American historian Henry Adams, grandson of one president and great-grandson of another, is looking for Miriam Talbott, a young American student. Miriam is alive in ways Adams can scarcely remember being, but when he goes looking for her, she disappears. When another woman's body is fished out of the Seine and identified as hers, Adams becomes embroiled in the police's attempt to identify the body and in the Panama Canal scandal that threatens to engulf France.