Young, wild poet Arthur Rimbaud and his mentor Paul Verlaine engage in a fierce, forbidden romance while feeling the effects of a hellish artistic lifestyle.

In the seacoast town of Boulogne, antique furniture saleswoman Hélène lives with her stepson, Bernard, who's back from military duty in Algiers. An old lover of Hélène's comes to visit, Alphonse, with his niece Françoise; he too is back from Algiers, where he ran a café. Bernard speaks of his fiancée, Muriel, whom Hélène has not met. The past is obscured by guilt, misperceptions, and missed possibilities. Appearances deceive, things change. As Hélène and Alphonse try to sort out a renewal, everyone seems off-kilter just enough to hint that all cannot end well.

A true story shot in a German Impressionistic style. In France during the Nazi occupation, Dr. Petiot (Michel Serrault) offered to help Jews escape the Nazis. They would come to his house, and he would kindly give them lethal "vaccinations" for their anticipated travel to Argentina. Then he would steal everything the brought with them (in addition to their up-front payment to him) and burn their bodies in his home-made crematorium.

A drunken, self-destructive woman called Betty wanders into a Parisian bar where she meets middle-aged alcoholic Laure. Laure decides to take care of Betty. Recovering in a hotel room, Betty begins to recount to Laure the story of her bourgeois life and her unhappy and unfaithful marriage.

Hugo-Paul de Weydroos, forger who manages to mystify the most renowned experts, is an attractive man, not without talent but paranoid and megalomaniac. He lived a childhood in the Paris of the 1920s, upset by his love of drawing and painting thwarted by an abusive mother. Delivered to his own fantasies, the hero indulges in the most disordered introspection and will end up consuming himself to become the reincarnation of the one he is trying to copy: Hans Pauli Weyergans, painter of the 18th century.

A young woman convenes with her extended family in a provincial village where her cousin, in a coma, is hospitalized after attempting suicide.

We follow Ronsard to the Loire Valley, listening to him evoke his loves through odes and sonnets. Thus, Cassandre, Marie d'Angevine, Hélène de Surgères come back to life for a few moments for us. This evocation does not forget the friendship between Ronsard and another great poet of the 16th century, also born on the banks of the Loire, Joachim du Bellay. It takes us to the castles of Blois and Taley, to the manor of La Denysière, to Couture, Ronsard's birthplace, and to the priory of Saint-Cosme-les-Tours, where the poet died.

Passionate about the singer Elvis Costello, Ulysses works every Saturday at a gas station in the middle of nowhere to pay for his meteorology studies. Shy and suffering from stagnation when confronted with a conflict situation, he does not respond to the insistent advances of Marie, who lives across the street. At the same time, Anton and Mirek, two English gangsters, are combing all the gas stations in the area in search of a loot hidden in the toilets.