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.
A hated country gentleman is murdered, and the inspector on the case takes the veiwer through his thoughts about the possible murderer and motives as he questions everyone concerned.
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.