When her father files bankruptcy and then dies, Rose's fiancé jilts her; she takes a job as a maid in a Montmartre kindergarten with 150 poor children. Rose gives each child loving attention, and soon she's their favorite. An especially needy child is Marie, a prostitute's daughter. Rose and she bond, and Marie is jealous of all attentions paid Rose, especially those of Dr. Libois, the school's physician. When Rose inadvertently guides the children through the educational experiment of a visiting scholar, and then discloses she has a college degree and is working beneath her station, the principal wants to fire her. Is there any way she can stay? And what will happen to Marie?

Paris, 1865. In a music-hall Manon accidentally kills her partner who was trying take sexual advantage of her. She is condemned to twenty years of hard labor first and then to be deported to marry a released convict. On the ship where she sails with her female fellow-sufferers she gets to know a young doctor and helps to suppress a revolt. Once arrived at her destination, Manon hesitates between her official fiancé and the doctor whose household she does not want to break...

A street singer becomes the star of the circus but his pal Armand shows him who his real friends are.

The Donadieu family lives in the Provençal sun in a happy letting go, The father, the mother, the son and the three daughters. One of them, Claire, falls in love with a mountain dweller, Chapus, whom she marries Chapus, rough and austere, undertakes to educate the Donadieu family. The joy disappears and only returns in the absence of Chapus.

France, 1880. Francois Roquevillard is a respected lawyer in Chambery and the head of a family that prides itself on its impeccable morals. Francois's world rapidly begins to fall apart when his son Maurice elopes to Italy with Edith Frasne, the wife of an esteemed notary.

In 1914, during the First World War, the rich chatelaine de Boissière, with a sulphurous past, took in Jean le Barois, a young soldier lost in territory occupied by the Germans, who was none other than the son of the man she loved, then ruined. The young man, after having despised her, falls madly in love with the woman who pushed his father to suicide.

Two burglars enter a house where a young woman has illegally settled. In exchange for her silence, she asks them to play the role of her parents so that she can welcome her lover.

Côme de Lambrefaut inherited the family castle on the death of his father, but the notary told him that all his property was mortgaged. However, he wants to keep the pack of one hundred and ten hunting dogs that make him proud. In September 1939, the castle was destroyed during a bombardment, and the dogs escaped from their enclosure.