Cigalon (Alexandre Arnaudy) manages a restaurant in a small town in Provence. A chef with a high opinion of his past culinary achievements, he makes no effort to attract customers and is rude to those who venture into his establishment expecting to be fed. To Cigalon, gastronomy is the greatest of all the arts, and so he is naturally aghast when a former laundress named Madame Toffi (Marguerite Chabert) opens a restaurant next door to his. Madame Toffi does not share his elevated notions and intends to serve meals to the general public - an appalling prospect! While Cigalon's restaurant remains empty, Madame Toffi's is always busy. To prove he's the better chef, Cigalon must now start catering to the whims of paying customers or be forced out of business.

"Merlusse" is French schoolboy slang for codfish, and M. Blanchard, a professor at a certain lycée, was known to his victims by that name. On Christmas Eve, when some twenty of the students—orphans, foreigners or just plain "unwanteds"—had to remain in the boarding school, Merlusse is placed in charge. His glass eye glares at them stonily, his good one with no less severity. He sets them to tasks, marches like a proctor up and down the aisles, exacts to the utmost the last measure of discipline. But when the youngsters awake in the morning, there are toys by each bed in the dormitory and M. Blanchard, no longer to be called Merlusse, is exposed for the softhearted fraud he is.