Conrad's unfinished novel that he was working on before his death in 1924, in which he returns to one of his favorite subjects: the French Revolution. Unlike Duel, his character here is a young Englishman named Cosmo Latham, who visits Genoa during the days in which Napoleon was imprisoned on Elba, where a conspiratorial environment of diplomats and spies of all colors pivot around the spectral figure of the exiled emperor. Among the many people that Cosmo meets, there he meets Madame de Montevesso, a liberal aristocrat who has had the misfortune to marry an unscrupulous soldier.