Daisy Kenyon is a Manhattan commercial artist having an affair with an arrogant and overbearing but successful lawyer named Dan O’Mara. O’Mara is married and has children. Daisy meets a single man, a war veteran named Peter Lapham, and after a brief and hesitant courtship decides to marry him, although she is still in love with Dan.

15th century poet, François Villon (John Barrymore), in his lifetime the most renowned poet in France, is also a prankster, an occasional criminal, and an ardent patriot.