Madame X is, at its borders, occasionally and unfortunately a dull film, a conclusion all the harder to understand when one accounts for the scandal at its core. The film begins and ends strictly in the vein of melodrama, and takes its time at exposition and dénouement. The circumstances we first find Jacqueline Floriot in are intriguing enough: she is in a park in Paris, alone, watching children play. She inquires after one child in particular, whether she might ever find a boy named Raymond at this park, and on learning he has been gravely ill, she departs in haste.

She arrives at a stately residence that we learn, over an agonizingly slow twenty minutes of conversation with the man of the house, the maid, the doctor, the family friend, had been her home until she left it and her son to live with a lover, now dead. She has returned asking only to see »»»