In the upheaval following the German invasion of France, in summer 1940 Abel Gance went to the Free Zone in the south and arranged a contract to make a film at the Victorine Studios in Nice.

Only when she has reached the bottom of the abyss does she encounter the smile of Providence that life reserves for those who have faith in it, and she can then go serenely back up the slope towards happiness.

"[1] The beautiful Clarisse learns that she is going blind, and in order to prevent her lover Madére, a boatman, from sacrificing himself for her, she decides to break with him, pretending she no longer loves him.

Madère angrily leaves, and Clarisse takes a job as a singer in a harbour bar to support herself and her crippled sister Mireille.

The yacht is in fact the broken-down boat which used to be their shared home, but all their friends conspire to create the illusion that Clarisse is on a sea voyage.

[3] Although the censorship of the time prevented any explicit references to contemporary politics, Gance was anxious that the relevance of his vision of hope for a new France should be understood.

On the other hand, even before its première the film became the object of an attack from the collaborationist and anti-Semitic newspaper Aujourd'hui, which insinuated that the freedoms of film-making in the unoccupied zone in the south of France were being exploited by Jews: the producer Jean-Jacques Mecatti, Viviane Romance and Gance himself were singled out for derisive references to their Jewish connections.