a 25-year-old parisian student, gérard morere (calvé), hears a lecture about a treasure troilus lost at sea after the peloponnesian war, and thinks he knows where it is, thanks to a discovery he made five years earlier when diving near the island of levezzi, in corsica. he gets friends and an innkeeper to invest in his dream, enough to get him to tangiers where he convinces a cigarette smuggler, eric (vernon), to take him to the island.