The affair occurred in Ford's Paris home under the eye of his common-law wife, Australian artist Stella Bowen, while Rhys's husband, Jean Lenglet, was in jail.

When Stephan is charged with selling stolen artwork and sentenced to a year's jail, Marya, stranded and alone in a foreign city, is destitute.

There she discovers Heidler's history of inviting young women to lodge in his spare room, initiating affairs with them as Lois turns a blind eye.

With Marya at their mercy, Heidler and Lois escort her around their social haunts in a charade of respectability, deflecting suspicion and gossip about the ménage à trois.

Rhys and her first of three husbands, Jean Lenglet, a multilingual Dutch journalist and French Intelligence Service spy, met in London in 1917.

They moved between Amsterdam, Belgium, Paris, and Vienna, where, from 1920, Lenglet was a secretary-interpreter with the Inter-Allied Commission of Control's Japanese delegation, which monitored disarmament in Austria-Hungary.

[7] Thinking Lenglet's articles unmarketable, as an afterthought, Adam perused Rhys's diary of her time in London, Paris, Vienna, and Budapest.

[8] At Ford and Bowen's parties, she met people like Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and painter Nina Hamnett.

Ford and Bowen sent Rhys to Juan-les-Pins, finding her a live-in job ghostwriting a book on reincarnation and interior design for Rudolph Valentino's mother-in-law Winifred, second wife of American cosmetics millionaire Richard Hudnut.

The pair remained close friends, bound by their daughter, Maryvonne Lenglet, who was three and in care at the time of her father's imprisonment; she later became his custodian.

With the help of Rhys's subsequent husband, editor and literary agent Leslie Tilden Smith, Quartet was published in 1928 by Chatto & Windus.

[14] Quartet's real-life character counterparts each published their own version of this episode from their respective viewpoints, all fictionalised, except for Stella Bowen's memoir Drawn from Life (1941), which recalls Rhys disparagingly.

[citation needed] In old age, Rhys wrote of marriage to Lenglet, their life around Europe, meeting Ford and his literary coaching, in Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography (1979), which was published posthumously.