It is a warm day in July 1650. A woman returns from the market on a country road outside of Ransdorp. Her name is Geertje Dircx. Unexpectedly, a carriage approaches her, and two bailiffs get out of it and arrest her. The next twelve years she will spend confined in a correctional facility in Gouda. There has been no trial. Everything has been silenced. Especially the name of her former lover, the country's most renowned painter: Rembrandt van Rijn. Simone van der Vlugt manages to consecrate herself once again in the genre of historical fiction with this formidable novel in which she reveals the hidden face of the most important artist of the seventeenth century and gives voice to a woman reduced by history to silence.