Jean Benoît-Lévy & Jean Epstein's inventive documentary about the life of Louis Pasteur, a French chemist and one of the most important figures of medical microbiology, blends biographical drama with scientific recreations of his experiments, using Pasteur's actual instruments.
Two young doctors, surprised by the storm, take refuge in an inn. A diamond broker joins them and, for lack of space, shares their room. At dawn he is found dead. A few years later justice is done.
Jacques Averil leads an idle life which plunges him into weariness and melancholy. When he learns of the suicide of his father, a banker ruined by dark speculation in Icelandic minerals, he decides to take charge. An old friend of his father offers him the opportunity to join as a sailor.
After his engagement party with beautiful Aline, Claude, a struggling writer, meets his two closest friends. The trio sets up a daring publicity stunt, involving a fake murder. The scheme backfires as the fake victim gets really dead.
Lieutenant Varnière, responsible for discovering the cause of the death of two officers in Algeria, unmasks the assassin in the person of a Russian who lives with three women. He falls in love with one of them and runs away with her while the Russian is killed by a devoted servant.
A father allows himself to be accused of the murder of a blackmailer to save his son who is the real murderer. But he is forced to confess, and commits suicide in his cell.
A young English lord, who has been excavating in Egypt, finds a mummy of a beautiful Egyptian princess, more than 5,000 years old. So well has the Egyptian embalmer done his work that the face is perfect in all its beauty, and the susceptible young man falls deeply in love with this belle of old...
