Constance, the female protagonist of The Goldsmith, finds an old unfinished tale, written together with Marco when they were young, before losing contact with him. She starts looking for him. When they meet each other, he gives her another book, he wrote by himself: Ii - The string and the pearls. A closed necklace is shown on the cover; its right side is folded on itself. Constance unfolds it and discovers a new drawing: an open necklace. It invites her to wear it and to understand the significance of any single pearl. Urged by curiosity, she starts reading the book that same night. While she is holding it in her hands, she is hit by a sudden idea: she gets a long golden ribbon, passes it through the pages and hangs the book on her neck.
She runs to her bedroom to look at herself in the mirror: the lamp flashes and immediately breaks. She, a middle aged woman, remains dumbfounded: the image she saw in the mirror was surely hers, but the one of when she was thirty.
"Is this book magic?" she asks herself.
In one sense it's true: it was able to collect together her present and her past, to make her pass, as a string, through the pearls of her life.