Summary In 2073, the world returned to a wilderness state, following a strange scourge that ravaged the planet and caused an almost immediate death of its inhabitants. This scarlet plague, so named because it caused a red coloring of the skin, totally upset the natural order and virtually scratched the man from the surface of the globe. Only a few individuals, mysteriously spared, survived the pandemic and managed to recreate a form of society, without past and without culture. An old man, questioned by his grandchildren, tries to make the old world understand to beings incapable of imagining him. Representing a form of intellectuality henceforth incongruous, having sunk himself in half a senility, the former professor James Howard Smith evokes a world engulfed, its miraculous survival, the terror of the solitude until its meeting With the Tribe of the Chauffeurs, the difficult submission to beings devoid of all intelligence and now reigning as brutes ... But a hope remains: in a cave, Smith has stored works, vestiges of the once triumphant civilization, and the key to The alphabet, in order that one day a man may recover from his ashes the power of the human mind.