The novel is divided into three parts. The first part concerns the fate of a worker named Pierre, who was laid off from the factory as a result of the economic crisis. The loss of his steady job leads to eviction and homelessness. The protagonist is also abandoned by his lover, Jeanette, to whom he had promised to give a pair of slippers for the ball. During his wanderings on the streets, the protagonist obsessively tries to find her. Driven mad by hunger, Pierre mistakes the prostitutes and street women he passes – who accompany the wealthiest bourgeois in the nightlife of Paris – for his former partner. In a fit of madness, the protagonist attacks one of the men, resulting in his arrest. After his release from prison, he finds employment as a security guard at a research institute for infectious diseases. There, he comes into possession of a vial containing plague bacteria, which – in an act of revenge against the bourgeois society of the French capital – he releases into the drinking water reservoir, thereby triggering an epidemic of the deadly disease.

In the second part, a representative of a revolutionary group from China – P’an Tsiang-Kuei – arrives in the destabilized city. His mission is to exploit the emergency situation to carry out a workers’ revolution in the European capital. At this point, an extensive flashback is introduced, depicting the activist’s childhood. P’an’s father drove a rickshaw for wealthy white people through the streets of Nanjing, which ultimately led to his untimely death. The boy eventually ends up in the care of the Lazarist fathers. Under the guise of missionary charity, the monks reinforce colonial relations and social norms through education and upbringing. In the middle school library, the young man discovers the works of Marx, which allow him to gradually reject Christian teachings and become one of the champions of the revolution.

The final part of the novel depicts Paris, engulfed by both the plague and the communist revolution. The metropolis is divided into sectors controlled by various political factions. Key figures such as the American financier David Lindslay and Rabbi Eleazar Ben-Cwi, head of the Jewish community, make their appearances. The spiritual leader initially interprets the health crisis as a response to Christian blasphemy. However, when members of the community he leads are swept away by the epidemic, he decides to leave the city on the Seine for New York. As the ship “Mauretania” approaches the east coast of the United States, the capitalist attempts to secure a safe return to his homeland by using his influence. The escape fails, however, and the ship is sunk. Meanwhile, the residents of Paris win the battle against the plague. At the same time, the communist faction prevails in the struggle for political “rule over souls.” The former bourgeois capital is reorganized into a proletarian polis. The advent of this utopian vision in the novel’s epilogue legitimizes a new political paradigm in Western Europe.