Young Veronica Carstairs dazzles the aristocrats of King Louis Philippe's court with her sensuous beauty and independent spirit, but her heart is captured by the fanatic revolutionaries who draw her to the smoke cafes of the Latin Quarter. As she is swept up in their desperate struggle for freedom, her innocence is brutally ravished by an unscrupulous American pirate -- and she becomes an unwilling slave to his whims and her own fiercely felt passion. Torn from the comfort and privilege to which she was born, Veronica must accept undreamed of humiliations until, at last, her deepest longings are satisfied by the hungry kisses of the man she once despised.