Francis Poulenc did not approve of female singers performing songs that addressed women as love objects; in his book, Diary of my Songs, he noted a particular objection to hearing a woman sing Fauré's lines, "J'aime ton front, j'aime ta bouche, ô ma rebelle, ô ma farouche" (were the beloved a man, he would be "mon rebel"). Because of that slight squeamishness in his character, he made a point of finding and setting texts that he felt were "truly feminine." It caused him no difficulty to do so when the poet was his dear friend, Louise de Vilmorin. During the early years of World War II, she and her husband, a Hungarian count, were marooned in their castle behind enemy lines and no communication was possible with them. Poulenc wrote that he decided to compose this cycle so as to have an excuse to think of her.

The poetry is slight, modest, elegant: nostalgia and reflection, rather than action or immediacy, are the important themes throughout the otherwise unrelated poems. The overall emotional atmosphere is bittersweet, which Poulenc delicately underscores. Only two of the six songs ("Il vole" and "Fleurs") begin in major keys, and even then the mood is not robust or cheerful, but (in the former) anxious and (the latter) wistful. In addition, "Fleurs," the cycle's coda, ends with a minor cadence. These songs lack the brilliance and contrast of Poulenc's cycles written around the same time: Tel jour, telle nuit (December 1936-January 1937) on texts by Paul Éluard, and Banalités (1940), on texts by Guillaume Apollinaire. Nevertheless, they have charm, and display Poulenc's characteristic harmonic sophistication and melodic inventiveness. Of the six, "Dans l'herbe" is the most intense, building from the quiet futility of "I can do nothing more for him," to the anguished despair at "He was calling me." The strangest is number six, in which the alienated speaker describes herself as if she were in her own casket; not surprisingly, Poulenc's harmonic language here is highly chromatic, some of the melodies almost tortuously so. A virtuosic romp for both singer and pianist is "Il vole"; the text plays on the pun between "to steal" and "to flee" and the sparklingly contrapuntal accompaniment (tempo marking: relentlessly presto!) supports a wide-ranging vocal line which lifts off and trails away at last, like the flying, thieving lover it bemoans.

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