Manoel de Oliveira commemorates his ninetieth birthday with the adaptation of the novel La Princesse by Madame de la Fayette, published in the seventeenth century.

     Having lived through her first disillusion in love, Mademoiselle de Chartres, agrees to marry Jacques de Clèves, a renowned doctor, even though she does not love him. In her heart, however, she rediscovers love when she meets singer Pedro Abrunhosa. Under pressure from this forbidden love affair, she is led to share her dilemma with her husband himself. He can not bear the weight of this disclosure and dies some few months later.

     Even as a widow, she knows that she dare not make known her feelings. She disappears without leaving a trace. Some years later, friends receive a letter from Africa: Madame de Clèves is living with missionaries, assisting the wounded and the destitute from the civil war.

     Manoel de Oliveira defines his film as a "story of passion, with fragments of a social vision that shows us disorder that, with the same cruelty as in the past, assails our incorrigible world".