Someone we hear talking - but whom we do not see - speaks of a project which describes the four key moments of love: meeting, physical passion, arguments/separation and making up. This project is to be told through three couples: young, adult and old. We do not know if the project is for a play, a film, a novel or an opera. The author of the project is always accompanied by a kind of servant. Meanwhile, two years earlier, an American civil servant meets with an elderly French couple who had fought in the Resistance during World War II, brokering a deal with a Hollywood director to buy the rights to tell their story. The members of the old couple's family discuss heatedly questions of nation, memory and history.
After his family tries to kill him and he has been pronounced dead, Michel returns from the dead and sets about getting revenge on his family members. He sends each one a voodoo doll, warning of their fate. Wandering over the streets of Paris, Michel is the haunted and hunted, as he himself hunts his villainous kin.
In the 1930s, in a village in Gironde, Guillou, a young boy in need of affection, nicknamed the Sagouin, unhappy and in need of affection, leads a life of anguish and sadness in a sinister castle. He exasperates his mother who sees in him only the hated reflection of a husband she only married to become a baroness. Thanks to the kindness of the village teacher, Guillou glimpses for a moment the existence of another world, of gentleness and tenderness.
After a confinement in a harem, an illiterate Algerian takes her revenge by reinventing herself as a writer. Under the name of Elissa Rhaïs, she becomes the darling of the literary Paris of the inter-war period, in search of oriental fantasies.