, how she has chosen the profession of doctor for him, even making him marry a submissive, colorless woman whom he does not love.

"[7] John Banville includes the book on his list of "Top Five Georges Simenon Novels,"[8] and describes it as "Enigmatic, brooding, and wholly convincing."

In the Glasgow Review of Books Graeme Macrae Burnet writes "the mosaic of [Simenon's] romans durs does indeed form a coherent body of work, one with characteristic preoccupations of alienation and the desire to break out of an inauthentic existence.