"Olivia" captures the awakening passions of an English adolescent sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris. The innocent but watchful Olivia develops an infatuation for her headmistress, Mlle. Julie, and through this screen of love observes the tense romance between Mlle. Julie and the other head of the school, Mlle. Cara, in its final months.
A group of policemen look over three murder cases including a cutthroat that prays on young women, a madman that hid his deformed landlord's corpse in the floor, and a wine aficionado who buries his friend alive.
Micheline, who fled to Paris with the man she is in love with, finds herself on her own when he abandons her. She lands in a reformatory from which she manages to escape.
Laura has lost her fiancé. Immediately after, an accident happens to her and she becomes blind. Eve, her sympathetic sister, and an understanding doctor imagine having a newcomer, Marcel, play the delicate role of the missing fiance, because their voices are identical. Laure marvels and regains a taste for life. But Marcel falls in love with Eve.
The Donadieu family lives in the Provençal sun in a happy letting go, The father, the mother, the son and the three daughters. One of them, Claire, falls in love with a mountain dweller, Chapus, whom she marries Chapus, rough and austere, undertakes to educate the Donadieu family. The joy disappears and only returns in the absence of Chapus.
François, a young student at a provincial college, likes Colette, the daughter of the headmaster. Turlot his colleague, who commits suicide, left a diary where he writes of his relationship with Colette.
