- A wife shoots her husband's mistress. Afterwards, she is tormented by guilt when someone else is blamed for the crime.
- Francoise is a jealous wife who spies on her playwright husband one evening after a play and overhears him and his lover Odette, the star of the show, quarreling in the street about him leaving his wife. She reminds Paul how she gave up her previous lover for him, a married man and demands that he leave his wife that night. He protests, he tells Odette, because he does not want to hurt his wife.
Paul comes home at 3am and finds that Francoise has waited up for him. Unbeknownst to him, she is distressed at the news and pretends that she knows nothing of the affair. She attempts to seduce him but fails. The more he tries to tell her that he's leaving her, she become increasingly agitated, speaking more rapidly as she backs out the door and leaves him alone in the bedroom. Peaking through door, she sees Paul take his gun out of the nightstand and check it before putting back. Francoise sits are her desk and sobs and returns to bed after Paul has gone to sleep.
The next morning, Paul awakes to find that Francoise has left for day and she has left a note indicating that she is running errands. She sees a lawyer to find out how she can keep him from divorcing her. She learns that there is nothing legally she can do to compel him to stay. The lawyer suggests that they can make him pay for leaving her but that is not satisfactory for her as she want Paul, not his money.
That night at the theater, Paul tries to tell Odette why he was not able to tell Francoise he is leaving her. She is upset as he has promised and failed at this before. He promises to leave Francoise that night and Odette tells him that she will not kiss him again until he has left. meanwhile, elsewhere in the city a man has robbed a bank and shot a teller. He escapes in his car which he leaves parked near the theater and proceeds to try to blend into the group of actors arriving for rehearsal. The director is running through a scene again and again, until they get it right and he instructs Odette to repeat her entrance from off stage. As she enters the stage to begin singing a shot rings out and she fallen to the floor dead. The bank robber is seen climbing into the catwalk of the theater. The police are summoned and find him but he swears that he does not know Odette and he did not kill her. He is arrested for Odette's murder.
As Paul leaves the theater, he finds a gun, exactly like his tossed into a fire bucket full of water and immediately knows that his wife committed the murder. When he returns home Francoise is preparing for a dinner party she is giving that night. Paul asks her where she has been all day and if she knew what happened to at the theater. She replied that she did' He asked he if she lost anything while she was out and shows her the gun. With a glassy stare she tells him, "I never travel with firearms". At the dinner party, the topic of crimes of passion comes up and Francoise defends a woman's right to commit a crime of passion because the parties who have wronged her have killed her first.
After the dinner, he confronts her and calls her a fiend. She tells him that she intends not to say anything and at first he threatens to turn her in to the police. Instead he tells Francoise that he will stay and keep her secret to watch her fall apart. He moves out of the bedroom. Two months pass and Paul notes in his diary that Francoise still has not turned herself in but instead exhibits a cool unemotional exterior. At dinner she tells Paul that she intend to leave him and travel. Odette's dog is brought to Paul while they are at dinner and Paul decides to keep him since he has no home. The dog's presence makes Francoise uneasy. Francoise reads Paul's diary and in the last entry he says that even if she travels her feelings of guilt will follow her. The last line says that he is unable to feel sorry for her. Francoise puts a line though that last line and underneath writes, "I am staying".
Francoise unexpectedly shows up at a party Paul is throwing for the 100th performance of his play, the party is being held on the stage. He had just finished telling everyone that she wasn't coming because she was feeling unwell. The rest if the crowd seems pleased to see her but when she sits and the table offers a toast to her, Paul remains silent. As she sits at the table, A young actor who is drunk, flirts with her and forces her out into the dance floor for a dance. Francoise keeps seeing the shooting over and over again and leaves the room.
Paul notes in his diary that Francoise is rapidly becoming weighed down by her guilt. By now she is looking very ill and tired but refuses to allow Paul to call a doctor for her. He receives a letter that at first he refuses to read to her. When she demands he read it, she finds out that the bank robber has been convicted of Odette's murder and sentenced to death.
Francoise goes to her friend, the district attorney and asks for permission to see the Castelli, condemned man. He is hostile to her when she is let into his cell. She confesses to him that she murdered Odette. He tells her that she should go away and to never mention it again, he would have been executed for killing the bank teller anyway. He sees it as a joke, the authorities are going to execute him for a crime he truly did not commit. It is six month later and Paul tells Francoise that she is the only person suffering more than him but as long as she won't confess, she will continue to die inside.
At dinner that night, she sees a paper where Castelli confessed to killing Odette just before being hanged. While she is unconscious her mind plays though all of the events of the past six months. When she wakes up, Paul tells her that she is the only person who can help herself. After a moment's pause, she picks up the phone and makes an appointment to see the attorney general to turn herself in for the murder. Paul says that he will stand by her throughout her upcoming ordeal. She declines his offer but asks that he comes to visit her in jail occasionally. He helps her dress and once more she tells him to remain as she leaves to make her way to confess to the murder. As she walks, along, Paul is walking a distance behind her.
A boy runs into the street after a ball. He falls as a truck is bearing down on him. Francoise jumps into the street to save him and sustains a critical head injury. The doctor gives Paul the good news that while Francoise will live, she has lost her memory of her entire life and how to do basic functions such as feeding herself, their names and her entire life history. This includes her murder and subsequent guilt. The final scene shows that Paul has taken Francoise to the south of France to recuperate, She is repeating simple words such as "sand" and "mountain" and he is taking care of her, convinced that this is God's plan.
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