The history of one of France's most famous streets is retold, featuring multiple performances from Guitry himself.

Someone we hear talking - but whom we do not see - speaks of a project which describes the four key moments of love: meeting, physical passion, arguments/separation and making up. This project is to be told through three couples: young, adult and old. We do not know if the project is for a play, a film, a novel or an opera. The author of the project is always accompanied by a kind of servant. Meanwhile, two years earlier, an American civil servant meets with an elderly French couple who had fought in the Resistance during World War II, brokering a deal with a Hollywood director to buy the rights to tell their story. The members of the old couple's family discuss heatedly questions of nation, memory and history.

Town trollop Safia, much against her better judgment, falls in love with Matteo, a beggar and mystic in the native quarter of Sirocco. She flees to France, first as the mistress and then wife of a wealthy archaeologist, and bears him Matteo's child, whom he believes to be his own. Complications arise years later when Matteo finds Safia, and a ring of blackmailers uncover her past and exposes her to her husband.

A do gooder hopes to cure potential romantic partners of what he considers the disease of love, by putting them up in a property and having them watched over.Things do not turn out according to his plan.

Julie and Désirée Clary are courted by the brothers Joseph and Napoleon Bonaparte. Joseph marries Julie and Napoleon is affianced to Désirée. When Napoleon breaks the engagement and marries Joséphine de Beauharnais, Désirée becomes involved with General Bernadotte.

An opera singer is stricken with amnesia and, on the evening of a premiere (in his stage costume which is that of a tramp), he goes to wander with real tramps.

A ruined banker is abandoned by his mistress. He commits suicide after entrusting a prostitute with twenty-thousand francs. The money changes hands. A crook is arrested in the house of an an actress he had fooled. In a luxury hotel, a typist kills her lover's wife. The trial of the murderer is followed by the bankruptcy of another financier and the money finally returns to the mistress of a suicide in the restaurant in which she had first appeared.

In Central Europe, resistance to the Germans in growing. But the partisan leader is denounced and killed. His daughter and the son of the traitor love each other. Condemned by his comrades, the informer commits suicide in front of the young couple.

After a banker is driven to suicide by his wife's reckless spending, an innocent cashier is wrongly implicated in a crime.

A man who has made a pact with death must designate the member of a family who must die the next day. After many hesitations, he will sacrifice the innocent young girl so that she does not know the infamy of her family.