Caesar, a senior French colonist returned home after many years of absence, knows a girl, Marcella, who is in full depression because she was abandoned by her lover. Caesar welcomes her into his home and surrounds her with paternal attention so that he can quickly forget the past. Slowly his feeling turns into a love that Marcella seems to reciprocate. However, when Cesare realizes that the girl feels only gratitude for him and is in love with a younger man, he loses control. Blinded by jealousy, he plans to kill Marcella's lover but, in the face of the girl's vulgarity and indifference, he realizes that he has been teased and turns his anger towards her.

A wealthy widow becomes infatuated with an adventurer posing as a poet and, forgetting her responsibilities as a mother and her no longer young age, falls prey to a love frenzy in her family that puts her at odds with her daughter, who has just left boarding school, and her own brother, who is all about scientific research. The girl, who has learned of the alleged poet's less-than-honest intentions, tries every means to drive him away and restore her mother's sentimental balance. For this she pretends to be in love with him who, attracted by her youth and rich dowry, proposes that she elope.

Annna, a rich lady, decides to finance in great secrecy a singular enterprise: the founding of a real center for the creation of ideas, directed by Mario Morelli, a poet and songwriter perpetually waiting for great success, and a painter, Enrico Bovio, who cannot find the inspiration or the model for a portrait of a woman he wants to finish. Both are short of money and, convinced of the brilliance of their ideas, wish to open that bizarre business, called precisely the "Bazaar of Ideas".

Middle-aged Georges of the "old school" who offers shelter and comfort to Marcelle. Despite his own reservations, Georges falls in love with the much-younger girl, remaining faithful to her even after he realizes that she cares only for his money.

A small-time con man is run down by a drunken young millionaire . The former blackmails the other into being taken in the family mansion.

A ruthless loan shark doesn't realize the evil that he has done to his own family: his son is waist-deep in resentment, and his daughter- married to an unsuccessful lawyer - ends up prostituting herself.