To salve his guilty conscience an elder brother removes his disturbed younger sibling from a mental institution after a suicide attempt and tries to bring him back to mental competency through one on one contact. Free of the institution he continues to be haunted by dreams of a lost twin and chants the eerie phrase "Do I stand before the king?" It is the elder brother that seems doomed to lose himself in his brother's insanity.

In Genève, bookseller and publisher Axel Thorpe catches willful, rich 16-year old Sibylle Ashby shoplifting. She brags about her writing, so he challenges her to produce a book. She writes an erotic novel that Thorpe publishes anonymously, and it becomes a best seller. She also tries to capture the love of this 40-year old publisher. When he drops her for her older sister, should she seek revenge or recapture? In subplots, she gets along badly with her sister and her father, and she encourages her mother's affair with dad's sister. Axel has problems too besides the determined Sibylle: he must come to terms with the drowning death of his mother years ago.