Monsieur Panalitus – a young man of ambiguous nationality — runs a hotel in the French countryside. The neighboring peasants tolerate him; to them, "he was scarcely more foreign than the French who came from Annecy, or Lyons, or Paris."

Monsieur Panalitus spends each morning playing with the village's dogs and children, and each afternoon grocery shopping. The advent of WWII brings this daily routine to an end, however, and Monsieur Panalitus becomes a recluse.

The man's spell of privacy is disturbed when a four-year-old boy comes to look for fish in the pool abutting the hotel. Monsieur Panalitus emerges to inform the boy that the fish are gone; it's too cold for them. "Poor Monsieur Panalitus is all alone now," he laments.

"Everything's gone," he continues. "The nice new hotel Monsieur Panalitus was going to build next year can't be built now. No more men left to build the big hotel...They've all been taken for the war."

The boy remarks that his father has gone to war — and then notes that, unlike all the other young men, Monsieur Panalitus is still present in the village.

The boy's observation spreads, sparking village-wide gossip. The townspeople grow suspicious about why the ostensibly strong and healthy Monsieur Panalitus has not been called to war. When they catch him on his furtive errands and ask questions, he acts evasive and odd. Some people begin to wonder if he's German, though they reason that the police would have intervened if such was the case.

Unbeknownst to the village, Monsieur Panalitus actually penned a note to France's War Department and offered them his "active services." They rebuffed him, however, writing that "no provision had been made for the recruiting of persons without a nationality into the military." Indeed, Monsieur Panalitus had fled his country of origin due to a "revolution" and is now considered stateless. Though the War Department letter could exonerate him, Monsieur Panalitus is anxious about explaining everything to his suspicious neighbors. He decides, for now, to keep the letter to himself.

Some time later, on a frigid winter's day, the four-year-old boy goes missing. His mother sets out to find him, eventually arriving at Monsieur Panalitus's door. Monsieur Panalitus says he saw her son looking for fish in the pool earlier that afternoon and sent him home with a bag of caramels. She retorts that the boy never made it home.

In an instant, the child's fate dawns almost simultaneously on the mother and Monsieur Panalitus: holding hands, they approach the pool and find the boy drowned in the water.

Monsieur Panalitus, the doctor, and other men in the village work all night to try to revive the boy, but to no avail. When their desperate efforts splutter out, the men begin to turn on Monsieur Panalitus. As an outsider, he is not considered above murder. One man spits at him, "You haven't put your name down for one side or the other. We don't know where you came from. All we know is that child's father is off defending his home and his country while men like you—"

The doctor interrupts this rant and defends the maligned Monsieur, urging him to protect himself by explaining why he has not yet been called into service. After sustaining a bit more verbal abuse, Monsieur Panalitus presents the War Department letter. He then sits beside the dead boy's body and shakes with the cold.