A breakdown in his new Studebaker sports car, and the hope of "living some extramarital adventure", lead textile traveler Alfredo Traps to spend the night in a small town on his usual route. Your hosts, a retired judge and some disturbing colleagues with whom you are going to share the evening (a lawyer, a prosecutor and an executioner), will propose you to participate in a macabre game: to be the accused. The breakdown is an unpredictable nouvelle as the best police intrigue and relentless as a classic tragedy. Filmed on several occasions, this work is perhaps the most perfect investigation into one of the author's favorite themes: the foundation of the principle of justice. The bourgeois double morality, the concept of freedom and individual responsibility or the affinity between moral and aesthetic judgment in a world that overturns the concept of evil for that of fault or error, also run through this text: great literature that does not copy reality It "threatens to become reality" itself.