Merette is a pretty child, living within a patrician, strictly Calvinist family in the Switzerland of the 19th century. She is happy, until her mother dies, and Merette blames God, and gives up her religion. Her family turns against her, the villagers reject her, and her priest drives her into isolation.

It is carnival time in Munich and participants are overindulging in alcohol and sensual pleasures. "Follow us into madness" beckons Lys who is drunk on life, but the sensitive Henry does not follow him. Lys has betrayed his fiancé, as Henry once betrayed his lost love Anna. In memory of Anna and his cruel Dickensian childhood, Henry challenges Lys to a duel to try to appease his guilt.

Switzerland 1523. The mercenary Jackie Geer returns with his soldiers from Iatly to his home in the Oberland. They have fought for the Pope and now find a religious upheaval i Switzerland.

Martin Lundt, heir to his family's industrial business, falls for and, against his family's wishes, weds the family maid, Régine. Soon thereafter, rumors begin to circulate about Régine's faithfulness and being to haunt Martin.

A few leagues from Seldwyla, in the Zurich countryside, two children, Sali Mantz and Vreneli Marti, form an inseparable pair of playmates. Unfortunately, their farming parents, who have always been friends, are at odds with each other over the purchase of an adjoining field.Sali and Vreneli don't see each other again until much later and fall in love, but their parents still hate each other fiercely. Despite everything, the young couple will try to live their forbidden love.

While on a longer business trip, a wannabe poet urges his beautiful but more simple wife to answer his overly swollen love letters. With no idea how to respond she forwards the letters to a new young school teacher to use his answers instead...

The daydreaming tailor Wenzel is fired from his job, because the fancy frock he was supposed to cut for the mayor, he instead made for himself. He is allowed, however, to take the frock, which he appropriated for himself and he puts it on as he leaves the shop. A puppeteer picks him up in his coach and addresses Wenzel as "Count". So is he received in Goldach, where people think he is Count Stroganoff, the ambassador to the Czar of Russia.

Engineer Frank Reynolds returns to his Heimatland, where he finds a blue diamond in Regine. But she has a brother who is not a diamond at all.

Seven men in peaceful Switzerland swear lifelong friendship, while the rest of the world is at strife, though a conflict arises when the daughter of one (a rich trader) falls in love with the son of another (a lowly tailor).