This novel is concerned with twenty-four hours in the life of a Spanish inhabitant of the Algerian sector of Paris. Sharing the only food his neighbors can afford, he has bought himself a beautiful cabbage. In his quarter the very air has become "cabbaged," every sense impregnated with this food of human privation and despair. The cabbage has absorbed the totality of the Algerian ghetto; it is the bread of those not deemed human enough to merit bread. And now, bearing his cabbage home, the narrator becomes involved in a murderous police raid in his street. Arrested with many others, he is thrown into a closed van and taken to a temporary concentration camp on the outskirts of Paris. There his entire reason, his every effort is bent on retrieving his cabbage from the hands of his tormentors. Finally in the dawn he emerges, still clutching his prize like the Grail--which like its owner has survived the night of torture and murder--to search out in triumph Adele, the Spanish mother, mistress, friend to all Spaniards in Paris, the whore forever reborn in purity and grace, life triumphant over the death of body and spirit.