It's the off-season at the lonely Beauregard Hotel in Bournemoth, and only the long-term tenants are still in residence. Life is stirred up, however, when the beautiful Ann Shankland arrives to see her alcoholic ex-husband, John Malcolm, who is secretly engaged to Pat Cooper, the woman who runs the hotel. Meanwhile, snobbish Mrs Railton-Bell discovers that the kindly if rather doddering Major Pollock, played by David Niven, who won an Oscar for his performance, a retired officer who likes to find out more...

The film is entirely extracted from the diary of Grace Elliot, a doughty royalist residing in France during the turbulent and uncertain period of the Revolution. What makes it of historical interest is that her ex-lover and close friend, le Duc de Orleans, a cousin of the king, was of a different political hue, a revolutionary idealist who believed in parliamentary democracy, but who was swept aside in the violent class upheaval that marked the end of the feudalistic Bourbon court. A sumptuous c find out more...