Paris, 1909: Adélie Tremier, a young widow suffering the final stages of tuberculosis, flees for French-occupied Indochina to seek out a fabled spring of immortality that might allow her to return to her nine-year-old son. Laos, 1936: Pierre Lazarie, a young academic turned Saigon bureaucrat, is sent by Adélie's son, now an Army captain, to find his long lost mother.