Chouchou leads a happy life between his comrades and his fiancée. But his father wants him to marry a rich American in love with him. Chouchou refuses and looks for work in order to be independent and to marry the one he loves.

After winning a cash prize in a contest a young woman decides to visit Venice. She hires a secretary, a wealthy young man in disguise, to accompany her on the holiday. Once in Italy she attracts several suitors but her real love is her secretary. When she discovers he has deceived her she returns to Berlin on the express and he pursues her to try and declare his love. Loosely based on the 1883 operetta Eine Nacht in Venedig (A Night in Venice) by Johann Strauss II, it was a French-language version of the 1931 German film The Love Express.

The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general.