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The central story is brief, violent, dramatic. Michele is the skipper of a barge that is tied up in Paris, on the Seine. He has lost the love of his pretty young wife Giorgetta, since their child died in infancy. Now she is secretly in love with Luigi, a longshoreman who works for Michele. When Michele has gone to sleep, she tells Luigi, she will strike a match as a signal for him to come aboard to meet her.
 

Unfortunately, Michele stays up later than usual. Thinking bitterly about his lost love, he lights a match for his pipe. Luigi, mistaking this for Giorgetta's signal, steals on board. The suspicious Michele surprises Luigi, forces him to confess his love, and then quietly strangles him to death.
 

Giorgetta, uneasy, comes from the cabin and asks her husband whether he does not wish to have her near him.
 

“Under my cloak?” asks Michele.

“Yes,” she answers. “You said once that everyone carries a cloak: sometimes it hides joy, sometimes sorrow.”
 

“But sometimes it hides a crime!” cries Michele, and he tears the cloak from Luigi's body. As she utters a cry of horror, he seizes her roughly and hurls her forcibly upon the body of her dead lover.
 

That is the central, dramatic story, most of it occurring in the last few pages. But we are first treated to a whole series of memorable vignettes. There is Tinea, the longshoreman, who drowns his sorrows gaily in wine, and dances drunkenly with Giorgetta. There is Frugola, the wife of Talpa, another longshoreman, who seems to love her cat as much as her husband. There is a song pedlar who passes musically by. There is the idealized picture of life in a small town sung in a duet between Luigi and Giorgetta. And always there is the background of the river Seine itself, suggested by the undulating rhythms of the prelude—rhythms that come in again and again.