A young man in love with a slightly older woman sees another man leaving her apartment, and, when he happens to see the other man later that day, starts to follow him.

An impulsive young art student, tired of the complications of freedom and insecurity, ends an affair with a painter and decides she wants to get married. She picks out a prosperous lawyer and confidently sets out to catch him, only to be ensnared by her increasingly obsessive scheming when she refuses to accept his polite indifference.

A handsome stranger tries to convince a lovely young woman that they had a passionate affair a year ago, 'perhaps at Marienbad,' but she claims not to remember him. He haunts her mind with images by mixing memory and fantasy, fear and desire.

A timid cafe pianist has given up his career as a concert pianist, a career which had destroyed his marriage. Events force his involvement with gangsters who once again cause him to be responsible for the destruction of his life.

As Clarissa Dalloway prepares for an elaborate party, she remembers another summer in the past, when she was a beautiful young woman. Her preparations are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of a former suitor from that long-ago summer. As the day of the party unfolds, Mrs. Dalloway's life also becomes strangely intertwined with a young man she never meets, but whose tragic fate strikes a chord of truth, deep in her soul, that she cannot deny.

During the Franco-Prussian war, a young widow who is saved from an attempted rape finds herself mysteriously pregnant several months later. Unaware of how this happened, she is sent away by her family and ends up marrying her rescuer, whom she doesn't know is the child's father.