During the student uprising in Paris in May 1968, eleven-year-old Yvette Roman, in the company of her mother Emma, is attacked by police during a riot. Her head injuries are so severe that the operating physicians cannot be sure that she will survive. She does survive, but at the cost of her speech, and is left also with periodic severe epileptic attacks. Her epilepsy takes a very rare form that includes complicated spell-bound visions before the actual arrival of the seizure itself. At the age of fourteen, Yvette accidentally draws in colored pencil the figure of a flying bird. It is completely masterful, and she has no explanation for how she did it. Now, thirty-one years later in 2001, she is in New York with her mother for an exhibition of Yvette’s work at the Guggenheim Museum. She is shepherded around Manhattan by her American dealer Maceo Briggs. One day a large painting by Yvette, a self-portrait, arrives at Maceo’s gallery on 57th Street, and Yvette has no knowledge of having done it. It may be her masterwork. But is it hers, or is it a forgery?