Madame X 1937

Jacqueline, the wife of lawyer Bernard Fleuriot, is about to break off her affair with a young man, Jean Rochin, when a former lover bursts into his apartment, shoots him, and flees. As police and others respond to the gunshot, Jacqueline escapes unseen. Returning home, she is discovered by her husband, who is angered by her infidelity and her absence while their son had taken ill. Traumatized by these events, Jacqueline pleads for help and forgiveness, but Bernard throws her out of their home, saying that he will tell the son that his mother had died.

Jacqueline assumes a new identity, adopting the name Miss Pran and serving as a governess for two children of a wealthy couple in Monte Carlo. Two policemen arrive at the estate ahead of Bernard, and Jacqueline, afraid that they are investigating her lover’s murder, pretends not to be Miss Pran. She then boards the yacht of an American whose advances she had previously rejected and sails with him to New York.

Left on her own in New York, she turns increasingly to drink, working as a hostess/entertainer in bars in the Old World and the New. In New Orleans, she is hired by a man named Scipio as a hostess and singer, but she flees again, this time to Buenos Aires, where she meets a gambler named Lerocle and helps him to cheat at cards. In a drunken confession one evening, she reveals her real name and former marriage to Lerocle. Seizing this opportunity to blackmail Bernard, Lerocle takes her to Paris, but before he can act on his threat, Jacqueline shoots him rather than let him disgrace her former husband and son.

Now arrested and on trial for murder, Jacqueline refuses to divulge her name to anyone or to defend herself, especially once she realizes that her court-appointed attorney is her now-adult son, Raymond Fleuriot. Bernard, Maurice, and Rose are in the courtroom to support Raymond at his first trial, but Jacqueline signals to them that they should say nothing as Raymond makes a vigorous and emotional appeal to the jury, pleading with them for mercy.

Awaiting the verdict, Jacqueline thanks Raymond for his efforts and asks if she can offer

“a mother’s kiss”

, then collapses and dies, still without a name for the case.