Four young friends share the carefree, cheerfulness, laughter and dances of Bohemian life. Rodolphe the painter, Alexandre Chaunard the composer, Colline the philosopher, as well as Marcel and his friend Musette. Mimi, a romantic young girl, falls in love with Rodolphe.

In his will, the late Jérôme Armandy has expressed the wish to have all the surviving members of his family summoned to the Château de l'Etang, in Provence. Firmin, Jérôme's servant, asks Claude, a Montmartre artist, to organize the reunion, to find the sum of 17 million francs which is hidden there (as a child he had been told by Armandy where the hiding place was) and to divide the amount between the different heirs. But a series of odd facts occur: Claude is knocked unconscious as he is busy opening the hiding place door; one of the heirs gets killed; and even more astounding, the dead man reappears and... asks his money back!

Paris, 1830. Fleur de Marie is rescued from poverty by the mysterious Rodolphe, who is in fact the Grand Duke of Gérolstein, who has gone incognito in search of an illegitimate child he once had. Which is not at all to the taste of Sarah Mac Gregor, her current mistress who kidnaps Fleur and has her locked up in Saint-Lazare prison.