In pre-Revolutionary Paris, Madeleine, a girl fresh from the convent, is promised in marriage to an older nobleman to pay off her father’s debts. She flees to the literary salon of her late mother’s friends, aristocratic women who conceal radical politics within reinvented folk tales. When her promised husband shows up, the women must use their wits to save Madeleine. But in the end, the maid Françoise is revealed as the real hero of a story they didn’t realize they were in.