wrote about Noces: "I was informed as a choreographer [by my brother's ballets] Jeux and The Rite of Spring. The unconscious art of those ballets inspired my initial work." Les Tentations de la Bergère [Temptations of the shepherdess] (1924) This one-act ballet featured baroque music composed by Michel de Montéclair (1667–1737), which was recently orchestrated by Henri Casadesus. The sets, costumes, and curtain were by Juan Gris. An alternative title is L'Amour Vainqueur [Love Victorious]. It opened in Monte Carlo. In the mid-1920s "a significant part of the Ballet Russes repertory turned away from modernism and themes of contemporary life." This included Les Tentations de la Bergère and the ballet Les Fâcheux, also choreographed by Nijinska. These were "two works produced by the Ballets Russes during the 1920s that focused on themes related to eighteenth-century France. These productions were rooted in France's post-World War I fascination with bygone monarchies and court life." Les Biches [The Does (or 'the girls')] (1924), also called The House Party A one-act ballet Les Biches ['Les Demoiselles' was once a proposed alternate title] depicts a contemporary house party for singles, with music to 'entertain' by Francis Poulenc. 'Fashionable' scenery and costumes were by cubist painter Marie Laurencin, also French. Poulenc's commissioned music for ballet, which originally included sung lyrics, was a "wonderful chameleon of a score", that was "mischievous, mysterious, now sentimental, now jazzy, now Mozartian..." Dance writer Robert Johnson comments that beneath this ballet's sun-washed, Riviera setting lie "shadowy scenes painted by Watteau: the Parc des Biches where Louis XIV trysted, and the forest where voluptuous courtiers rediscovered Cythera, the isle of love... . From the opening notes of Poulenc's overture, significantly scored for flutes and woodwinds, we find ourselves in this bois of ancient gallantry." Poulence described the section titled "Jeux" as, "a kind of hunting game, very Louis Quatorze." Its January 1924 opening at the Théâtre de Monte Carlo featured "La Nijinska herself" in the cast and, among others, a minor role for Ninette de Valois (she later became director at Sadler's Wells). The French title Les Biches signifies "the girls" or female deer (the plural of doe), which was "1920s terminology for young women; [it] celebrates ballet women as chic young ladies." Several English-speaking ballet companies changed the title, e.g., The House Party or The Gazelles. "Although Diaghilev to Poulenc praised Nijinska to the heavens ... [he] feared she might be