The story of Pascal Ichak, a larger-than-life French traveller, bon vivant, and chef, who falls in love with Georgia and a Georgian princess in the early 1920s. All is well until the arrival of the Red Army of the Caucasus, as the Soviet revolution that has swept Russian comes to Georgia. Told as a flashback from the present, as a French-Georgian man whose mother was Pascal's lover translates his memoirs for Pascal's niece.

A poor, fatherless young man loves the daughter of a wealthy family, the woman's parents are opposed to their marriage. When the village was threatened by cholera, the couple managed to sneak away from their parents at night and marry.