The Lovers

Henri and Jeanne Tournier, married now for eight years, live outside the provincial town of Dijon, where Jeanne grew up, with their adolescent daughter, Catherine. Jeanne feels like a neglected wife as Henri spends more time on his job as the publisher of the Burgundy Monitor newspaper than he does with her. As such, she feels jealous of the exciting cosmopolitan life of her longtime best friend, married Maggy Thiebaut-Leroy, a flighty Paris socialite. Jeanne's visits to Paris become more and more frequent, to a point of being twice a month, as she has taken up with a renowned Paris polo player, Raoul Flores. Jeanne considers Raoul somewhat reckless in how open he is in their affair, she using Maggy, through who Jeanne and Raoul met, as their third in any outing to avoid any speculation of her infidelity. Jeanne admits she doesn't like the fact of other women chasing after Raoul when she's not around, he stating that he never succumbs to their advances. Jeanne suspects that Henri is having his own affair, with Helene Cavalier, his secretary at the newspaper. Regardless of if Henri's affair is fact or just Jeanne's belief, Henri, knowing about Raoul, wants to have a showdown of sorts by Jeanne asking both Maggy and Raoul for a weekend in Dijon with them. If Jeanne has nothing to hide, she should have no problem with inviting her friends. That showdown, where the three in the triangle plan to work toward their own end goals, is affected by the last minute addition of a fifth to the weekend, young archaeologist Bernard Dubois-Lambert, who rescues Jeanne from her broken down car en route from Paris back to Dijon and who abhors the vacuous life of the Paris social scene.