Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly

Secrets, rumors and betrayals surround the upcoming marriage between a young dissolute man and virtuous woman of the French aristocracy.

The action takes place under the Restoration, at the Château de Savigny, near Nerville, a devout and prudish little town in the Cotentin region. Doctor Torty is the doctor. He tells a story of which he is the only one to know the secret, that of a criminal couple, without any remorse. The pretty Hauteclaire Stassin, daughter of the master of arms, meets the Count of Savigny, married to the noble and languid Delphine. Madly in love with the count, Hauteclaire joined the castle as a servant. Shortly after, the countess died of poisoning. Will the guilty lovers go unpunished?

A twenty year old Anouk Aimée stars as Albertine, the daughter of a bourgeois couple who house a young officer during the Napoleonic wars. Newly promoted, the officer (Jean-Claude Pascal) is quartered by a dull bourgeois couple who treat him with a cold politeness bordering on indifference.

Normandy 1850. A stagecoach drives along a road in the middle of the countryside. Inside, the passengers are all asleep except two men who are talking. Suddenly the coach stops: an axle has just broken. When one of the two men leans out of the window to see what is going on, his gaze lingers on the front a provincial abode, which seems to upset him. He soon starts remembering facts that took place forty years earlier...

An adaptation of the novel by Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly.

Roberto is one of those men to whom simulation has become the greatest art. He is an unmoved, inscrutable, mysterious man. But the truth is that Robert feels an intimate, deep tedium. The boredom of those who have already exhausted all the pleasures of life. The only thing still surprising him is the fact that nothing surprises him anymore. One evening he has an overwhelming encounter with a woman. For his own bewilderment, he discovers the sublime horrors in which the woman has sank.