Le Mal Noir tells the heartbreaking story of a Russian emigrant trying to get to a friend in Chicago. In order to find the money to travel, and like many poor Parisians, he goes through the hell that is the Mont-de-Piété, the state-owned pawnshop denounced by Zola, Hugo and the many revolutionaries of the 19th century. Let me explain how it works: the temporarily embarrassed can bring to the Mont-de-Piété anything they own worth a little. There, it is appraised, and their owners are given a third of its value. Moving forward, they will have to pay interest to keep ownership of whatever heirloom they brought, although it stays with the Mont-de-Pieté. To get it back, they will have to reimburse the initial loan.

The protagonist of Le Mal Noir manages to find the money to reimburse the loan, but when he tries to sell the earrings, one of the diamonds has a defect no one noticed before - and he can't get enough out of them.

'(...) as my fellow lodger, a man without profession, Michel Néron, says, Russians always manage to land on their feet, however tricky the circumstances. Russians are just plain lucky.

‘Lucky at what?’ I cried out later that night when he dropped by. ‘How? At what?’

But he, of course, didn’t know what to say; and as he couldn’t bear shouting, he shrugged his shoulders, walked out without a word and went to his room.

Then follow various attempts to reach his goal, where he meets touching characters, but the point is rather the journey, spent at a distance from the world, dreaming of Chicago. This is a haunted traveler: he knows he travels with ghosts, but he is not ready to give up on life; yet, life refuses itself. So he floats toward an undetermined end, on the way from hell to whatever comes next, which may be nothing.