Charles Baudelaire, a French poet and journalist, lives very poorly in a pension in Paris. He hopes to succeed in the world of letters and win back his lover, Jeanne Duval. Meanwhile Duke Rémy, a very wealthy aristocrat, science fan and scientific patron, unscrupulous, despotic and irritable, aspires to reformulate the decimal metric system, established during the past French Revolution to achieve his personal glory. To do this, Rémy wildly plans to measure one ten millionth of the planet in the Argentine pampas, the flattest place on Earth. The duke is ready to do anything to achieve his mission. The lives of these two very dissimilar characters will intersect in the most unexpected way.

The author