The author of the title is not the wise son of David and Bathsheba, but the eighty-five-year-old Salomon Rubinstein from Paris, a retired trouser king, who finances a gift-sending and counseling service from his fortune in the clothing industry, and even sits by the phone himself during his sleepless nights, trying to ease his fear of death and deny death. its inevitability.
This King Solomon finds a kindred spirit in Jean, a twenty-five-year-old taxi driver who wages a desperate struggle against the laws of nature and, in general, for all animals and people who are or are threatened with extinction or death.
An endangered individual, for example, is Cora Lamenaire, a sixty-five-year-old chanson singer who once saw better days, who during the German occupation exchanged Mr. Rubinstein for a Gestapo handsome boy, and by the 1970s had sunk very low, all the way to the basement of a beer hall, as a toilet maid.
Jean embraces Miss Cora out of personal, but general humanism, and takes Miss Cora to dance and bed, which involves certain humiliations and very sacrificial compromises, but in the end everything turns out for the best.

Romain Gary (1914-1980) is a French writer of Lithuanian Jewish origin. He wrote novels, plays, essays, screenplays, and directed two of his films himself. He published under several pseudonyms, so he was able to receive the Goncourt prize twice, the second for Élöttem az élétért, published under the pseudonym Émile Ajar in 1975.