Three penniless artists become friends in modern-day Paris: Rodolfo, an Albanian painter with no visa, Marcel, a playwright and magazine editor with no publisher, and Schaunard, a post-modernist composer of execrable noise.

A playwright of note, Darius developed a drinking problem after his first major hit, and has taken time out from writing his follow-up to go to a clinic and dry out. After his release, Darius finds his producer has hired a leading lady for his next show, booked the theater and advertised the starting date -- all without Darius writing so much as a word of this new play. Darius desperately tries to come up with ideas, but nothing comes to mind, with an inflexible deadline staring him in the face. One day, Darius kills a neighbor's cat by accident; terribly depressed, he swallows some sedatives and falls asleep at his computer -- only to awake with the beginning of his play glowing on the screen. Darius is now convinced he must kill in order to create, and starts murdering an ever-expanding variety of creatures in order to satisfy his now bloodthirsty muse.

Clarisse's life is nothing fancy: she wears herself out waiting tables in a lousy Parisian bistro. One busy day at work, a stranger's going to turn her life upside down by declaring his love...

Believing she comes from a wealthy family, thugs kidnap a young woman hired as an au pair in Paris.

Perhaps you have to love dogs in order to sell tins of slimy mystery meat to their owners. At any rate Martin, who is indifferent to pets in general, isn't doing all too well in his marketing job at Floppy Dog Foods. But right now this is the least of his problems: he has made a British au-pair pregnant in a one night stand; and while he is trying to figure out how to deal with this, his ex-wife (who divorced him over his not wanting children) and his mother (a militant anti-overpopulation, pro-birth control, pro-abortion activist) have a few comments to offer on the situation. Before his own child is born, Martin clearly has some growing up of his own to do.