La chanson d'Eve inaugurates Fauré's last, "old master," manner—inward, stripped, and tellingly direct. By the time the initial setting, Crépuscule, arrived, composed June 4, 1906, and freshly engraved from the publisher in late August, Fauré had decided that it was to be part of a cycle and had already begun what was to become the first number, Paradis. Prima verba followed in late September, though the composition of the remaining seven songs was spread over 1908-1910, delayed by his duties as director of the Conservatoire and work on the grand opera Pénélope (1907-1912).

In La chanson d'Eve, by Belgian poet Charles Van Lerberghe (1861-1907), Fauré found an extensive art nouveau meditation on the feminine ideal—wraithlike, mysterious, and (as Eve) primordial. Crépuscule had been adapted from the Chanson de Mélisande, composed originally to English words for the London production of Maeterlinck's play, and Paradis opens with Mélisande's theme—a recurring motif. For in the symbolist aesthetic, Eve and Mélisande are interchangeable—fleeting, elusive faces of the eternal feminine. But where Mélisande is passive, Eve is an instrument of creation who, in Prima verba, awakens to sensuous prehension all that she names—"How the soul of the fountains and woods...sings in my voice....Words dormant for aeons finally come to life on my lips in sounds, in flowers." Through the luminous, prismatically refracted pantheism of the central songs, Eve is revealed as at once an innocent, both daughter and lover of God, and the magna mater, mother of all. But Crépuscule shudders with a premonition of the inevitable reversal—"What is it that comes and flutters in my heart like a wounded bird?" And the final song—O Mort, poussière d'étoiles—brings numbness and extinction—"Come, dark breath in which I flicker like a flame intoxicated by the wind!"

In La chanson d'Eve, the lyricism of La bonne chanson has been sublimated in a sort of chant, lifting into arioso at moments of maximal expressiveness, to project the words, the poems' profuse images. Throughout, occasional subtle deployments of the whole tone scale evoke Paradise pristine on "the first morning of the world." The piano's part, too, seems ancient and modern at once in its alternation of severe imitation and radiant shimmer, piquant with modally inflected modulations couching the vocal line in anxious rapture. In his Adagia, Wallace Stevens noted that "Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully." In La chanson d'Eve, Fauré's recondite idiom—sensuously engaging and hieratically distanced—meets that criterion in a way that must remain hidden from all but connoisseurs and the most devoted of the composer's admirers. Following the first performance on April 20, 1910, at the initial concert of the newly formed Société Musicale Indépendante by Jeanne Raunay, with Fauré at the piano, Ravel wrote, "My dear Maestro, How I should have liked to express my delight to you...after La chanson d'Eve...I was too moved...."

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