Tragic fate pursues Isidore Ducasse from his childhood. At the age of two, he witnesses the suicide of Celestine, his mother, on Christmas Eve 1847. At the age of eighteen, holding a baccalaureate and with some of his unfinished Songs in hand he takes on the pseudonym "Count of Lautreamont" and enters the literary world of Paris and Brussels. Rejected by publishers, the young writer abandons his studies and takes on a life of luxury at his father's expense. The Franco-Prussian War breaks out. Decadence overtakes his guardian, leaving him practically penniless in South America. At the age of twenty-four and profoundly depressed at the carnage of bodies piling up in the streets of Paris, the young writer ingests a mortal cocktail and picks up his razor, thus fulfilling his prophecy: "Upon awakening, my razor, opening a pathway across my neck, will prove that nothing, actually, is more true...""