This is a wondrous little song, a one-minute excursion into the realm of youthful love and yearning.

The tragic Raymond Radiguet, whose short life lasted only from 1900 to 1923, wrote two novels and some poems, which were collected under the title Les Joues en Feu. Composer Francis Poulenc (1899 - 1963) wrote in his volume Journal de mes melodies that some lines in this poem immediately suggested to him a melodic curve for the first line, and carried through for almost four lines more.

But, as Poulenc recounts elsewhere in his Journal, he often left songs incomplete, finding solutions for other passages would occur to him later. He would often have to knit the fragments of direct inspiration together, usually needing to find ways to modulate from the key of one of idea to the key of another.

In the case of this song the young composer found that he lacked "technical control," and gave up trying to compose it.

In 1946 news that a film was in project of Radiguet's novel Le Diable au Corps reawakened his interest, and set him to re-read Les Joues en Feu. The poems were appealing, but suggested no other musical possibilities to him, though he now realized there was a way to complete it.

Poulenc saw that a controlled full stop, a moment of silence, and then picking up again in a remote key without modulation would provide an effect he needed to progress over the passage that had earlier given him trouble.

Then a melancholy feeling that stole over Poulenc on a rainy day gave him just the right tone for the song. The song has a tender and yearning slowish opening couple of measures, then moves into a breathless tempo, restlessly asking "What is Paul doing without her? Where is Virginia?"

Then the sudden full pause (with the pedals allowing a chord to hang in the air) and when the tempo resumes it is with a warming and deepening of the sonority. The song ends with a restatement of the opening few moments.

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