In 19th-century France, doctor's wife Emma Bovary seeks to escape her dull provincial life through various extramarital affairs and extravagant spending, leading to tragic consequences.

In Vendée, an old farmer is gradually abandoned by his family who do not see their future in the fields. Only a cripple in love and abandoned remain at his side.

The maid of a doctor, he had some canvases he didn't care for bestowed on him once by an unknown artist, thankfully has saved them as the paintings are now worth some money and others want them.

Under the regime of Louis XVIII. Years after Waterloo, Napoleon's loyal officers live in retirement on half-pay. Useless and idle, they have lost their prestige and keep meeting in the hope of the Emperor’s return. When Napoleon dies, they decide to plot the rise to power of Napoleon II.

Flipotte, driven out of his band of burglars, takes the name, personality, house and checkbook of Monsieur Pardigon. When the real Pardigon returns, he doesn't stop him because he has learned from Flipotte that money can make people happy.

Didier Méreuil, affectionately called Poliche, is in love with Rosine, a beautiful girl, so he does everything to please her. She does not love him, and accepts a seductive airplane pilot who proposes to her. One day, she discovers that the funny man is just a front behind which there is a serious Didier. She will try to make up and live with him - but the gap between them is already too large.

A rich old man wants to give a good lesson to his niece and his nephew, who are very full of themselves. He pretends to be dead, after having put as a testamentary clause, so that they touch his fabulous inheritance, that our two "stylists" marry respectively the servant and the cook of the philosopher character...

Ferdinand is an honest and almost prude chemist at the Fourageot laboratories. His boss, Mr Fourageot, is mostly busy with his mistresses but comes to be worried with his young and outgoing daughter.

Political turmoil convulses 19th-century Russia as Razumov, a young student preparing for a career in the czarist bureaucracy, unwittingly becomes embroiled in the assassination of a public official.

Germaine Moreuil's insane jealousy triggers such violent marital quarrels that the spouses file for divorce. When Germaine's parents find out, they sham a fierce spat to disgust their daughter and her husband with the pathetic spectacle of a couple at loggerheads. But just as their farce is on the brink of becoming a tragedy, events combined with the blunders of all four happily reconcile everyone.