Pandora’s Box by Bernard Werber, summary

A high school history teacher accidentally stumbles upon a stage hypnosis session and discovers within his own mind a corridor with a hundred numbered doors, behind which are locked memories of past incarnations. His first uncontrolled plunge into the trenches of 1917 disrupts the teacher’s usual rhythm of life and sets off a series of unexpected physical confrontations on the Parisian embankments at night. The novel was written and published in 2018 in France after years of practical experiments with Ericksonian hypnosis techniques and interviews with historians.

The book opens a conditional trilogy about memory and human incarnation, which later included the novels "Prophecy of the Bees" (2021) as the second and "The Voice of the Earth" (2023) as the third.

Theatre on the Seine and the mud of the trenches

René Toledano, a thirty-two-year-old teacher at the Johnny Hallyday Lyceum, fears hereditary dementia, the same condition that is slowly causing his father, Emile, to fade away in a hospital. A colleague, Elodie, brings the historian to the barge "Pandora’s Box." The green-eyed hypnotist, Opal, calls René onto the stage and asks him to descend the staircase of his imagination to a locked, armored door. Curiosity pushes the volunteer toward door number 109.

The man instantly finds himself on the Ladies’ Road in the spring of 1917, in the body of Corporal Hippolyte Pélissier. The air smells of gunpowder and rot. French infantry perishes under machine-gun fire, tanks get bogged down in the mud, and the surviving corporal hides in a German underground tunnel. He slits the throats of the sentries, but in the hand-to-hand combat, an enemy bayonet pierces his right eye. René, screaming, interrupts the séance and runs to the embankment, where he vomits from the horror he’s endured.

Near the water, a drunken skinhead with a switchblade accosts the teacher. His comfrey reflexes kick in: René twists the mugger’s arm, and he falls chest-first onto his own blade. The terrified historian pushes the cooling corpse into the Seine and runs home.

The Corridor of Incarnations and the Sun of Atlantis

Lyceum lessons devolve into exposing official cliches: René argues with the class about Carthage, the Cretan Minotaur, and Michelet. The tic in his right eye persists. The historian returns to Opal, demands the nightmare be erased, and agrees to a new immersion. Door number 95 casts him into the body of Countess Leontine de Vilambreuse, dying of greed in 1785, who left her family with nothing for the sake of a chest of gold buried under an oak tree. Door number 4 places him as the Sicilian galley slave Zeno at the Battle of Drepana in 249 BC.

Renee demands peace and love. Opal finds the first door.

There’s an azure ocean, dolphins, and fine sand. A tanned astronomer named Geb, wearing a beige skirt, sits on a warm boulder. They speak the language of pure thought. Geb explains that his capital, Mem-set, is located on the island of Hamem-ptah, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, twelve thousand years ago. The city knows no money, prisons, wars, or meat. However, Renée warns her ancestor: the island is doomed to drown in the Great Flood.

Scandal, arrest and electric shock

A teacher obsessed with saving an ancient civilization forgets the curriculum, and twists the arm of a defiant student. Principal Pinel demands that this dangerous activity cease. Renée slams her resignation letter on the desk.

In the lyceum cafeteria, the police snap handcuffs on his wrists for drowning. Élodie digs up old connections and transfers her friend to the Marcel Proust Clinic. The head doctor there, Maximilien Chaub, is obsessed with electrocuting obsessive thoughts.

Shob straps Renee to a chair, gags her, and shocks her temples, promising to turn the lush forest of neurons into a mown lawn. The pain is unbearable. The teacher ducks through door 111, where he finds the Cambodian monk Phirun in a Khmer Rouge torture chamber. The monk teaches the future soul to mentally construct an impenetrable stone grotto that will protect it from the executioners’ blows.

To free himself from the restraints, René calls for Hippolyte. The soldier grabs the historian’s muscles, knocks out the orderlies with blows to the nerve centers, frees the tortured patient, and starts a fire with a blowtorch. The fugitive escapes to Paris in a stolen ambulance.

Gold under the oak tree and escape to Africa

Elodie is frightened by the news and refuses shelter; her sick father at the clinic mistakes his son for a spy. The historian flees to Opal’s on Rue des Orfèvres. The police storm the house, but the partners escape through the back door, wearing thick black burqas.

They need to verify the veracity of the visions. At night, they sneak into the park of the Château de Vilambreuse, where René, using the Countess’s memory, digs up a chest and throws ingots over the fence, fending off a shepherd dog with a heavy ingot. A buyer in Lyon offers five million euros for the metal.

In Hyères, they charter a black sailing ship, the Flying Fish, and set course for Egypt. During a storm, René enters Geb’s body again, helping the Atlanteans build a massive sailing ark, the Ne-he, on wheels, and lead a hundred survivors right out from under a collapsing volcano and a fifty-meter-high ocean wave.

The hypnotist also attempts to enter a trance, but burns her fingers on the red-hot handle. Renée helps her cry out her childhood grievances, and door 73 finally opens: in 1609, Opal was burned at the stake among hundreds of Basque witches by Judge de Lancre at the Inquisitorial Inquisition.

The Siwa Desert and Disappointed Hopes

The fugitives disembark in Mersa Matruh and travel to the Siwa Oasis. While speaking with Geb, Renée learns a stunning detail: the Atlanteans are seventeen-meter-tall giants who live for nearly a thousand years. Geb leads the remnants of his people through the desert and hides two parchment scrolls in jars depicting a dolphin inside a cave in the White Mountain.

René blows up the collapsed entrance with dynamite. Deep within the rock, he and Opal discover two titanic skeletons with intertwined fingers and clay vessels. Wishing for triumph, the historian calls Elodie, who brings a film crew led by journalist Gautier Carlson with equipment for a live broadcast.

The journalist declares a sensational story for all of France and descends into the spotlight, but the cave turns out to be completely empty. The credits are filled with shame, and Gautier screams of a hoax. Egyptian special forces are rounding up the French: officials from the Antiquities Department, led by the Islamist minister Abdel Ali, secretly removed the bones to the sands and dissolved them in acid to erase any traces of pre-Islamic origin.

Samurai Rebellion and a New Signal

The prisoners are thrown into Cairo’s Scorpion special prison. Diplomat Jean-Charles de Villambreuse tells René about the destruction of the relics. They have to rescue their comrades by force.

René throws open door number 71 and lets in the samurai Shiro Yamamoto, nicknamed the Black Scorpion. Wielding a broken broom, the warrior crushes the guards’ knuckles with precise blows, unlocks all the cells, and leads the group to freedom amidst a prison riot in a fire truck.

Villambrez hides his compatriots in the embassy, provides them with clothing and a car. The crew returns to the yacht in Mersa Matruh and leaves the continent forever.

They cross the Atlantic and reach Bermuda. The Countess’s money is used to purchase a villa on Long Bay beach and powerful transmitters. Elodie, Gautier, Cerise, and Nicolas decide to stay with René and Opal. They launch the independent satellite channel "Mnemosyne," revealing hidden springs of the past to millions of viewers and teaching them techniques for accessing their own deep memories.