When the daughter of the miserly cooper Grandet is up for marriage, both families Des Grassins and Cruchot want to marry their sons to her and her substantial dowry. But the girl shows more interest in the impoverished cousin, whom she entrusts her entire fortune to.

A doctor and his son fall in love for the same woman, who has lost her child.

Eva is a Jewish literature teacher at a high school in Bordeaux, France, after the Second World War. During the war her whole family was sent to the German extermination camps by French collaborators. Eva survived by chance. Then by chance a new girl enters her class, a girl who resembles Eva's dead daughter.