Chemins de l'amour

Poulec wrote two songs for the popular singer-actress Yvonne Printemps – À sa guitare, a period-flavoured Ronsard setting for her to sing in the title role of Édouard Bourdet’s play La Reine Margot in 1935, and Les Chemins de l’amour, a delightfully idiomatic valse chantée which she performed in Jean Anouilh’s Léocadia at the Théâtre de la Michodière in 1940. It no doubt owes its affectionately Parisian stylishness to the circumstances in which it was written, and with no hint of irony in this case.