The Basque shipowner Ignacio Ibarrola has two sons: Ignacio and José Mari. Both have very different characters and since childhood there has been a great rivalry between them.
Joaquin Monegro feels a huge hatred for Abel Sánchez, who was once his best friend. Over the years, Monegro marries without love, and tries to have his children marry, but not forgetting Abel so far.
Paris, 1857. While on trial for moral outrage, French writer G. Flaubert tells the court and the audience the true story of the heroine of his novel Madame Bovary, a sensitive but capricious woman whose desperate efforts to overcome the bourgeois conventions of a dull, provincial life led her family first to ruin and disrepute and finally to the abyss of tragedy.
After the discovery of two murders, Commissioner Chabrier, of the French secret services, is investigating the disappearance of plans affecting the national defense of the country robbed by a gang of international spies.
Leo Bianchetti has just finished his military service but then is again called to arms; after 10 years on various fronts, he finds himself again in Italy to guard a bridge destroyes by the Germans that he doesn't want to leave.