A night of excessive drinking. The morning after. Black out. Still in the claws of alcohol, but without any memory of the events of the past night, the wealthy bourgeois Lenglume awakes in his bed. How did he get home? And who the hell is snoring under the blanket next to him? Can it possibly be that he had brought someone home? A woman? A man?! - There is a deep gap in his memory, which he by no means is able to close.

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In his nightmarish comedy of 1857, Eugène Labiche playfully shows the filthy shoals, which are to be found behind the clean and decent surface of bourgeois morality. The stranger in Lenglume's bed turns out to be his former school friend Mistingue. But the joy of reunion doesn't last long: everything indicates that the night before our two friends, lost in alcoholic delirium, have assaulted a young coal-selling girl and subsequently murdered their victim in a most brutal way. In panic they try to wash their coal colored hands and to eliminate all traces. Shedding false tears for their innocent victim all they care for is to save their own existence.

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