It carries within it a discussion centered on the moral issues prevalent in the lower Parisian societies, in the first half of the twentieth century, specifically during the period between the two world wars. The main character is the fifty-year-old lawyer, Charles Benistot, who belongs to the prominent bourgeois Benistot family in Paris. One day, he decides to separate from his family, consisting of his parents, two brothers, and a sister, to live on Rue Vanves, one of the poor neighborhoods of Paris at the time. In the context of this novel, the moral approaches that resulted from Charles's separation from his traditional bourgeois world and his transition to the proletarian underworld become clear, with his intertwined relationships with many members of that neighborhood, most notably Saracini, the poor, drunken day laborer, his daughter Juliette, as well as Madame Chivas and others. The novel leads us to a tragic conclusion: the evils from which Charles escaped are no worse than what he saw in the society that contradicted his original society.