In his will, the late Jérôme Armandy has expressed the wish to have all the surviving members of his family summoned to the Château de l`Etang, in Provence. Firmin, Jérôme`s servant, asks Claude, a Montmartre artist, to organize the reunion, to find the sum of 17 million francs which is hidden there (as a child he had been told by Armandy where the hiding place was) and to divide the amount between the different heirs. But a series of odd facts occur: Claude is knocked unconscious as he is busy opening the hiding place door; one of the heirs gets killed; and even more astounding, the dead man reappears and... asks his money back!