Travelling around Paris on the city’s metro system, the narrator recounts a series extraordinary but true tales about the city’s history. The book includes visits to Paris’s catacombs at ‘Hell’s Gate’; to the literary cafés and old jazz cellars of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés; to the seventeenth-century alleys of the Marais; along with trips to the Palais-Royal at the time of the Revolution and the world of opera during Claude Debussy’s lifetime. Through the eyes of the existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dallas describes the German occupation of Paris during the Second World War and the intellectual ‘wars’ that immediately followed. A visit to the futuristic Cité de la Science at La Villette opens the story of the Marquis de Morès, the ‘French cowboy’ and anti-Semite, who was eventually murdered by tribesmen of the Sahara Desert in 1896. Outside the Jesuit church of Saint-Paul the reader discovers Gabriel de Montgomery, forgotten ancestor of Montgomery of Alamein; he accidentally killed his king just here and, after leading the Protestant armies against Catherine de Medicis, was executed on the Place de Grève. This exotic voyage through space and time concludes at the Cemetery Père Lachaise with the unknown tale of Oscar Wilde’s strange involvement in the Dreyfus Affair, the greatest legal scandal of all time.