A forty-four-year-old man, Martin Austin, is a businessman from Chicago. During a stay in Paris, he falls in love with Josephine Belliard, a woman of unusual beauty who is a mother and in the process of getting a divorce. Austin believes he can perfectly play the keys of feminine emotions. He has been happily married to Barbara for many years, or so he thinks. While he searches for an explanation for what draws him so irresistibly to Josephine, his orderly middle-class existence begins to crumble.