Doug Gueyburt lives in a time far in the future, which succeeds the current era. He spent his life writing and, at the age of eighty, decided that his autobiography would be his last work. Only, when it comes time to dig up his memories, his memory problems play tricks on him and his past gets mixed up with the stories he wrote when he was younger. Instead of telling his own life, he puts on paper the story of a character created several decades earlier, Damien Nordgal, whose life takes place in our time. Thus settle two parallel intrigues which feed each other.

Doug Gueyburt, for his part, is struggling with the authorities. By appropriating the fictitious past of Damien Nordgal, he thinks he has committed a crime decades before, and decides to go and confess to the police station closest to his home. He attracts the spotlight on him and his decline as a public figure begins. Poet with unanimous success in his youth, he is now an old man suspected of murder. His new status, added to his delirious and incoherent remarks, leaves another police case secondary in the eyes of the public: the disappearance of the originals of his poems. Helped by his housekeeper Audrey and by the investigator Frank Milas, Doug fights to regain his credibility and his dignity.

As Doug sinks deeper into writing his autobiography (actually, the life of Damien Nordgal), he claims to have hidden art pieces from a time he cannot have known. However, when he opens up to an archaeologist, the latter trusts him and launches the research. A book several thousand years old is found, as well as a human skeleton. Is it the one of the man Doug confessed to having killed, or of another?

Damien Nordgal is of modest origin, and passionate about art. Two reasons why he fell in love from an early age with the Duchess de Seize, who would perfect his artistic education until adulthood. When the Duchess's parents are murdered and her art collection falls into the hands of a crooked uncle, he agrees to steal it to hide it at the Duchess' request. No one will ever know of the existence or location of the cache. His impossible love story with the Duchess, impossible for social considerations, haunted him all his life. Damien will go so far as to kill the husband of the one he considers his soul mate, after the man pushed Solène Nordgal, Damien's sister, to suicide.

Doug Gueyburt eventually learns that the unearthed skeleton is the one of a woman. Is it that of Solène Nordgal or, worse, that of the duchess with whom he says he is in love when he thinks he is Damien? The two women are supposed to be fictitious, and he will never know the answer. He then ends up defeating Alzheimer's (element made possible by the future temporality) and understands that the story he has written is not his. While Damien Nordgal ends up in prison for premeditated murder, Doug Gueyburt is cleared of the confession of a crime he did not commit. Investigator Frank Milas eventually finds the missing poems, the poet's "sons". Doug finally realizes that the one he thought was his home help, Audrey, is none other than his own wife, and that she was always on his side.