Maurice Schwartz and Sarah Duhamel meet at a party, and he falls instantly in love with her. She doesn't even notice him. He follows her and her escort home, and when she passes a note through her window to what she thinks is the other guy, Schwartz gets the note, and pursues the object of his affection.

Léontine cannot resist her desire to sail her new toy boat indoors. She plugs up the drains and turns on the faucets, flooding the house as water rains down through the floorboards and collapses the ceilings.

Léontine goes on a dish-breaking rampage to protest her parents’ boring rules, so they kick her to the curb. She proceeds to terrorize the neighbors, tripping two men hauling large cartons by ensnaring them with pieces of string. She drops a pumpkin on a shopkeeper’s head, ties someone’s furniture to a moving vehicle, and then explodes fireworks inside a plumber’s protruding drainpipe. He puts out the flames in a tailspin by jumping into the river.

Jane has been elected the president of the Union of Cooks and Housemaids, and has just signed a resolution to improve their working conditions. Returning to the bourgeois family for which she works, Jane flexes her new-found power.

Pétronille's husband jockey, Tortillard, face-plants in the middle of the track. She puts on his clothes and mounts his steed, “despite her rotund build” at 100 kilos. She leads the other riders on an off-track equestrian escapade, eventually making it back to the course.

Anarchic physical destruction

A couple’s fight over dinner leads to spiralling domestic abuse that spreads all over town. (MoMA)

When Patouillard meets another woman at a street cafe, his jealous wife dresses up as a man in a suit and beard to spy on him.

Léontine helps her pal Rosalie (Sarah Duhamel) race against time to clean up a house after Rosalie’s boss, Baron von Hummen, announces that he and Madame will return home earlier than planned. They recruit workers and poach resources from a nearby construction site. As we see, it takes a village to tidy a house on short notice (or at least it should!), but there’s a limit to the capacities of even collective domestic labor. Accelerated productivity gives way to sheer physical anarchy and irreversible destruction. Dirt and debris pervade every surface—furniture and skin alike—leading to several unfortunate blackening gags.