Madeleine Chastel works as a chambermaid in a brothel in Paris. It is 1750, a bitterly cold winter in which children are disappearing from the streets. Madeleine is sent on a mission to spy on a mysterious inventor who makes ingenious automata for the wealthy. Madeleine goes with him to the Louvre, and then to Versailles, as he makes automata for Louis XV, and she begins to learn some sinister truths.