This is rural France. It's the summer of 1943, the weather is fine and sunny and life is sweet. On one of these beautiful days, Nanette, a fourteen-year-old peasant girl, meets a slightly injured young man near the farm she lives on. Her life is about to change forever.
The main character is a woman trapped in the long stifling marriage in a boring province. She has an affair with a traveling photographer, follows him to Paris, and then has a series of unsatisfactory but interesting relationships, one of which is with a woman.
Marie, the charming daughter of Italian immigrants, has a dream : to become rich. In Roubaix, where she lives, she meets and marries small-time crooner Marcel Potier. Together they leave for the South of France where they live happily but poorly. Now, Marie hasn't forgotten her hopes of wealth and with this aim still in mind she pushes Marcel into becoming the swimming instructor of Achille Zopoulos, an oil tycoon.
