France, 1760. Marianne is commissioned to paint the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young woman who has just left the convent. Because she is a reluctant bride-to-be, Marianne arrives under the guise of companionship, observing Héloïse by day and secretly painting her by firelight at night. As the two women orbit one another, intimacy and attraction grow as they share Héloïse first moments of freedom. Héloïse's portrait soon becomes...

Follows the bawdy activities of Tom Jones, a foundling of mysterious origin, adopted by a squire in eighteenth-century England.

After her father's death, Marie of Burgundy is the richest heiress in Europe, but the sharp-minded woman resists the citizens of Ghent who try to force her into a marriage with nine-year-old Charles, the French King Louis' son. Meanwhile, Maximilian, the young Austrian archduke, stubbornly opposes his father Frederick who also wants him to marry the young duchess. Nevertheless, Frederick has the merchant Fugger negotiate the marriage between Maximilian...