An elderly painter, Claude Zoret, adores the young pupil he has adopted first as a model and then as his son. Zoret watches helplessly as Mikaël drifts away from his exotic love into an affair with the even more exotic Princess Zamikoff. Driven to despair by the boy's unconscious cruelty, he shuts himself away as a hermit, gives up his will to live, and dies after leaving everything he owns to Mikaël. (Excerpt from The Cinema of Carl Dreyer by Tom Milne, published 1971).