Around 1750, in the Dauphiné not far from the Swiss border, a cooper, tired of the injustices affecting the peasants crushed by taxes, went into revolt.
Luis Aguilar is a talented piano student who struggles to make ends meet. At the conservatory he meets the beautiful, rich, and also talented piano student Marta Reyes and romance ensues.
A win on the football pools in postwar Britain changes lives. A happy family is turned into an unhappy argumentative lot until it is discovered the coupon apparently didn't get posted.
Childhood friends move up the economic ladder from slumrat to middle class comfort, but the marriage between two of them is threatened by a bad woman from a nightclub.