Giuseppe Giusti

Crime drama about a betrayal, murder and jealousy around a femme fatal.

Adrien Sixte is a reclusive intellectual known for his theories on psychological materialism. Sixte’s orderly, self-enclosed world is violently interrupted when a desperate mother petitions his help and a judge summons him to a criminal trial. The young defendant, Robert Greslou—a student and self-styled disciple of Sixte—has sent his master a confidential memoir written in jail. Greslou’s psychological self analysis traces the nexus of causes that propelled him to his current predicament. The memoir culminates with his experience as a tutor for an aristocratic family: when he experiments with the affection he inspires in a young girl, the disciple’s actions eventually leading to her death.

Hard pressed for funds in his campaign for Mayor, Jim Creelman does not know where to turn, but Olga Bateman, an actress, who has fallen deeply in love with the handsome politician, offers to loan him twenty thousand dollars to insure his election, hoping that in the end he will marry her. He makes good use of the funds and his campaign is carried to a successful termination. A short time afterwards, however, he meets Miss Syble Chatfield, the fiancée of Estaban DeBussy, the editor in chief of the leading daily paper, and falls desperately in love with her.

A wife is upon the point of breaking her honor, a bunch of primroses being placed as the signal to a huntsman who will pass through the grounds. Her husband's nobility is suddenly revealed to her, and she scatters the flowers to the wind.