Following the tragic death of his wife, Pierre Brun, a Parisian historical novelist, has not published a book. Pierre discovers a journal written by an ancestor in 1805-07. Pierre is drawn into a strange, mysterious story of a passionate love. Miraculously, it seems he has found the subject for a new novel. But as the narrative oscillates between modern-day Paris and Napoleonic France, like the pendulum of his ancestor’s Sevres clock, his investigation impels him beyond the journal’s factual story.