This parable, written by one of the masters of the theater of the absurd, Eugène Ionesco, was presented for the first time in Paris, in 1951. One-piece play, introduces us to the teacher, a man in his 60s who receives at his home a young girl for a lesson. "It is a beautiful city, with a park, a boarding school, a bishop, beautiful shops ..." says the student in one of the first answers she gives her tutor in this beginning of action, guided by the rhetoric of extreme courtesy and the almost abusive use of rules of good education. But this does not last for long: the student's first flaws in the basic arithmetic of subtraction and entry into the field of philology - despite the warnings of the third character, the prudent housekeeper - quickly turn the private lesson into a very unlikely educational session that precipitates in an uncontrolled spiral with a strange and unexpected outcome.