Quebec, the 1830s and 1840s. As she attends the bedside of Jérôme (Marcel Cuvelier), her second husband, Élisabeth (Geneviève Bujold) recalls her youth, her marriage to her first husband, Antoine (Philippe Léotard), life in remote Kamouraska where he is seigneur, their love dissolving in his mental illness and cruelties, her falling in love with an American physician, Georges Nelson (Richard Jordan), and the aftermath of Antoine's violent death.