Following some dodgy dealings, stockbroker Saccard is determined to pull himself out of the gutter and regain is reputation. He is of such ill repute that few, not even his own brother, want anything to do with him. Yet against all the odds he manages to establish a bank. Using straw men and secret knowledge of the course of the war, Saccard inflates the bank’s shares to feed his own sordid desire for speculation. Unfortunately, false success rarely endures. The preserved material is a fragment. (stumfilm.dk)
The manufacturer Laroque stops at nothing when trying to destroy his enemies, and this time Fréderic Nessières, one of his competitors, is in the line of fire. With his diabolical, hypnotic power, Laroque has snared Nessières’s wife, Madeleine, in his evil web, and she will now do anything to help her husband’s enemy. But even though Laroque’s first plan to ruin Nessières fails, he does not give up. Once he has selected a victim, he will quite literally fight to the death to vanquish them. (stumfilm.dk)
Count de Croisset becomes infatuated with the star dancer Odette Blant. She accepts his offer of marriage, but must promise to abandon the stage forever. She sorely misses performing, however, and when the theatre manager Delage asks her to step in after his star is injured, she agrees. Her husband is at the theatre and recognizes her. Thinking she is having an affair with Delage, he challenges him to a duel. Each duellist must swallow a pill, one of which supposedly contains a deadly poison. This is Delage’s idea, allowing him (with the help of his uncle, the apothecary Michot) to engineer a happy ending for all concerned.
