Angelo, the handsome Italian officer with a face like an angel, runs along the alleyways and across the sun-beaten rooftops, gallops down the sunken trails of the fields. Towards what ? For What ? The story takes place in 1832 during a cholera epidemic that has laid waste to Provence, leaving a mass of corpses with blue, hideously grimacing faces in its wake. Yet Angelo finds time to lend to and massage the innocent victims with his last reserves of energy. He also finds time to love, calmly and serenely, the young Pauline de Théus, who is looking for a mysterious husband who may already be dead...