A young Madeleine takes on the care of two children and the work of the household in the farm home of widower Michel Cordier, and gradually binds herself to the family. But the hostility of the jealous former hand Boiseriot, together with the tensions between Catholics, dissidents, and Protestants in the village, slowly closes in on her place there.

Devotion slowly runs out of room inside a village shaped by prejudice and jealousy.