Paris, at the beginning of the 21st century. Edouard is a painter, Charles is a poet. The two artists are friends, but their adverse circumstances begin to weigh on them. Gulcan, a foreigner, suddenly appears. He has an idea.

Determined to change his life, the Count of Servadac donated his castle and each of the bodies of the family members to the avant-garde medicine of William Stein (great-grandson of Victor Frankenstein), duly poisoned for this purpose. . Opportunity for Stein to carry out the first transplant of memory neurons on human corpses.

During the First World War, Camille (Sylvie Testud), a young woman whose husband is away fighting at the front, receives a short letter of break-up from him. Distraught, she decides to go to join him, but is driven back by the rule of the time which forbids women to move around alone. She has no other recourse than to dress herself up as a man so as to be able to take to the road on foot. As she lives near the Western Fromt she hooks up with a passing group of French soldiers without too much trouble. But there's something a bit odd about these stragglers, and it's not just their habit of bursting into song at every opportunity.

Alexandre, a thirty-year old tailor, has decided to improve his cultural level. That is the reason why he has decided to attend an evening school. The lessons are given in the classroom of an elementary class by a teacher named Etienne. The subject of the course is : "The solitude of Jean-Jacques Rousseau". Will Alexandre become another man after grappling with with Rousseau, Diderot and ... Etienne? - Guy Bellinger