Romania in the Twenties. In a border town on the left bank of the Danube, the town house of Madame Vorvoreanu, one of the great ladies of the old Romanian nobility, glitters with the lights of the ball to which all the local nobility has been invited. The young Dumitriu couple are the toast of the town ; he is a Captain in the Romanian army, a pure product of the Prussian military school, while she, Marie-Thérèse Von Debretsy, a prodigious "Middle European" beauty, is Hungarian on her father's side. The young woman, who is passionately in love with her husband and children, scorns the advances of General Ipsilanti, which leads the Dumitriu family to be transferred to an isolated garrison on the far side of the Danube, in the Dodroudja region...