On the novel by Mór Jókai. The first half of the XVIII century. Several decades of life of a noble family Karpati.

Merry soldiers arrive in the sleepy Transdanubian town. The cynical woman-hunter, Ferdinándy, learns to know doctor Barlay's beautiful wife at a carnival. She lives a happy married life, and the attentions of the lieutenant are all in vain.

Blondie and Árpi love each other very much. She is a hairdresser, he is a confectioner. Blondie's parents are divorced and she lives with her grandmother. Árpi loves her parents, but has long been angry with her brother-in-law, whom she knows to be keeping a mistress. Pista turns the parents against Árpi, and after a quarrel, the boy decides to leave home. Then he has an even better idea: marry Blondie. She is just as much of a hebrensch, so she insists on marriage. It's summer, and the Árpi's move to their summer cottage on the top of the hill. But they are unprepared for independence, and so they have a series of conflicts. They quarrel badly, and Blondie moves back home. To Arpi's surprise, her father persuades her to make up with him. Blondie sulks at first, but her lover overcomes her resentment. They try again, together.

Csutak is just a pain in the neck, the little boy is even excluded from play by his mates. Vacation is spent lonely until one day he sneaks the woman haulier's old, shabby horse, a creature that would be better off in a slaughterhouse, out with himself. Possessing the animal is the key to the children's gang. They all try to find a place for the horse.

Mihai Toth worked for forty years as a watchman in a timber warehouse. On his last watch, there was a fire: the warehouse burned to the ground. The damage amounted to one and a half million forints. It was a terrible blow to Mihai, who had worked honestly all his life. Suddenly it turns out that Mihai has won one and a half million forints in a lottery. Wanting to save his good name, he wants to deposit this sum in the state treasury. But it turned out to be not so easy: the cause of the fire has not been established and Mihai's guilt has not been proved. That's why nobody had the right to take money from him. For a long time Mihai wandered from one institution to another with a request to accept money from him, but everything was in vain. Then the old man tried a trick...

In modern Hungary, con artist Bender Oszkár and his motley crew - Barangó and a band of small-time schemers - embark on a series of outrageous scams to track down an “illegal” millionaire and seize ten million for themselves. As they exploit every trick in the book - fake charities, crooked roulette tables, forged documents - their madcap pursuit of easy riches exposes the absurdities and corruptions of contemporary life, with Bender’s fate hanging on whether his “great maneuver” will pay off or blow up in his face.

In 1963 in Tihany, somebody addresses the writer Gábor Náday. He is reminded of a night drive in 1944 that saved his life. Painful memories start coming to Náday.

Those who don't work have to think very hard to make ends meet. Can one be called an artist of life who sells the Blood Field to Bulgarian gardeners in post-war Budapest? The need is great, sometimes greater than the power of the law, as long as an army of gullible people roam the streets.