Deserted by his father, and dislocated by the Second World War, Paul is a boy who wants affection and attention and cannot find it at home. For a while, he becomes the pet of some German soldiers, running errands for them. Later, he helps the Resistance, and when the Americans come to stay, he is really in his element with them.
An aging dentist looks for a little liveliness by abandoning his wife in favor of a younger woman. When he learns that his mistress also has another younger lover, he gets jealous, but tries not to make an issue of it. In the end, he dumps her and returns to his wife, who is not about to stand for his middle-aged immaturity. She leaves him.
Paul has been imprisoned for ten years for passing counterfeit money. He feels victimized enough, both for the prison time and for the crime which led to it; he committed the crime to give his wife the nice things she asked him for. When he discovers that she has remarried a quite wealthy man, he is outraged. However, his ire is not due to her disloyalty to him; he loved their only son to distraction, and now the boy has no knowledge or memory of him.
Philippe is an older man and an industrialist whose wife is confined to her bed. They have no children. As he is preparing to go on a vacation to the seaside, he strikes up an acquaintance with Paul, a young working-class boy, and decides to bring him along. This is Paul's first glimpse of how the other half lives, with their first-class hotels and so on. When he meets some aristocratic young people at the resort, he tries to put over the fiction that he is of their class, with poor success.
