Guignol's Band

Ferdinand falls in with Cascade, a French pimp who has inherited responsibility for women whose pimps have gone off to war. He also becomes involved with Boro or Borokrom, a volatile piano player, and encounters characters such as the pawnbroker Claben and the bizarre doctor Clodovitz.

The relationships are unstable from the beginning. Fights break out among Cascade's women. Money disappears. Ferdinand drifts between lodging houses, pubs, criminal schemes and sexual adventures while trying to avoid both the police and the people whose business he has disturbed.

A particularly chaotic episode at Claben's establishment leaves people dead and places Ferdinand under suspicion. Scotland Yard and members of the underworld begin closing in on him.

Ferdinand arrives in London as a wounded French veteran with no stable occupation. Through connections from his military experience he enters Cascade's circle. Cascade makes his living from prostitution, and Ferdinand gradually becomes part of a world in which criminality is less a profession than the ordinary condition of existence.

He meets Boro, the eccentric pianist; Claben, the pawnbroker surrounded by his possessions; Clodovitz, an equally eccentric doctor; and the women working for Cascade. Jealousies and rivalries among the group produce fights and increasingly surreal confrontations.

At Claben's establishment, another bout of drinking, drugs and violence ends disastrously. Claben and another person die, leaving Ferdinand exposed to suspicion even though the circumstances are confused. Cascade is angry with him, and the police are interested in him.

Realizing London may no longer be safe, Ferdinand considers returning to military service despite his wounds. At the French Consulate he instead encounters Hervé Sosthène de Rodiencourt, a grandiose occultist, adventurer and charlatan who proposes an entirely different means of escape.