Famous writer in search of creation, Marat (Jean-Pierre Cassel) retired from the world in a fishing village in Portugal. He lives there between his wife, his young nieces and his friends. When they learn that he has an incurable cancer, they hide his illness from him and strive to make his life very pleasant, each of the women giving themselves to him. When he finally learns the truth, Marat, having passed a fit of anger, accepts the inevitable. Staging his own death in the midst of his family, he has the passages from the works he wrote down to him, asking the youngest of his nieces, the silent lover, to bring him the glass which contains his deliverance.