Madeleine Milhaud's husband, Darius Milhaud, was a member of Les Six, the prominent and fashionable group of Parisian composers in the 1920s. The couple played an active part in the musical, cultural and social life of Paris, and numbered Cocteau, Dufy, Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Ravel and Satie among their friends. In Darius Milhaud's autobiography, My Happy Life, references to his wife are tender but few, although in fact they were cousins and she knew him from her childhood. She was with him through most of his successes and traumas, the latter including long spells when he suffered from agonizing arthritis and was confined to a wheelchair. Roger Nichols sees his conversations with Madeleine, presented in this book, as in one sense a commentary from the distaff side on Darius's autobiography.