When her father, a naval aviator, died on a maneuver, Marianne was barely five years old. Faced with her mother's pain, her grandmother's omnipresence, her little brothers who monopolize her attention, she must repress her own suffering. For years, she will live with the idea that the father's absence is not so tragic and that she lacks nothing. She will have to grow up to understand that she is the victim of a distress that could not be expressed. She will go in search of this deceased father, to find herself and be at peace with herself. The family history is then combined with that of the Aquilon, which Pierre Guillemin was the last to pilot. A testimony which underlines the importance of the father, in a society where his place in the home is still understated.