Set amid the glamour of the intellectual, worldly, artistic and feminist circles of 1920s Europe, this is the first half of the Adventure of Catherine Crachat. Catherine is a film star--an inconstant wanderer, she is compared to Hecate, the lunar goddess--in search of her destiny. Having returned to Paris after a sojourn in Vienna that has been fraught with emotional entanglements and the taint of death, Catherine seeks new relationships that will give her life meaning, but she finds that no one is who he or she appears to be. In an emotional tumult, events--both real and imagined--spiral out of her control, and Catherine turns to psychoanalysis to reconcile a past in which love and death, debasement and the search for divinity merge and divide in haunting, kaleidoscopic ways.