On the day of his retirement, Émile, a literature professor in Dieppe, gives his young students one last lesson on literature and love, encouraging them to become the poets of their own lives. A student asks him about his own feelings. Is Émile still in love with his wife? Unable to answer, he discovers, once he returns home, that his wife has left him. He is forced to apply his own precepts to himself. Two encounters and a reunion will then help him reinvent himself.