A man leaves his 8-year old son with his father-in-law who lives near the glacier where the boy's mother died.

1968. La famille Maïmon : Félix, Mireille et leurs deux enfants, Eric et Michel, débarquent à Marseille. Quelques années plus tard, à peine installé à Belleville, Félix fait la connaissance de Serge, un parrain local avec qui il se lie d'amitié. Serge entraîne Félix sur les chemins du grand banditisme, jusqu'à ce que celui-ci se fasse prendre par la police et décide d'endosser, à la place de Serge, la responsabilité de chef de bande.

Isabelle Nanty is a Paris concierge, four children to look after and a fifth in gestation with a loutish and uncaring husband who runs off with the girlfried of one of the lodgers in her building. This same lodger called Le Bison has rather strange hours and both he and Dorine ( the concierge ) get on each other's nerves because each makes noise at the "wrong" time for the other ! The fact that their respective mates have run off together nevertheless bring the two together and with Dorine's children getting very attached to Le Bison, there are the makings of an "idylle" between the two of them which the return of the two offending mates fails to break

The plot revolves around Bernard – a schoolfriend of Olivier's who is preparing for his bac – discovering he is a bastard and taking this as a welcome pretext for running away from home. He spends a night in Olivier's bed (where Olivier describes a recent visit to a prostitute and how he did not find the experience very enjoyable). After Bernard steals the suitcase belonging to Edouard, Olivier's uncle, and the ensuing complications, he is made Edouard's secretary. Olivier is jealous and ends up in the hands of the cynical and downright diabolical Comte de Passavant, who travels with him to the Mediterranean.

When Yves-Marie, 9, asks Jacqueline, who is her age: "Marry me", she replies with a pirouette: "The day you go to the stars, I give you my hand."

September 1960: on a purely punitive basis, eight scouts must climb the solid mass of Brévent to 2500 meters of altitude. The so beautiful and so majestic mountain which draws up face them very quickly reveals dangerous. All the techniques of orientation learned at the scouts will do nothing there. The teenagers find themselves delivered to themselves. Lost in the abrupt throats, the eight boys are confronted cold, with the hunger and the fear.