1816. Captain Anghjulu Mambrini, a demobilized officer of the disbanded Imperial Guard, returns back home to Corsica after being taken prisoner by the Prussians at Waterloo, then released after a few months of captivity. Along the way, he meets a young doctor, Lurenzu Dominici, who tells him a strange love story on the threshold of death, between a sick woman and her doctor, and then makes him an even more surprising request...