Two young officers, Saint-Avit and Morhange, get lost in the desert and find themselves prisoners of the beautiful Antinéa, queen of the city of Atlantis. Saint-Avit, blinded by his love for her, obeys her when she orders him to kill his comrade... With L’Atlantide, Pabst offers a psychoanalytic reading of Benoit’s novel, with a dominant female figure who enslaves her lovers before destroying them. The film’s fantasy dimension is disturbing, L’Atlantide bathes in a humid nightmare atmosphere, between the desperate search for a missing friend and the apparitions of an underworld lost in the desert. A long, discursive flashback suggests the Parisian origins of Antinéa, born from the marriage between Clémentine, a pretty, light-thighed French Cancan dancer, and an Arab prince seduced during a theatrical performance. But again, it's impossible to know whether these are the ramblings of an old alcoholic or the strange truth.

A gypsy and a boatman fall in love with each other. They do not understand each other and make each other suffer. When, at last, their hearts are confounded, the young girl’s father kills the young man, thus accomplishing the implacable Bohemian law.

A gypsy has cast a spell on Livette, the fiancee of Renaud, the proud guardian nicknamed, King of the Camargue. Renaud wants to punish the witch who frightened Livette. But then, meeting the gypsy, he is taken under the strange spell that emanates from her. She arranges to meet him in an isolated hut in the middle of the muddy ponds. Livette, warned of her betrothed betrayal, goes to the place where she is to meet the infidel. But Renaud changed the stakes that line the only fordable passage. And Livette dies, even more from Renaud's betrayal.

Said Ali, an old and sick noble Arab, living on an island in the Red Sea, has no other occupation than collecting pearls. The spiteful Nadir tries to take possession of the treasure, he kills Said Aly but finds a terrible death by desecrating his tomb.

Paris, 1830. Fleur de Marie is rescued from poverty by the mysterious Rodolphe, who is in fact the Grand Duke of Gérolstein, who has gone incognito in search of an illegitimate child he once had. Which is not at all to the taste of Sarah Mac Gregor, her current mistress who kidnaps Fleur and has her locked up in Saint-Lazare prison.

A ruined banker is abandoned by his mistress. He commits suicide after entrusting a prostitute with twenty-thousand francs. The money changes hands. A crook is arrested in the house of an an actress he had fooled. In a luxury hotel, a typist kills her lover's wife. The trial of the murderer is followed by the bankruptcy of another financier and the money finally returns to the mistress of a suicide in the restaurant in which she had first appeared.

In this mythical fantasy, the evil queen of Atlantis lives in a magnificent palace, the halls of which are filled with the mummified remains of former lovers.

Antinea, the Queen of Atlantis, rules her secret kingdom hidden beneath the Sahara Desert. One day two lost explorers stumble into her kingdom, and soon realize that they haven't really been saved-- Antinea has a habit of taking men as lovers, then when she's done with them, she kills them and keeps them mummified.