The University staff is all agog over the arrival of Jens Aage Lindemann--the respected Danish scholar and irrepressible reprobate who has come to conduct a symposium on his country's most fabled storyteller, Hans Christian Andersen. But things end unhappily ever after for the lecherous Lindemann when someone bashes his brains in with a bronze statuette of one of Andersen's most beloved creations, the Little Mermaid.