A young man marries the daughter of a famous actress, but is visibly more attracted to his stepmother. She manages, not without difficulty, to reconnect the bonds of a vacillating household.
1824 in Issoudun. A bourgeois, Rouget, lives as a husband and wife, La Rabouilleuse, who holds him in her power. The old man's nephew, ex-Colonel Philippe Bridau of the Imperial Guard, swears to hunt the intruder.
A vagabond arrives in a village where he works for a rich landowner, Master Pierre; he seduces one of the girls, gets her pregnant and hits the road again.
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.
Arlette and her brother are penniless orphans; as the man is to leave for Africa to work for a long time, the young girl is forced to live with her cousins, four spinsters, who place virtue over everything.
Because the shiner Titin has fallen in love with a singer, he braves the latter's protector, the baron, and passes himself off as an insurer in connection with a pearl necklace that is circulating. Bitters get involved, Titin kidnaps the beauty and leaves the pearls to the baron.
In 1914, during the First World War, the rich chatelaine de Boissière, with a sulphurous past, took in Jean le Barois, a young soldier lost in territory occupied by the Germans, who was none other than the son of the man she loved, then ruined. The young man, after having despised her, falls madly...
The Count of Kerlor, to chastise his wife whom he believes to be unfaithful, entrusts his son to a couple of scoundrels. When he repents and wants to find the child, the carnies make their nephew sick. But the other little boy, in search of his comrade, is recognized by his reconciled parents.
A woman receives her lover at home but the husband arrives having to hide him in a trunk. They go on a trip and the porters do not treat the trunk very well.
