Hippolyte, the titular oddball, is a far from typical country lawyer. He has been happily married to the woman of his dreams for 15 years, but has an incurable penchant for practical (or rather impractical) jokes.

After a confinement in a harem, an illiterate Algerian takes her revenge by reinventing herself as a writer. Under the name of Elissa Rhaïs, she becomes the darling of the literary Paris of the inter-war period, in search of oriental fantasies.