Renee, a young man of a noble family, settles in a French colony in the wilds of Louisiana, among an Indian tribe of elbows. His past is shrouded in mystery. Renee's penchant for melancholy makes him shun society. The only exceptions are his adoptive father, the blind elder Shaktas, and the missionary of Fort Rosalie, Father Suel. In vain, however, they try to find out from Rene the reasons for his voluntary flight. For several years, Rene has been hiding his secret. When, having received a certain letter, he began to avoid both his old friends, they convinced him to open his soul to them.
On the banks of the Mississippi, Rene finally decides to start her story. “How pathetic my eternal anxiety will seem to you!” - says Father Suel and Shaktas Rene, “a young man, deprived of strength and valor, finding his suffering in himself,” and complaining only of the troubles that he inflicted on himself.
His birth was worth the life of his mother. He was brought up far from parental shelter and early showed ardor of nature and unevenness of character. Renee feels free only in the company of Sister Amelie, with whom close and tender bonds connect him with the similarity of characters and tastes. They are also united by a certain sadness lurking in the depths of the heart, a property granted by God.
Rene's father dies in his arms, and the young man, for the first time feeling the breath of death, thinks about the immortality of the soul. Before Rene, deceptive roads of life open, but he cannot choose any of them. He is tempted to hide from the world, reflecting on the bliss of monastic life. The inhabitants of Europe, forever overwhelmed with alarm, erect silence for themselves. The more turmoil and fuss in the human heart, the more entail solitude and peace. But due to his inconstancy, Rene changes his mind and sets off on a journey.
At first, he visits the lands of the disappeared peoples, Greece and Rome, but soon he gets tired of “rummaging through the graves” and discovering “the ashes of criminal people and deeds”. He wants to know if there are more virtues and less misfortunes among living nations. Rene is especially trying to get to know the people of art and those divine chosen ones who glorify the gods and the happiness of peoples, honor laws and faith. But modernity does not show him beauty just as antiquity does not reveal truth.
Soon, Renee returns to his homeland. Once in early childhood, he happened to see the sunset of the great century. Now he has passed. Never before has a single people changed so surprisingly and unexpectedly: "elevation of spirit, reverence for faith, severity of morals have been replaced by resourcefulness of mind, disbelief and corruption." Soon, in his own country, Rene feels even more lonely than in other countries.
The inexplicable behavior of Sister Amelie, who left Paris a few days before his arrival, also upsets him. Rene decides to settle in the suburbs and live in complete obscurity.
At first, he enjoys the existence of a person who is not known to anyone and does not depend on anyone. He likes to mix with the crowd - a huge human desert. But in the end, all this becomes unbearable for him. He decides to retire to the bosom of nature and end his life journey there.
Rene realizes that he is condemned for the inconsistency of tastes, accused of constantly rushing past the goal that he could achieve. Obsessed with blind attraction, he seeks for some unknown good, and everything completed has no value in his eyes. Both perfect loneliness and the incessant contemplation of nature put Rene in an indescribable state. He suffers from an excess of vitality and cannot fill the bottomless void of his existence. Either he experiences a state of rest, then he is in dismay. Neither friendly relations, nor communication with the world, nor solitude - nothing Rene succeeded, everything turned out to be fatal. The feeling of disgust for life returns with renewed vigor. Monstrous boredom, like a strange ulcer, undermines Renee’s soul, and he decides to die.
However, you need to dispose of your property, and Rene writes a letter to her sister. Amelie feels the constraint of the tone of this letter and soon comes to him instead of an answer. Amelie is the only creature in the world that Rene loves. Nature endowed Amelie with divine meekness, a captivating and dreamy mind, female shyness, angelic purity and harmony of soul. The meeting of brother and sister brings them immense joy.
After some time, however, Renee notices that Amelie begins to lose sleep and health, often shedding tears. One day, Renee finds a letter addressed to him, from which it follows that Amelie decides to leave her brother forever and retire to the monastery. In this hasty escape, Rene suspects a secret, perhaps a passionate love in which the sister does not dare to confess. He makes the last attempt to return his sister and comes to B., to the monastery. Refusing to accept Rene, Amelie permits him to attend the church during the rite of her tonsure as a nun. Renee is struck by the sister’s cold hardness. He is desperate, but forced to submit. Religion triumphs. Cut off by the sacred rod, Amelie's hair falls. But in order to die for the world, she must still go through the grave. Renee kneels in front of the marble slab Amelie lies on and suddenly hears her strange words: “Merciful God <...> bless with all your gifts your brother who did not share my criminal passion!” Such is the terrible truth that Rene finally reveals. His mind is muddled. The rite is interrupted.
Rene experiences deep suffering: he became an involuntary cause of his sister's misfortune. Grief for him is now a constant state. He makes a new decision: to leave Europe. Rene is waiting for the fleet to sail to America. Often he wanders around the monastery, where Amelie took refuge. In a letter he received before leaving, she admits that time is already mitigating her suffering.
On this story Rene ends. Weeping, he hands Father Suel a letter from the abbess of the monastery with news of the death of Amelie, who became infected with a dangerous disease while she was caring for other nuns. Shaktas comforts Rene. Father Suel, on the contrary, gives him a stern rebuke: Rene does not deserve pity, his sorrow, in the full sense of the word, is nothing. "You cannot consider yourself a man of an exalted soul only because the world seems hateful to you." Everyone who has been given strength is obligated to devote them to the service of his neighbor. Shaktas is convinced that happiness can only be found on paths common to all people.
After a while, Renee dies along with Shaktas and father Suel during the beating of the French and the slavery in Louisiana.
