This engaging saga follows the parallel lives of Eve Charbonneau and her son Gaston Voclain, someone cruelly snatched for her at birth on the instruction of a socially ambitious father and a mother too weak to interfere. When the Germans fall on France at the beginning of WWII, Eve is retired in Poiters having amassed a fortune gifted to her by her mentor, owner of the most famous bordello in Paris and probably the whole of France.

The lives of Eve and Gaston converge in a prison cell with the meeting orchestrated by sadistic Gestapo chief Herr Hauptmann Steiger. Gaston will eventually survive the encounter but his mother, Eve will not. With the undercover agent known by the fearsome Maquis in France as Agent Pierre uncloaked at the end of the war and offered a new identity as Glen Carlisle, he sets off to create a business empire with the money and assets left to him by his mother.