The telling is in the third person but with the exclusive viewpoint of the unnamed paedophile , with his thoughts in
the foreground throughout, and his imaginings as vivid as his contact with the other characters in the real world -- who are also unnamed. (The only person named in the book is a maid, Maria, with red hands but no dialogue or role in the story.)
A jeweller, his skill and fascination with the crystal gems he fashions have made him wealthy, and ascetic, able to escape into his work and treasure memories (a friend's kid sister he tutored, brief moments of contact), rather than have the temptations of his obsession with young girls rule his life and no doubt get him arrested. The lurid nature of his
fantasies, however, constantly undermines the melancholy rationalizing that rules his social appearance.
The book begins with a long immersion in his thoughts: while congratulating himself on the limitations he has established for his yearnings, aghast at the idea of hurting anyone, of being repulsive to anyone, deep down he is sure in his own aesthetic core that the way to true bliss is the 'still delicate membrane' of a young girl; justifying at length his transgressive feelings as part of a paternal tenderness; he is often, however, on the brink of indulging fantasies of the worst he is capable of, returning hastily to his sham tenderness, disingenuously admitting to seeking justification for his guilt, a further sham.
A meeting in a Paris park with a roller-skating, hopscotch-playing, open-faced (not a knowing child) little girl who is in the city with her carer, a prim, narrow woman, always knitting, to visit the her ailing mother, a widow. The child lives with the woman, described as a friend of the mother, and her husband in a
cathedral town in the provinces. A meeting is engineered with the mother (the sale of her furniture) and before long he has proposed marriage, despite the woman's health problems being possibly terminal. The child comes to the wedding but the mother refuses to have the child come live with them, her health is too frail. Her new husband avoids nearly all bodily contact with her, and that little keeps her bedridden and in pain for months, during which the option of murdering her occupies his thoughts. Another operation is needed. To his fury, she is said by the hospital doctor to be making a good recovery, and he resolves to overrule her on the question of having the child come to live with them, right away. All fired up at this prospect of asserting himself and bringing the girl to Paris while the mother is still in hospital, he is even disappointed to arrive at the hospital to be told the mother has died after all!
Rapidly, the awareness that the girl is now, in fact, under his legal control takes over: he plans a year-long absence from home, moving from place to place, teaching her to regard nakedness (hers and his) as perfectly natural, their love turning (entirely at the girl's urging, he will not force her)to full sexual relations and going from strength to strength, even as she grows the true bliss of their having known each other from when she was a child uniting them against the rest of the censorious world. On the train to pick up his prize from the cathedral town, the woman sitting opposite him moves to another carriage to get away from the outward manifestations of the man's overmastering fantasies of his future alone with the child.
In a chauffeur-driven car they set out straight away from the cathedral town south towards Cannes; eventually too tired to do anything but stop at the very next roadhouse, at the bottom of a hill, only a double room with a double bed is available. The man -- the girl's father now! -- 'reluctantly' takes it. The girl is dead on her feet. A farcical interlude interrupts the man's first time alone with the girl: the desk clerk has mistaken his identity and called the sheriff; the man is in a state of turmoil over the possible suspicions he might have aroused and his own arousal. By the time he gets back to the room the girl is asleep in her robe on the bed. He lies next to her. Trucks hurtle past the hotel, grinding through their gears up the incline in both directions. From contemplating every inch of her, the man insensibly moves on to feeling her, soon exploding priapically, which awakens the girl: she screams and screams, waking the whole hotel, from which the now exposed paedophile runs in his bare feet to be wiped out by the next of the big trucks that comes howling downhill.