Christine and Lea are exemplary maidservants whose fastidious appearance and attention to duty are the delight of their tyrannical new mistress, Madame Danzard. Madame Danzard and her daughter command an immaculate townhouse and lead lives of perfect bourgeois respectability. The reward for the sisters' hard labor is the few free hours they spend with each other. Literally trapped in the house and on edge from Madame Danzard's overbearing treatment, Christine and Lea attempt to find refuge in each other, but their obsessive emotional ties reach a sexual pitch, which overrides their sense of duty. Uncomprehending of the sexual fever that is growing betweem the two girls, but aware that her authority is slipping away, Madame Danzard resorts to greater cruelties against them until the pressure finally reaches a breaking point.