The curiosities sealed in a battered old case, discovered at a Paris auction after more than two centuries, trace the adventures of Claude Page , a young man whose manual dexterity destines him to become one of the eighteenth-century France's most gifted-inventors. He constructs his greatest device, a masterpiece that proves to be his downfall, leading to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette, and one that is much more bizarre.