Despite their destruction early in the fourteenth century, the Knights Templar leave clues to a vast fortune hidden beneath the Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral. Almost five hundred years later a Catholic Bishop conspires with the Pope to resurrect the ancient military order and its fortune to fight the secular forces growing in Paris. The conspiracy becomes entangled with the gunpowder research of the world's greatest living chemist, Farmer-General Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, his dedicated apprentices, and a motley collection of foreign spies from Austria, Prussia and the Italian States intent upon stealing the scientist's secrets. Mix in a foreign political agitator, a beautiful woman descended from a famous French playwright, a misguided minister to King Louis XVI, an over-sexed Cardinal and his prognosticator, an irritable commandant of police, a famous escapee from the Bastille, a doubting monk, and a man seen only in the shadows and something has to give.