The play is a revue of major political and artistic events of 1892. Lemercier de Neuville wrote: “I staged the Sar Péladan . . .; psychological novelists; nebular poets; Emile Zola, Paulus, Yvette Guilbert, Bellacoscia the Corsican outlaw [introduced as Bellacosta in the cast of characters, ed.], etc. Furthermore, I inserted passages of shadow puppetry and a tiny ballet, which had already featured in other plays. These innovations were, and I am glad of it, at the heart of the last thirty years of work with my Pupazzi. This play was performed five times.” The author mocks feminism and social discourses; but he also expresses interest in scientific progress, spread by Camille Flammarion, pertaining to astronomy.

Thanks to a new type of telescope that brought the Moon at one metre, the astronomer Télescopos and his servant Babylas, the watchman of the Observatory of Monaco, made a breakthrough; they end up on the Moon and are unable to leave. They meet strange and fantastic people, either allegorical or taken from recent events. As the Moon is waning, the residents have less and less space and want to go back to Earth. Télescopos, Babylas’s master, builds a new telescope to accomplish that. The play ends with a cellist reciting verses as payment for the journey back to Earth.