An unnamed elderly woman is preparing to move into a nursing home, in accordance with her son Julien’s wishes. She finds herself thinking increasingly about her past and ventures into her attic in search of an old steamer trunk containing:

[S]everal faded leather-bound journals; a packet of aged postcards tied together with a blue satin ribbon; a cardboard box bent in one corner; a set of slim books of poetry by Julien Rossignol; and a shoebox that holds hundreds of black-and-white photographs […] carte d’identité, an identity card, from the war […] [with] the small, passport-sized photo of a young woman. Juliette Gervaise (3).

Julien interrupts his mother and tries to talk her out of taking the trunk to the nursing home. The woman, however, asks him to consider it her “last request” (5). She has recently been re-diagnosed with cancer after a period of remission, and both she and her son—a doctor—know she will die soon. Julien then asks who Juliette Gervaise is, and the woman painfully remembers.

A young woman named Vianne Mauriac prepares for a picnic with her husband Antoine and her eight-year-old daughter Sophie. They live in a small town in the Loire Valley called Carriveau, in a summer house (“Le Jardin”) that has belonged to Vianne’s family for centuries.