A woman lives with her seven children in the south of France. Although they are busy and insipid, they are still relatively happy. Except for one person who made them unhappy-the owner of the farmland. He was an arrogant, arbitrary man, the woman's lover and the father of her children. The owner of the farmland took the woman and her children as his private property and used cheap labor to farm for him and kept them from leaving the farm. The only thing the woman could do was to make the children endure it, but she had come to realize that she could not bear it any longer.