In the frame story, the narrator tells his companion, after attending a show in a menagerie, a story he heard from a former French soldier. The soldier had been captured during Napoleon's campaign in Egypt. He escaped from his captors with a horse, food and weapons. After the horse dies he finds refuge in a cave and manages to tame a panther with which he is somehow in love. He calls her "Mignonne", in memory of his former lover, and projects a number of feminine qualities on the beast. He sets off walking through the desert towards the Nile to be rescued, and is followed by the panther. He stabs the animal to death when he mistakenly thinks she is attacking him. He is rescued by soldiers who find him in tears. The story finishes with the soldier telling the narrator of his regrets and of his experience of the desert.