The novel begins in Mindin, opposite Saint-Nazaire, in the early 1960s, in a lazaretto which became a psychiatric hospital: a lame child, whose father is administrator of the place, befriends one of the internees, of the navy, which, swinging back and forth, repeats incessantly the same enigmatic formula: Taba-Taba. From there, Patrick Deville unrolled the long ribbon of History, varying the microscope and the macroscope. For France is not only the Hexagon: the narrator walks around the planet, to recall the colonial epic with its disasters but also its audacious undertakings (Suez Canal, Panama). This great romantic fresco goes from Napoleon III to the attacks which recently bloodied the country, passing by the Great War and its trenches, then by the Popular Front, the Débaccle, the Occupation, the Resistance, the Vercors, the Liberation.--Summary by Seuil.