Magda (Young) rebels against the harsh treatment she receives from her stern father (Edward Kimball). She ultimately escapes from home with aspirations to become a singer. She is betrayed by Kellner (Edward Fielding), a friend of the family, but she also becomes a great success.
Camille is a courtesan in Paris. She falls deeply in love with a young man of promise, Armand Duval. When Armand's father begs her not to ruin his hopes of a career and position by marrying Armand, she acquiesces and leaves her lover. However, when poverty and terminal illness overwhelm her, Camille discovers that Armand has not lost his love for her.
Desperate to change her vixenish image, Theda Bara was called upon to play a sweet young thing (she was nearly 30) who sacrifices herself for the happiness of her sister (Claire Whitney).
Vere Herbert lives with her wicked mother, Lady Dolly (Marie Curtis), who is living in sin with Lord Jura (Glen White). Although Vere is in love with an opera singer, Lucien Correze (Harry Hilliard), Lady Dolly convinces her that marrying the dissolute Prince Zouroff (Walter Law) will save her father's honor. But the Prince makes her miserable and insists on having his mistress, Jeanne deSonnaz (Caille Torrez), live with them.
Billy Martin is sent to New York to put through a war contract for his father, a new England manufacturer, and takes $100,000 as a security. The munition broker's secretary, a crook, tells Graham, a gambling house keeper, of Billy's coming. Miller is detailed to lure him to the gambling house.
This film is a very loose film adaptation of the 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo and presumed lost: The wealthy girl Esmeralda is kidnapped by gypsies at birth and becomes, as one might assume, the darling of Paris. She is loved by the bell ringer and former hunchback Quasimodo, Frollo, the wicked surgeon who cares him, and an equally wicked Captain Phoebus.
