Paris, 1857. While on trial for moral outrage, French writer G. Flaubert tells the court and the audience the true story of the heroine of his novel Madame Bovary, a sensitive but capricious woman whose desperate efforts to overcome the bourgeois conventions of a dull, provincial life led her family first to ruin and disrepute and finally to the abyss of tragedy.

After the May Revolution occurred, a young man abandoned his royalist uncle and became a drummer for the revolutionary army and his father's guide.

Each month a school teacher narrates a new story to his students, with a moral in each of them.