Till Marriage Do Us Part 1974

In Sicily at the start of the twentieth century, two noble families celebrate the wedding of Raimondo and Eugenia. After the couple retreat to the bedroom, a telegram is slipped under the door declaring that they are brother and sister. For inheritance and decorum, they reluctantly agree to stay married but sleep apart. Eugenia resents the idea of enforced chastity, and on their honeymoon in Paris she yields to the advances of a French baron, Barone Henri de Sarcey. Yet when she confesses that she is still a virgin, he disappears quickly. Back in Sicily she is driven to mass by the chauffeur, Silvanno Pennacchini, who stops at an isolated hut and possesses her. These trysts continue until the chauffeur is discovered to have been helping himself not only to the mistress but also to the household silver. At his trial, she reluctantly identifies him.

When Raimondo goes off to war in Africa, Eugenia grows closer to Evelyn, a free-spirited journalist. After Raimondo returns as a hero, the two women ride bicycles through the countryside and pass the hut where Eugenia lost her virginity. Evelyn thinks it would be a provoking idea for the two of them to make love on the same spot, but upon peering through the door they glimpse Raimondo atop a peasant girl. He is then elected to the Parliament in Rome and takes an apartment there. When Eugenia visits him, he suggests that rather than the dull routine of chastity they should taste the ultimate forbidden pleasure of incest. The moment arrives when the telephone rings: an urgent message from Sicily says that they are not brother and sister after all. Yet the prospect of ordinary conjugal sex does not excite either of them.

Italy enters the First World War and Raimondo dies at the front. Eugenia volunteers as a nurse and tends badly wounded soldiers, one of whom is the ex-chauffeur. After the war she decides to go to Paris, where she discovers that the baron—the only man she had offered herself to—is dead. One evening, while she is in her underclothes, there is a knock and the ex-chauffeur returns, now recovered from his wounds. He does not seek revenge for his imprisonment; he simply wants to resume where they left off.