Louise Créteur's husband dies on the Titanic trying to emigrate, so she must leave their boy Lucien with her old dad in Honfleur and leave the Normandy countryside for greater Paris. She becomes a maid in the run-down Villa des Roses, a dodgy pension run by crafty retired barrister Hugh Burrell and his frivolous, posh wife Olive, an international home to has-beens and would-bes. Louside becomes the lover of German painter, but fears he's not committed and has an abortion. Fate changes, at the eve of World War I.