Lucien Chardon comes to Paris with literary ambitions. His ambition is to make a career in literature and to climb the social ladder. He becomes a journalist and, immersed in the dirty world of daily journalism, slowly loses his dreams and illusions, betrays his principles, only to return to where he came from a financially and morally ruined man.

Xavier Giannoli's new adaptation is a strikingly vivid portrayal of the manipulated and corrupted world of the press, which is also a mirror of society. It is a mirror of French society in the first half of the 19th century and a mirror of today.