About a woman of Rouen mused Renee, who is perhaps less seductive and certainly less self-pitying than Moravia's Adriana. Lenormand, who is a well known dramatist of the '20's, enlists considerable likeability for Renee, who accepts her profession with practicality and who, for all her amorality which is without sense of sin or shame, is honest in her love for Pierre Lassele, an artist. Unable to stomach Renee's clientele (this includes ranking German officers, a gentleman from the provinces who traffics in corpses, an old man of eighty who resists impotence with drugs) Pierre breaks with her time and again. But at the end when the mass deportations by the Germans threaten Pierre, it is Renee who leaves the man she loves to force him to go undercover, while she carries on her trade in loneliness and contempt... The occasionally offensive detail here will alienate some, while it certainly will attract others.