The love story between a young man and a married woman 20 years his senior.

The love affair involving the beautiful Simone and the younger Françoise, coming from a frustrated suicide attempt.

In this political drama, five left-leaning friends gradually lose heart in the Socialist government elected in 1981 in France. One of the five men is a television broadcaster; the others are a teacher about to become an academic inspector, a tax man, the director of a cultural center, and a sociologist who is about to step into a ministerial position. Their interlocking lives are told in alternating vignettes over a four-year period, and the professions director Jacques Fansten has chosen for his main characters seem to be a comment on the media, education, budget or finance, the arts, and government bureaucracy under Socialist rule.

The Vergèse family is very fortunate : all their descendants have married some well-off people ! But oddly, they leave many bodies in their trail. Flore is their only penniless daughter-in-law, and the young woman feels in danger… Is it possible that the wealth of the Vergèse might be drenched in blood ?