Pauline is twenty-years-old when she and Jean first meet at a ball in Barbazac in the Charente. Jean, a minister married with children, has just recently resigned himself to the failure of his marriage with Nathalie. No matter the pressures of polite, Protestant society surrounding them, from this moment on, Pauline and Jean's "emotional destinies" are linked. In the tragic aftermath of the 1914-18 war, that fatal wound which causes massive changes to society and the collapse of big industrial dynasties, the love shared by Jean and Pauline, luminous and constant, is more powerful than the time that passes, that has passed. "Love... there is nothing else in life... nothing."