 City greens laborer Jef Liefooghe and his bossy wife, Jeanne Piens, are moving into a large home in Leuven (Louvain in English), a Flemish city dominated by its medieval Catholic university. They are helped by his best friend Odilon Bonheur, a jailer in the city s national prison, Leuven Centraal, who is stupid but very helpful and handy. Jeanne is a former cash register clerk who is starting a sweets shop. To make the move worthwhile, they need to rent rooms to students, but Jeanne is determine to take only boys, no mixing of the genders; Jef claims that means loosing out on half the market. Jef scares off their first candidate, posh third year economics student Charles-Victor Blomme, but is caught in his own bragging to renting a room to a naive girl, phys ed student Sam Detaye. Jeanne is tickled pink when she gets Koentje, a timid freshman economics, or actually the deal is handled by the boy s father, a cattle trader, and domineering domestic mother.