"An upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined."--Container.

After a lavish dinner party in a stately mansion, the guests believe themselves unable to leave the premises. As the days pass, the elaborate facades of their social positions collapse and they are forced to live like animals. Finally discovering they are actually free to leave, they go to church to give thanks, where they are again trapped.

Dramatizes a weekend at a marquis's countryside château, where the rich and their servants gather, and which exposes some ugly truths about a group of haute bourgeois acquaintances in the early days of World War II.