Marion Trémontels

It’s summer and France is hit by a polar cold. Ten lone and lost souls find each other, a profound meeting as a last chance to hope and fear, to love and dream. Ten tales as tribute to Monet’s Water Lilies, ten tales portraying an impressionist painting of today’s France.

In the beautiful family home, at the end of the summer, Monique celebrates her 70th birthday, surrounded by her 4 children, all of whom have come for the occasion. There is Jean-Pierre, the elder, who took on the role of head of the family after the death of his father; Juliette, pregnant with her first child at 40 and who still dreams of becoming a writer; Margaux, the family’s radical artist, and Mathieu, 30, anxious to seduce pretty Sarah. Later, one day, one of them will make a life-changing decision ...

Summer 1890. In order to make some money to feed his family, Anton Chekhov, modest physician, wrote short stories for newspapers to sign Antosha Tchékhonté. Important characters, writer and editor, just make him aware of his talent. His situation is improving and Anton Chekhov gets the Pushkin prices and admiration of Tolstoy. But when one of his brothers died of tuberculosis, Anton saw it as a personal failure and wants to escape his fame and his love.

During a languid and peaceful summer in the 17th century, six young women dream of love. Directly or indirectly, each of them will experiment with the delights and torments of romance–desire and rejection, idealized and consummated love... Nina and Eulalie are sisters who share a strong bond. Eulalie, the eldest, is waiting for the return of her fiancé, who has left to seek his fortune in the Americas, while Nina seems to have nothing to wait for. Through nine chapters, we follow the destiny of each of these young women as they are finally confronted with the reality of a world and an era in which being a woman means not being free. Nina and Eulalie weave their way through each of these stories as they endeavor to understand and perhaps escape the inevitability of their fate as women.

In the turbulent formative centuries of early Europe, power-hungry family dynasties fought for domination of the continent.