The theme of the ballet is passion and death, and love beyond the grave. The scene is night rather than day, and Gothic Europe rather than the classical world of Greece and Rome. After almost 100 years of rational thought, audiences were clamoring for the mysterious, the supernatural, the vague, and the doomed. The story of the ballet is about a knight who slips into a cloister at midnight to steal a talisman from a dead saint's hand that will allow him to win a princess.