Cut off from her bourgeois family, a young woman drifts through Paris in disgrace, succumbing to the lure of alcohol and a mysterious benefactress. Expelled from her family home in the provinces after a scandalous affair, Betty arrives in Paris with empty pockets, no plan, and a powerful thirst for drink. In a seedy bar on the Champs-Élysées, she meets Laure, an older woman clinging to scraps of respectability. Their uneasy cohabitation offers temporary shelter, but at the same time sharpens Betty's sense of her own failure. As Betty drinks more heavily, the boundaries between past and present blur--memories of her childhood, her parents, and the incident that led to her disgrace surface in fragments, exposing a deep well of resentment, shame, and self-loathing. One of Georges Simenon's bleakest and most uncompromising psychological portraits, Betty charts a woman's self-destruction with relentless clarity, offering a devastating portrait of urban loneliness, class resentment, and the cruelties inflicted on the dispossessed by a numb and uncaring society.