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In the middle of the nineteenth century, a man appeared with his sons in the mountains of Lebanon. His name is Khanjar Jbeili, but he will soon be nicknamed the Emperor on foot. He came to found an estate and forge his own legend. His filiation soon became one of the most illustrious in the region. But this prosperity has a price. The Emperor, in his lifetime, imposed a rule on all his descendants: one by generation will be allowed to marry and have children; his brothers and sisters, if any, will simply be called to assist him in managing the incalculable and sacred properties of the Jbeili clan. Oath, or Curse? From the beginning of the 20th century to the present, successive descendants will have to choose between free will and respect for the forbidden. Open to the world, they will travel from Mexico to China, from France of Liberation to the Balkans of the Cold War, passing through Naples, Rome and Venice, chasing chimeras, watched constantly by the shadow of the ancestral curse. Until the last of the lineage of the Jbeili, breaking with the past and its forbidden, on the eve of the twenty-first century. But at what cost ?--Translation of page 4 of cover by Éditions du Seuil.