At the time my grandfather met Louise Janvier he was seventeen years old. I like to think of him as a very young man, in the spring of 1918 in Cherbourg, tying his reinforced cardboard suitcase to the bicycle and his father's house left forever." This is how Alex Capus begins a love story that would only end on April 16, 1986 with LÔeon Le Gall's funeral service in Notre-Dame. That morning, the small, white-haired lady appears as a mysterious witness of the past, resolutely making her way through the family members to the open coffin. Two young people fall in love on the Atlantic coast during World War I, then an air raid tears them apart. They think each other dead; LÔeon marries, but Louise, passionate temperament and insatiable urge for independence, goes her own way - until the two meet again in 1928 by chance in the Paris subway. Alex Capus has written a great novel about the twentieth century, and at the same time tells a wonderful story: sixty-eight years in the life of two people who never met and yet became ravishing lovers.