A married woman struggles to escape the decay of her failed marriage. She meets a strange young man with whom she falls deeply in love and with whom she lives the great illusion, the dream she longed for. She experiences intense dizziness and feels unprecedented joy. But the young man is "crazy," mentally disturbed, and epileptic. When his pigeons, for which he has an irrational and pathological love, die en masse from an unknown cause, he completely loses his mind and kills his lover, believing that he is offering her ultimate freedom.