Having come of age in the reign of the citizen-king Louis-Philippe and achieved his first fame in the reign of the Second Empire of Louis Napoleon, Charles Gounod was appalled by the destruction of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune and fled to England with his wife. After the restoration of peace under the Second Republic, Gounod's wife returned to France, but Gounod himself did not. He had found in the profoundly eccentric Georgina Weldon something of a mistress (she rarely submitted to his caresses) and something of a tyrant (she made the deeply lazy Gounod compose everyday in a small room at the top of her house), a combination he found, for a time, quite congenial. Finally, however, he fled Weldon and returned to France, where his liaison made him a figure of scandal and public opprobrium. In an effort to return to his wife's good graces and, not uncoincidentally, to the favor of the French public, he composed L'absent (The Absent One) with both words and music written by Gounod himself. With chastely seductive chromatic arpeggios in the piano accompaniment worthy of Liszt at his most sensuous, and with beautiful melodies in the voice worthy of Franck at his most reservedly passionate, Gounod's public apology worked wonders for his private and public lives, and he was soon back in his wife's house and on his public's stage.

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