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.

In the 19th century, the son of a frivolous countess faces the rigors of a tragic life.

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.