A young artist draws a face at a canvas on his easel. Suddenly the mouth on the drawing comes into life and starts talking. The artist tries to wipe it away with his hand, but when he looks into the hand he finds the living mouth on his palm. He tries to wipe it off on the mouth of an unfinished statue of a young woman. The statue comes into life and tells him that the only way out of the studio is through the looking glass. The artist jumps into the mirror and comes to the Hotel of Dramatic Lunacies. He peeps through the keyholes of a series of hotel rooms. In the last room he sees desperate meetings of hermaphrodites. One of them has a signboard saying "Mortal danger". Back in the studio the artist crushes the statue with a sledgehammer. Because of this he himself becomes a statue, located at the side of a square. Some schoolboys start a snowball fight around the statue. One of the boys is killed by a snowball...

The battle of the sexes as drawing room social satire. Philippe, a middle-aged newspaper editor, has lived for six years with Paulette, a successful stage actress. He tells her friend Claudine, a realistic and enterprising reporter, that he's thinking of proposing. Into the mix steps Carl Erickson, a charming Hollywood matinée idol in Paris briefly. He meets Paulette, sees her act (his box seat compliments of Philippe), and sets out to seduce her. The next two days bring talk, tears, separation, despair, surprises, and, perhaps, reconciliation as characters speak "exactly half the truth." It's a quadrille of changing partners.