SOURCE: Attwood, Catherine. “The ‘I’ of the Poet and the Poetic ‘I’: The Evolution of Literary Awareness in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries” and “The ‘I’ and the Other: The Poetic ‘I’ in the Works of Guillaume de Machaut.” In The Poetic “I” in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century French Lyric Poetry, pp. 11-228. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998.

[In the following excerpt, Attwood analyzes Machaut's principal works concluding that he, more than any other poet of his time, reveals his poetic ego as a purely textual, literary construct.]

Among the most significant contributions of the writers of this period to the development of the first-person lyric voice is their increasingly explicit differentiation between the poetic ‘I’ and the ‘I’ of the poet. By the first of these terms I wish to designate the first-person speaker as it appears in any lyric text, as distinct from the structuring consciousness or ‘implied poet’ which underlies it. By the second term, I understand those aspects of the poet's textual self which bear specifically upon his poetic, as opposed to his amorous, moralising or other activities. While by their nature these two phenomena remain inseparable, by the fourteenth century they are no longer indistinguishable, as had been the case in the works of the earlier troubadours and trouvères. This chapter aims to trace the development of the self-reflexive, creative consciousness of the ‘I’ of the poet, of his literary awareness, as it may be deduced from the corpus of texts to be examined in this book.

Critical interest in the problem of literary awareness in the lyric poetry of the later Middle Ages is of comparatively recent origin, though it has rapidly gathered momentum over the last two decades. To date, however, the only full-length study of the question in relation to the vernacular lyric is Sylvia Huot's From Song to Book, a work whose primary focus is on the metaliterary aspects of codicology. A concern for the formal and quantifiable aspects of literary awareness had been manifest since the first publication of Deschamps's Art de Dictier,¹ yet speculation as to the possible aesthetic implications of this work stopped short with the recognition of Deschamps's famous separation of ‘musique naturelle’ from ‘musique artificielle’. Enquiry into the broader implications of literary awareness has been fostered principally by the recent revival of interest in the works of Guillaume de Machaut. These provide a privileged area for such enquiry since, in addition to his Prologue, the literary reflexivity of which is explicit, a number of his longer dits, in particular the Voir-Dit, the Remede de Fortune and the two jugement poems, are centred on the theory and practice of writing, whether through the device of intercalated lyrics, or by close and deliberate reference to a pre-existing text.

A number of writers, following Machaut's example, have taken the Prologue as their point of departure in a retrospective reconstruction of the poet's literary theory.² Jacqueline Cerquiglini's ‘Un engin si soutil’, devoted to the Voir-Dit (together with the work of Sylvia Huot) provides the fullest study of any aspect of the question with which this chapter will be concerned, containing as it does much illuminating insight into Machaut's conception of both poetry and the poet. The enigma of the Voir-Dit has prompted a certain amount of speculation as to its author's intentions, whether ‘truthful’ or otherwise,³ and subsequently as to the nature of that truth and the problems of expressing it in writing.⁴ The Voir-Dit has provided a starting point for further investigations of Machaut's literary self-consciousness, centered on such issues as intertextuality and manuscript compilation.⁵

Just as the lyric and lyrico-narrative works of Froissart were influenced by those of Machaut, so critical writing on these aspects of Froissart's work has tended to take its cue from Machaut scholarship.⁶ With regard to the Chroniques, there have appeared a number of illuminating analyses of Froissart's conscious manipulation of historical discourse, the most comprehensive of these being Peter Ainsworth's Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History.⁷

As will become apparent in my more detailed treatment of Christine de Pizan, in Chapter Five, the question of the writer's status as a woman has come to dominate discussions of both her literary persona and her literary awareness. Amongst the considerable body of material devoted to Christine de Pizan, the work of Jacqueline Cerquiglini, Sylvia Huot and Kevin Brownlee stands out as offering what might be considered an objective account of her literary awareness.⁸ Many critics have accepted the most disingenuous of Christine's own evaluations of the status of the poet and poetry in her works, content, apparently, to believe her sincere when she claims to be so.⁹ Comparatively little criticism has appeared relative to the literary awareness of Alain Chartier: rather surprisingly, the metaliterary analogies of the Belle Dame Sans Mercy have been explored only to a limited extent and in isolation from Chartier's other works.¹⁰

That the preoccupation with form is fundamental to the work of Charles d'Orléans is reflected in the focus of all of the most distinguished critics to have written on the subject. Daniel Poirion significantly entitles the relevant chapter of Le poète et le prince, ‘Charles d'Orléans: le poète et son livre’, directing the attention of the reader, in his opening paragraphs, to the prevalence of book imagery in Charles's poetry.¹¹ The distinction between ‘Je’ and ‘Cuer’ which, as will be seen, plays such a vital role in Charles d'Orléans's elaboration of his approach to poetic practice has been analysed most extensively in Cholakian's Reflection/Deflection, though useful discussions of the question are also to be found in the work of Planche and Poirion.¹²

My aim in this chapter is to provide a general survey of the workings of the ‘I’ of the poet and of his literary consciousness: as it is not within the scope of this study either to establish an individual poetics for each of the poets concerned, or to elaborate a comprehensive theory of writing which would embrace them all, I intend simply to draw together various theories of self-presentation as propounded by the writers of the period under discussion, in the hope that these will illuminate the practice observable in the broader configurations of the poetic ‘I’ to be discussed in subsequent chapters. I intend to treat the different levels of literary awareness in ascending order of their direct applicability to the formation of a given text, beginning with an account of the varying conceptions of the role and status of the poet, afterwards examining concepts of the nature and purpose of poetry, theories of writing, both aesthetic and practical, and retrospective commentaries on the results of the creative process.

.....

Whereas the preceding chapter aimed to explore the literary significance of the separation of the implied poet from his poetic ‘I’, this chapter and the three which follow it will deal with the first-person speaker in the work of an individual poet—in this instance, Guillaume de Machaut—as it appears on the surface of any given text, at any moment and in any voice, whether or not apparently identifiable with that of the implied poet.¹³

The various facets of aesthetic distance discussed in Chapter One …, are, however, of paramount importance in any definition of Machaut's poetic ‘I’. My present aim, however, is to demonstrate the way in which a series of other devices, both grammatical and thematic, promoting both distance and rapprochement, determine the position of Machaut's first-person speaker. I hope to show that Machaut's poetic ‘I’ is essentially defined neither in terms of any inherent marks of ‘character’, nor by the impression upon it of external circumstances, but rather by its interaction—grammatical, physical, social—with other personae. Machaut's ‘I’, particularly in the fixed form lyrics, is in itself rather colourless, by comparison with the ‘I’ of such of his successors as Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan or Charles d'Orléans. It is as frequently seen to be the sum of what it is not as it is to be defined by the possession of positive attributes. It both shapes, and takes its shape from, the second- and third-person presences which surround it. This process appears as a series of binary oppositions—independence and inter-dependence; distance and propinquity; discreteness and fusion. The ‘discretion’ with which William Calin qualifies the narrator of the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, holding aloof from the knight and lady for fear of intruding upon their grief,¹⁴ is contrasted with what Poirion terms ‘l'indiscrétion du Voir-Dit’,¹⁵ where the clerkly narrator turned would-be chivalric lover offers a brilliantly executed account of his own rather unsatisfactory love affair. At such times, Machaut establishes a clear relationship between the moral attributes of discretion and indiscretion and the physical states of discreetness and fusion, exploring the implications for his personae of this conjunction. …

The prevalence of what is imagined or contemplated over what is experienced or recollected is evident throughout Machaut's lyrics. The life of the ‘I’ is here largely unalleviated by such concrete—if conventional—incidents as the bird-song, spring meadows or even jealous husbands which populate the songs of the troubadours and trouvères. The ‘I’ is not only confined to the realm of the intellect and the emotions, but is condemned to perpetual uncertainty, forever groping towards what it might feel in some circumstance as yet unexperienced, or lamenting over what has not, or—more frequently still—what has not yet happened. The mainspring of such uncertainty, as will be seen, lies in the influence upon the ‘I’, to varying degrees, of the actions of 2nd or 3rd person subjects over which it has little or no control.

Machaut's ‘I’ thus stands in marked contrast to that of the Grand Chant Courtois, whose essential character is intransitive and inward-looking. The ‘dame’ is largely absent from the early lyric, being evoked in the 3rd rather than the 2nd person. Of the 10 Chansons of Conon de Béthune, for example, the ‘dame’ appears in the 2nd person in only one; of the 61 Chansons of Thibaut de Champagne she appears in 20 as 2nd person; of 33 Chansons by Gace Brulé, she appears thus in 11.¹⁶ Of the ‘dame’'s appearances in 2nd person in the works of the last two poets, 6 in each case are made only after an initial appearance in the 3rd person. The following example from the works of Gace Brulé provides a typical demonstration of this pattern:

Fine amor et bone esperance
Me ramoine joie et chanter,
Se cele m'oste ire et pesance
Qui tant m'avra fait endurer:
Qu'ainc ne me vout guerredoner;
Pour ce ai esmai et doutance,
Se loiauté de bien amer
Ou sa grant pitez ne m'avance.
Douce dame en cui j'ai fiance
De ma grant joie recovrer,
Membre vos qu'en longue atendance
Me porroit amor trop grever.
Ne je ne m'en sai conforter,
Car en vos est ma delivrance;
Dame, si vos en doit membrer,
Selon vostre douce semblance.
Dan Dieus, quant remir sa semblance,
Trestot le cuer me fet trembler,
Ne mi oil n'ont tant de puissance
Qu'il osent son cors regarder,
Eins les covient aillors torner,
Si que n'i puis faire atendance;
Et quant li doi merci crier
Lors me faut cuer et hardiance.

(Chanson 11, stanzas 1, 3 and 4).

It is as though the ‘dame’ as 2nd person subject cannot communicate or be communicated with directly by the poet, sandwiched as she is between references to her less ‘immediate’ 3rd person self. She appears confined within the personal discourse of the ‘I’, existing only within his consciousness.

The widely recognised closed and circular nature of the trouvère chanson has been variously codified, notably in the hic/ego/nunc formula adopted by Zumthor and the ‘I’/love-experience/song, triangle proposed by Karl D. Uitti.¹⁷ The lyric poems of Machaut, equally, present a closed structure but one which takes greater account of the ‘Other’. … In the poetry of Machaut the spheres of action of the ‘I’ and the’Other’ continually intersect, to varying degrees. I have chosen [Ballades “103” and “24” of the Louange des Dames] to illustrate the full range of this intersection, “Ballade 103” being representative of those poems where it is least evident, “Ballade 24” representing the greater number of poems where the intersection is almost complete. …

The ‘I’ of the first category which may be characterised, in thematic terms, as essentially hopeful and solipsistic, does not differ markedly from that of the Grand Chant Courtois. Though some causal link is consistently observable between the actions or reactions of the ‘I’, and the actions of the ‘Other’—generally represented here as 3rd person subject—the ‘I’ remains largely intransitive. As was the case in the trouvère lyric, this ‘I’ is as much concerned with his reaction to his own action as to those of the ‘Other’. Thus, for example, in Ballade 103, though the ‘I’ makes a direct causal link between his present happiness and the belief that his lady recognises his love, (lines 10-13), his chief interest, expressed in grammatical variations on the paradigm of ‘aimer’, is with the unfulfilled potential of his own love. While the ‘I’ receives passively the happiness conferred by the ‘dame’—‘Ce me maintient en baudour et en joie’—he pursues the concept of his love through a series of active verbs throughout the first stanza.

Examples of such self-reflexive preoccupations are common throughout Machaut's lyric poetry, and are frequently expressed in terms of the well-established troubadour/trouvère topos of the lover whose devotion cannot be surpassed:

Fors que moy seul, qui tant l'aim et desir
Qu'onques dame, ce croy, ne fu amée
Plus loyaument ne de plus vray desir.

(Louange des Dames, 208, 15-17);

or else:

D'un cuer si fin et d'une amour si pure
Me sui donnés à ma dame d'onnour.

(Ibid., 64, 1-2)¹⁸

Love is an end in itself, loyalty its own reward:

La loyauté, où mes cuers se norrist,
Et vraie amour qui est sa norriture,
C'est ce pour quoy mes cuers en joie vist.

(Ibid., 118, 1-3)

The ‘Other’ is frequently evoked in purely passive terms, through conventional eulogies of his or her moral and physical attributes:

Car il a tant en son viaire cler
De sens, de pris, de bonté, de valour
Que vraiement, à raison regarder,
Il n'est de li plus bele ne millour.

(Ibid., 111, 8-11)

or:

Ne fu tel fleur dès que fu fis Abel,
Quant fleur des fleurs tous li mondes l'apelle.
Certes, mon oueil richement visa bel,
Quant premiers vi ma dame bonne et belle.

Ibid., 219, 5-8)¹⁹

The contemplation of the ‘Other’, however, may at times lead the ‘I’ into a voluntary absorption with his or her attributes which lends a more reciprocal appearance to their relationship. Thus, in the following example, the ‘I’ seems to merge herself with the description which she gives of her lover:

Honneur, vaillance et bonne renommée,
Grace, biauté sont en vostre corps gent,
Dont je me sent si hautement parée,
Car plus de bien n'ay, n'autre esbatement.

(Ibid., 9, 8-11)

The Louange des Dames provides a number of instances of such voluntary transference, effected in the mind of the ‘I’, of the physical attributes, emotions or geographical location of the ‘Other’ to itself, as, for example, the following:

Ou païs où ma dame maint
Sont mi desir et mi penser
Et mes cuers qui pas ne se feint
De li bien servir et amer.

(Ibid., 157, 1-4)

or:

Douce est et pleinne de valour
Et tous biens sont en li compris;
S'en vueil toudis, sanz nul sejour,
A li servir estre ententis,
Car je sui tout ensamble pris
Et confortez
Quant me dist ma dame de pris:
'Amis, amez'.

(Ibid., 43, 17-24)²⁰

The pairing here of the etymologically related terms ‘amis’ and ‘amez’ in the refrain emphasises the implied reciprocity of affection. Poems depicting mutual absorption of this kind represent the interaction of the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ at its most passive level. In such instances, the ‘Other’ generally remains in the 3rd person; the evocation of their love remains the prerogative of the ‘I’.

It happens more frequently in Machaut's lyric poetry, however, that the impact of the ‘Other’ upon the ‘I’ is effected in active terms, and in a manner over which the ‘I’ has little or no jurisdiction. Yet, in the fixed form lyrics such active interaction is almost always expressed in negative terms. Unlike the many poems in the works of Deschamps and Charles d'Orléans which contain dialogue in direct speech, or such poetic sequences as the Cent ballades d'amant et de Dame or the Belle Dame Sans Merci which depict open exchanges between the lover and his lady, few of Machaut's lyric poems afford, in themselves, an opportunity for direct communication. In the case of the Voir-Dit, the Remede de Fortune and the Fonteinne amoureuse, this quality is imparted to the fixed form poems by the verse narrative which surrounds and animates them. The Louange des Dames provides some instances of direct exchange, in paired poems, between a lover and his lady, together with occasional poems containing internal dialogue, but these are rare.²¹ For the most part, therefore, the ‘Other’ is, literally, conspicuous by his or her absence. The discontent experienced by the ‘I’ as a result of this absence forms the framework for awareness of the ‘Other’ and is the basis of the latter's controlling influence. The themes of absence and separation were increasingly common amongst poets of the fifteenth century and had also been exploited to a lesser degree by the trouvères and particularly by such of Machaut's immediate predecessors as Jehan de Lescurel.²² It was Machaut, however, who first employed these themes systematically.

The absence of the ‘Other’ impinges upon the ‘I’ in a variety of significant ways. In the case of “Ballade 24,” the fundamental bonding of the lady with her lover, prerequisite to his wide-ranging influence over her, is stressed from the outset by the use of the complementary demonstratives ‘ce qui’ and ‘ce fait’ placed in positions of emphasis in the first two lines of the poem. From this point onwards, a series of paired statements of cause and effect—both positive and hypothetical—illustrate the controlling power of the ‘amis’. Each of these instances, moreover, represents a concern common to the ‘I’ throughout Machaut's lyric corpus. In this poem, the impact of the ‘Other’ upon the ‘I’ which the latter stresses most insistently is that caused by the length of his absence, the distress which this occasions being expressed in the lexically emphatic ‘haïr’ of the refrain. Complaints about the lover's long absence are more common to Machaut's female than to his male personae, though they may also, on occasion, be expressed by the latter. Thus, for example, the female persona of “Ballade 27” laments:

Certes, moult me doy doloir
De mon tres loyal amy,
Quant il le convient manoir
Longuement ensus de my.

(ll. 1-4)²³

Elsewhere, the lover is seen measuring the time which has elapsed since his last meeting with his lady:

Hui ha. I. mois que je me departi
De celle en qui j‘ay mis toute ma cure,
Mais onques mais mes las cuers ne senti
Nulle dolour à endurer si dure.

(Ibid., 95, 1-4)

This poem also appears as one of the inserted lyrics in the Voir-Dit. As will be seen hereafter, the ever-lengthening periods which elapse between the meetings of the lovers and the anxiety which these induce are important motifs in the interaction of the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ in this work.

The subject of long absences and their effects on the parties concerned was, as has been indicated, to be explored more fully by the poets of the fifteenth century. However, like most poets before him, from Jaufré Rudel and his ‘amor de lonh’ onwards, Machaut is more concerned in his fixed form lyrics with the space than with the time which separates his lovers. Regrets at the distance existing between the ‘I’ and his or her beloved are frequent in the Louange des Dames, as, for example:

Hé! gentils cuers, me convient il morir
Pour vous que j'aim miex que mi proprement?
Certes, oïl. Amours le vuet souffrir
Qui loing de vous m'ocist a grief tourment.

(Ibid., 83, 1-4);

or else:

Mercy, merci de ma dure dolour
Pri et repri en moult lontein païs,
Mais je ne puis faire tant de clamour
Que je puisse de ma dame estre oïs,
Car trop lonteinne est de moy, ce m'est vis.

(Ibid., 135, 1-5)²⁴

Still more common than the laments of the ‘I’ at finding itself far from the ‘Other’, are those to which it gives utterance at the very moment of departure:

Or voy je bien, ma dolour renouvelle
Et ma joie prent son definement,
Quant il m'estuet partir de la tres bele
Qui a mon cuer en son commandement.
Si ne say mais la maniere comment
Vivre puisse longuement, sans morir,
Puis qu'il m'estuet de ma dame partir.

(Ibid., 156, 1-7);

or else:

Emy! dolens, chetis, las, que feray,
Quant de mon cuer, ma dame et m'amour
Seray partis? Certes, je ne le say.

(Ibid., 68, 1-3);

or, finally:

Sans cuer, dolens, de vous departiray,
Et sans avoir joie, jusqu'au retour.
Puis que mon corps dou vostre à partir ay,
Sans cuer, dolens, de vous departiray.

(Ibid., 264, 1-4)²⁵

It is at the moment of parting that the aspect of present happiness and the prospect of future misery are most nearly juxtaposed, and hence it is at this point that the ‘I’ is most keenly aware of the ‘Other’'s influence upon him.

A juxtaposition which further highlights this awareness is that of the presence of the ‘Other’ in the mind of the ‘I’ when the two are physically separated:

Dame, se vous m'estes lonteinne,
Pas n'est mes cuers de vous lonteins,
Car par ramembrance procheinne
Est nuit et jour de vous procheins.

(Ibid., 42, 1-4);

or else:

Et sachiez bien, tout sans doubter,
Que mes cuers point de vous ne part,
Se mes corps de vous se depart.

(Ibid., 160, 5-7)

The juxtaposition thus openly expressed is, of course, implicit in all the poems in which the ‘I’ laments the absence of the ‘Other’: it is, indeed, the raison d'être of such poems. In the physical absence of the ‘Other’ who is seen to be their primary inspiration, these texts are themselves the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

It has been shown above that the contemplation of the physical beauty of the beloved is one of the fundamental activities which binds the ‘I’ to the ‘Other’. Thus the frustrated desire of the ‘I’ to see the ‘Other’ when absent is a very common facet of his or her experience of separation from the beloved. In “Ballade 24,” for example, such thwarted desire is twice linked causally with the emphatic refrain: ‘or ne te puis veoir: / Pour ce m'estuet, … / Haïr mes jours …’, (lines 6-8), and ‘Mais li desirs que j'ay veint bon espoir / Et dous pensers; ce me fait. … / Haïr mes jours …’, (lines 14-16]. Elsewhere similar sentiments are expressed thus:

Las! tant desir l'eure que je vous voie,
Tres douce, où nuls ne saroit amender,
Qu'il me samble bien, se Diex me doint joie,
Qu'il a.C. ans que ne vi vo vis cler:
Einsi desirs fait mon cuer embraser;
Si que j'en pleure et soupire main et soir,
Pour le desir que j'ay de vous veoir.

(Ibid., 123, 1-7);

or alternatively:

Souvent me fait soupirer,
Dementer, pleindre et gemir,
Et grief dolour endurer
L'ardure dou grant desir
Qui me fait à la mort traire
Et dire adès main et soir:
‘Hé! tres douce, debonnaire,
Quant vous porray je veoir?’

(Ibid., 200, 1-8)²⁶

However, as at the moment of departure a pleasant state is contrasted most sharply with an unpleasant one, so, in those poems which deal with the possibility or impossibility of seeing the ‘Other’, the most telling in terms of the ‘I’'s awareness of the ‘Other’ are those which juxtapose both eventualities:

Car quant je voy vo biauté nonpareille
Et vo gent corps qui n'a point de pareil
Et vo fresche coulour qui à merveille
Coulourée est de blanc et de vermeil,
Resplendissant si com or en soleil,
Je n'ay vigour ne scens qui ne m'oublie:
Tant me fait mal de vous la departie.

(Ibid., 140, 8-14);

or else:

Car mes cuers est si forment convoiteus
De remirer son tres plaisant atour,
Son gentil corps, son dous vis gracieux,
Son dous regart et sa fresche coulour,
Par qui je sui plains de loyal amour,
Que je ne puis durer ne main ne soir:
Tant pour l'espoir que j'ay de li veoir.

(Ibid., 76, 8-14)²⁷

Moreover, just as the memory of the ‘Other’ is present to the ‘I’ when the two are apart, so too is the image of the ‘Other’'s physical appearance. Thus, in the 2nd stanza of “Ballade 24,” ‘souvenirs’ which evokes the ‘ymage’ of the ‘amis’ is seen to be a powerful active presence, directly responsible for the ’joie’ of the ’I’, which ’desirs’, thus prompted to action, destroys, while the ‘I’ remains a passive, helpless observer. The prevalence in the consciousness of the ‘I’ of the ‘remembered’ as opposed to the ‘real’ image of the ‘Other’, is also to be found elsewhere in Machaut's lyrics, as, for example:

Souvenirs fait meint amant resjoïr,
Mais il me fait toute doulour avoir;
Car il m'estuet tout adès souvenir
De ma dame que j'aim sans decevoir,
Et quant ne puis ne sentir ne veoir
La parfaite douceur dont elle est pleine,
Joie me fuit et doleur m'est procheinne.

(Ibid., 199, 1-7);

or else:

Amours, ma dame, et Fortune et mi oueil
Et la tres grant biauté dont elle est pleinne
Ont mis mon cuer, ma pensée et mon vueil
Et mon desir en son tres dous demainne.
Mais Fortune seulement
Me fait languir trop dolereusement
Et trop me fait avoir peinne et anoy,
Quant seur tout l'aim et souvent ne la voy.

(Ibid., 13, 18)²⁸

The image of the ‘Other’'s physical being, as is the case with the general impression of the ‘I’ concerning it, functions in some degree as a metaliterary counterpart or image of the text itself, clearly perceived as being distinct from the reality which it evokes. It is a representation which is as faithful as the human recreative imagination can contrive, but not a direct replica: hence the dissatisfaction of the ‘I’.

However, the liveliest anxiety experienced by the ‘I’ of “Ballade 24,” and by the ‘I’ of Machaut's shorter lyrics in general, is that of being forgotten by the ‘Other’. Such an eventuality, according to the ‘I’ in the above-mentioned poem, would be the cause of her death. Other examples of a similar preoccupation are frequent:

Vueilliez avoir de moy le souvenir,
Dame, de qui tout adès me souvient.

(Ibid., 274, 1-2);

or else:

Dame, pour Dieu, ne metez en oubli
Moy qui tant ay de doleur et de plour
Que je n'ay mais nul reconfort en my
De l'ardure qui me tient nuit et jour,
Eins sui toudis de morir en paour;
Tant ay perdu joie et envoiseüre,
Si me merveil comment vos cuers l'endure.

(Ibid., 39, 1-7)²⁹

It is as though the position of Machaut's ‘I’ and that of the trouvères had been reversed. While the ‘I’ of the trouvère lyric confined the ‘Other’ to its own personal consciousness and discourse, that of Machaut clearly perceives itself, to some degree, as existing only in the consciousness of the ‘Other’.

As has already been suggested, much of the life of the ‘I’ in Machaut's shorter lyric poems is confined to the realm of personal consciousness—whether its own or someone else's—to such a degree that there can be no question of open communication or interaction between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’. What is important here is the act of recognising that such interaction exists: the act of attempting to communicate, rather than the substance of the communication.

DISTANCE AND DIFFERENTIATION: THE EXAMPLE OF THE DIT

The dit, with its dual, lyrico-narrative character, provides a particularly privileged location for the interaction of the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’. Here, where the ‘Other’ is more truly present, and where, consequently, the contrast between presence and absence is more fully developed, the concrete and positive effects of such interaction may be readily seen. All seven of Machaut's dits amoureux have as their overt aim the rapprochement, both physical and emotional, of a pair or of a series of pairs of figures. This rapprochement is usually effected by one or more intermediaries whose interaction with the characters they seek to assist frequently serves, in turn, to illuminate the respective positions of the main protagonists. This pattern appears in its most rudimentary form in the Dit dou vergier and the Remede de Fortune, where the first-person narrator as lover/protagonist wishes to approach his lady but is initially both too timid and too ill-instructed to do so. He is therefore dependent upon the services of a supernatural tutor—in the first case the God of Love, in the second, ‘Dame Esperance’—to whom he then owes an allegiance equal to that owed to his lady. Thus the narrator of the Dit dou vergier reveals his subservience to Cupid:

Quant je vi que c'estoit mes sires,
Qui des maus amoureus est sires,
Onques de lui ne m'esloingnay,
Mais devant lui m'ageloingnay,
Et li requis en souspirant
A mains jointes et en plourant,
Qu'il me vosist reconforter
Dou mal que j'avoie a porter.

(Dit dou vergier, 377-84)

At the end of the dit, the narrator transfers this attitude of submission and dependence to his lady:

[…] elle est vers moy seul enchierie,
Et s'est seur tous de moy chierie,
Qui tant l'aim, pris, serf et tien chier
Que ja ne m'en quier destachier.

(Ibid., 1243-46)

The active potential of the narrator remains undeveloped throughout: beyond a little learning in the art of courtly love, the ‘I’ makes scant progress towards self-definition or self-assertion. His interaction with the ‘Other’—Cupid and his ‘dame’—remains passive and one-sided.

The narrator-figures of the Remede de Fortune and the Dit de l'alerion give proof of greater initiative. Both are young and inexperienced at the outset, and both need help to achieve their ultimate end of union with the ‘Other’, whether it be a lady or the series of falcons which, in the Dit de l'alerion, represent the lady's allegorical equivalent. Yet both show an active determination to further their own interests, and to this inclination their intermediaries—‘Amours’ and ‘Esperence’ in the former poem, breeders and purveyors of raptors in the latter—merely serve as adjuncts. Thus, for example, in the Remede de Fortune, the narrator reveals that—even in extreme youth, and before ‘Amours’ had offered him his support—he had made some progress towards his objective:

Pour ce l'ay dit que, quant j'estoie
De l'estat qu'innocence avoie,
Que juenesse me gouvernoit
Et en oiseuse me tenoit,
Mes ouevres estoient volages:
Varians estoit mes corages;
Tout m'estoit un, quanque vëoie,
Fors tant que toudis enclinoie
Mon cuer et toute ma pensée,
Vers ma dame, qui est clamée
De tous seur toutes belle et bonne.

(Remede de Fortune, 45-55)

Here, as in the Dit dou vergier, the ‘I’ is ultimately successful in forging a lasting relationship with the ‘Other’. However, whereas in the Dit dou vergier the ‘I’ became submerged beneath the active personality of the ‘Other’, it enhances its own standing as it approaches the ‘Other’. In the Remede de Fortune this is achieved through the acquisition of knowledge of the art of love and still more, of the art of writing poetry; in the Dit de l'alerion it comes about through the progress which the narrator makes in the theory and practice of falconry. Moreover, by virtue of its de-humanised status as a bird of prey, the ‘Other’, in the Dit de l'alerion can have no communication with the ‘I’ and can exercise no rational influence over him. She may gladden or sadden him by her escape or return, but he takes sole responsibility for chronicling and interpreting their relationship, and even resorts to such autocratic and non-courtly procedures as blindfolding her and depriving her of food to ensure her submission.

In the Dit dou lyon, the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne and the Fonteinne amoureuse, the pattern of separation and rapprochement becomes more complex, with the narrator acting both as an ‘I’ who wishes to be linked with an ‘Other’, and as an intermediary, himself leading one person or set of people to another. In the Dit dou lyon, this process is relatively straightforward: the narrator first establishes a rapport with a lion whose unexpected tameness encourages such a relationship, then helps to establish the lion in the good graces of a lady whom the latter admires.

The Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, however, is prolific in such instances. The narrator first witnesses the coming together of a knight and a lady and stresses in his account the eagerness of the former to enter into communication with the latter:

Mais quant amis,
En qui Nature assez de biens a mis,
Fu aprochiez de la dame de pris,
Com gracieus, sages et bien apris
La salua.
Et la dame que pensée argua,
Sans riens respondre a li, le trespassa.
Et cils tantost arriere rappassa,
Et se la prist
Par le giron, et doucement li dist:
‘Très douce dame, avez vous en despit
Le mien salut?’ […]
‘Mais je vous pri que vostre pensement
Me vueilliez dire’.

(Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, 56-67, 79-80)

The narrator then overhears the knight and lady confide to each other the devastating effects which the absence of a third person—through infidelity, in the case of the knight, through death, in the case of the lady—has had upon their lives. He is seized with a desire to speak to the bereaved lovers and an occasion for this is conveniently provided by the lady's little dog—an animal variation on the theme of the intermediary, usually restricted to human and allegorical subjects. The dog strays across to the narrator's hiding place and seizes the hem of his robe. Seizing in his turn this implicit overture to the process of mediation, the narrator returns the animal to its mistress, overjoyed at this excuse to introduce himself into their company:

Mais en mon cuer forment m'en deportay,
Pour ce qu'a sa dame le reportay,
Pour avoir voie
Et occoison d'aler ou je voloie;
Si que toudis son poil aplanioie.
Mais quant je vins ou estre desiroie,
Je ne fui mie
Mus, n'esbahis; einsois a chiere lie
Ay salué toute la compaingnie.

(Ibid., 1214-22)

He then eagerly offers himself as intermediary between the lovers and the King of Bohemia, whose arbitration between them as to which has suffered the greater hurt will, he urges, be of vital use in assuaging their grief. The narrator thus hopes to effect a rapprochement which will nullify the painful impression created on each lover by the initial distancing of their respective loved ones. Trite though this solution may appear judged by the criteria of the modern reader, within the confines of the schematic arrangement of the text it is shown to be very efficacious.

The narrator of the Fonteinne amoureuse overhears a noble lover, in a room adjacent to that in which he is sleeping, bewailing the fact that he is about to be separated from his ‘dame’ through exile and that he will be unable to communicate with her. The narrator is delighted with the discourse of the lover, and eagerly transcribes it:

La complainte qu'i voloit dire,
Si commença piteusement
Et je l'escri joieusement.

(Fonteinne amoureuse, 232-34)

On the following day, the narrator falls into conversation with a nobleman, the Duc de Bery, and is overjoyed to discover in him the unseen lover of the previous night:

Trop durement me resjoÿ
Quant ensement parler l'oÿ,
Car je sceus bien que c'estoit cil
Qui avoit l'engin si soutil
Et que j'avoie oÿ compeaindre.

(Ibid., 1511-15)

In company with the narrator, and strengthened by his encouragement, the lover dreams that his lady comes to comfort him, and subsequently goes into exile, secure in the knowledge that his lady, though physically absent, is present to him, and he to her, in thought.

It will be seen from the examples quoted above, that the ‘I’ in the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne and the Fonteinne amoureuse, whether it be the narrator or the lover separated from his or her beloved, derives a vital stimulus from proximity to the ‘Other’. In the case of the ‘I’ as lover, the obstacles to be overcome in attaining such proximity are those common to the later medieval lyric—separation through death, exile, geographical distance, indifference or infidelity. In the case of the ‘I’ as narrator/witness, the physical barriers which stand between him and his contact with the ‘Other’, whether through sight or touch, are generally symbolic of a more fundamental differentiation which, as will be seen hereafter, is vital in determining the nature of the interaction between them. Thus the bushes which initially separate the narrator from the lovers in the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne signify the diffidence of a clerc in the presence of the nobility.³⁰ Similarly, the wall of the room which separates the narrator from the lover in the Fonteinne amoureuse, but through which the narrator attentively listens to the latter's Complainte, afterwards transcribing it with great accuracy and poetic sensitivity,³¹ may be seen to represent the interpretative qualities of the writer as opposed to the active capabilities of the lover.

It is, however, in the Voir-Dit, in every way the most complex and sophisticated of Machaut's works, that the pattern of distance and rapprochement examined above is seen in its most elaborate form. The overt aim of the work is to enshrine the communications—prose letters and fixed form lyric poems—between the two protagonists, and to chart the progress of their relationship from their first hearing of each other, to their first meeting, to their sexual union, towards the anticipated growth of deeper mutual understanding. This broadly ‘realistic’ and mimetic aim is, however, subverted by the implied poet's continually drawing attention to the essentially ‘literary’ nature of the text. The underlying theme of the Voir-Dit is, precisely, the failure of the lovers to communicate directly and openly with each other. The poet is considerably more communicative on the subject of how the lovers are kept apart than on that of their coming together. Much is made by both protagonists of their having loved before they had seen each other. Thus Toute-Belle begins her first poem to the narrator:

Celle qui onques ne vous vit,
Et qui vous aim loiaument.

(Voir-Dit, 169-70, p. 7)

Subsequently, the narrator, having described the agreeable ladies whom he sees daily but cannot seem to love, defends the feasibility of loving someone one has not seen or cannot see:

Mais ce ne porroit avenir
Qu'Amours péust en moi venir,
Pour laissier celle qui lontaine
M'est de l'ueil, et du cuer prochaine.
Et comment se puet cecy joindre,
Qu'elle me puet de si loing poindre,
Sans ce qu'onques je la véysse,
Ne que son dous parler oÿsse?
On y puet assez bien respondre:
Amours se scet mettre et repondre,
Et de ce ne fai-je pas doubte,
En tel, qui onques ne vit goute,
Ne qui jà goute ne verra.
Mais tant de sa dame enquerra
Et de sa bonne renommée
Qu'elle sera de li amée.

(Ibid., 1059-74, pp. 44-45)

Such insistence on the potency of love between people who have not seen each other is the more striking as the meetings of the lovers are few and, for the most part, singularly unprofitable. When the narrator first encounters Toute-Belle in person, he is utterly overwhelmed by timidity:

Et quant elle me salua
Par nom d'ami, mes cuers mua
Si tresfort que je ne savoie
Parler a li, ne où j'estoie.

(Ibid., 1790-93)

On the occasion of Toute-Belle's first trying to entice the narrator into bed, he complains that he is being physically assaulted, (l. 3458, p. 146). Their sexual union, when it finally takes place, is not only shrouded in vagueness but literally concealed behind a mist which Venus conveniently causes to descend upon the lovers, (ll. 3760-76, p. 157).

A succession of intermediaries—the narrator's secretary, Toute-Belle's brother, her confessor and her relatives/confidantes Colombelle and Guillaumette—are introduced into the Voir-Dit with the overt purpose of furthering the interests of the lovers. Yet, whereas in earlier dits intermediaries served merely as links between one person and another, establishing and facilitating their interaction, in the Voir-Dit they frequently act as substitute for one party or the other, and thus demonstrate the deficiencies in their system of communication. Thus, for example, the narrator's close attachment to and great dependence upon his secretary is stressed from the outset:

Je vi venir tout droit à mi
Un mien especial ami
Qui me geta de mon penser.
Et nuls homs ne poroit penser
Comment je le vi volentiers.

(Ibid., 56-60, p. 3)

It is this secretary who helps to set the liaison between the narrator and Toute-Belle in motion, bringing her first poem and informing the incredulous narrator that he is beloved. Once the affair is underway, he assiduously offers his services as a regular go-between, (ll, 286-89), and the narrator's attachment to him deepens as a result of his zeal and usefulness in this regard:

Si, qu'adont par la main le prins:
Si, nous féismes, ce me semble,
Pour plus aise parler ensemble.

(Ibid., 358-60, p. 14)

The secretary acts, as do other intermediaries in the text, as a counterpoint to the narrator's inadequacy or lack of opportunity. Thus the latter bewails the fact that his secretary can see his ‘dame’ whereas he is prevented from doing so by ill health:

‘Vous en alez devers ma dame;
Et je n'i puis venir, n'aler,
Ne je ne puis a li parler.
Je n'en ay que le souvenir
Que Dous-penser me fait venir,
Tout par deffaulte de santé,
Non pas de bonne volente’.

(Ibid., 466-72, pp. 21-22)

Thus, in a similar manner, it is Guillaumette who seconds Toute-Belle in her endeavours to seduce the narrator during the first night which they spend together, and it is Toute-Belle's confessor who persuades the narrator of his lady's continuing fidelity towards him when her own reassurances are powerless to do so.

In the ninth letter of the Voir-Dit, Toute-Belle, regretting that she cannot come to see her lover, sends him her ‘ymage’. As was seen in the previous chapter, this ‘ymage’ is a symbol for the text as a whole. It is the text—on a thematic level through the poems and letters which the lovers exchange, as well as on a metaliterary plane—which is the true intermediary-cum-substitute, which forms the literal and literary basis of their relationship.

Moreover, it is not only intermediaries who keep the lovers apart whilst seeming to draw them together. The protagonists themselves, and particularly the narrator, seem singularly apt at finding excuses for deferring their meetings, and this in spite of repeated expressions of regret on both sides at their being unable to see each other.³² Fear of brigands, the plague, the harsh weather, the narrator's professional duties towards the Duke of Normandy, all are presented as valid reasons for the lovers' remaining apart.³³ As Calin has pointed out, they are hampered by very few of the constraints which commonly afflicted either the protagonists of the courtly lyric or the noble and professional classes of French society in the fourteenth century.³⁴ There are no jealous husbands to fear, no severe fathers to placate. Yet, though appearing to be free enough in her movements at most times, Toute-Belle twice complains that she cannot travel freely as a man might, and thus cannot visit her lover as often as she would wish.³⁵ It will be seen, then, that the interaction of the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ here is dependent on issues more complex than those of mere physical presence or absence.

Throughout Machaut's dits the first person interacts with the second and the third through a series of consciously promoted marks of differentiation, which may be physiological, social, professional or metaliterary. Such differentiation, as is the case with the balance between physical distance and propinquity in the works of Machaut, functions in close conjunction with an equally well-contrived system of rapprochement. Many of the means by which the ‘I’ seeks to distinguish himself from the ‘Other’ are closely associated with the conscious cultivation of the ‘clerkly’ image. The use of this image, as was seen in the last chapter, was of great importance in effecting the separation of the ‘I’ of the poet from the poetic ‘I’, both in the works of Machaut and elsewhere. What is striking, therefore, in the case of Machaut, is the close, almost symbiotic relationship which the ‘I’—despite the distinctness of their respective identities—retains with the ‘Other’.

At first sight, the most obvious physical differentiation between the first person and the second and third persons is that of gender. Evidently, such a differentiation, together with the inter-dependence of the sexes which necessarily accompanies it—is common to all literature in which heterosexual love is celebrated. Yet Machaut rarely, if ever, makes this difference explicit. Though a number of Machaut's shorter poems, together with the Confort de la dame contained in the Fonteinne amoureuse, and approximately 50 per cent of the inserted lyrics of the Remede de Fortune and the Voir-Dit, are enunciated by a female persona, it is impossible to distinguish in them any alternative or specifically feminine qualities of voice.³⁶ Indeed, the respective statements of male and female personae frequently complement each other in rhythmic or semantic terms, as, for example, in the following refrains of paired ballades:

Ne me soiez de vostre amour lonteinne.

(Louange des Dames, 31);

De vous me vient li souvenirs procheins.

(Ibid., 20);

or else:

Selonc ce que j'aim chierement.

(Ibid., 206);

Trop compere amours chierement.

(Ibid., 12)³⁷

The mark of the female persona here is thus, literally, her ‘otherness’, rather than her femininity.

As is the case in “Ballade 24,” quoted above, the female persona frequently praises her lover in terms identical to those used in similar circumstances by a male speaker.³⁸ Though the ‘dame’ is frequently seen in the passive position of the one who is left by the reluctantly departing ‘amant’, it is generally she who retains the active power of being able to dismiss him from or recall him to her memory. Moreover, there are a number of instances in Machaut's works, and particularly in the Voir-Dit, in which the conventional roles of men and women are reversed.³⁹ In both the Remede de Fortune and the Voir-Dit, the ‘dame’ takes the part of initiator and preceptor in the art of love, the lover following and, in the latter work, proving a very poor student. Though timid lovers are common in the medieval lyric, those of Machaut frequently protest too much in this respect. Thus, in the Voir-Dit, the physical frailty and cowardice of the lover make him appear pointedly effeminate by contrast with the vigour and forthright conduct of Toute-Belle.

A similarly fundamental differentiation which is peculiar to Machaut, is that of species. The transposition of the courtly lover into a lion in the Dit dou lyon and of the lady into a raptor in the Dit de l'alerion, has, at one level, the effect of alienating them from the nature and habits of the ‘I’ to an unusually high degree. Yet, while both are entirely dependent on the ‘I’ as narrator to interpret their actions, both, equally, have some power over him. The lion provides the ‘I’ with the excuse for an introduction to the ‘dame’ whom he admires but to whom he is unable to speak: thus, following the customary pattern of the clerkly narrator and the noble lover, the narrator writes and speaks, while the lion loves and acts. The ‘alerion’, though materially sustained by the ‘I’, sustains him in turn by the pleasure afforded to him by her fine appearance.

In the Voir-Dit, particularly, the topos of the unequal union of old age and youth, January and May, is exploited, as also is the resulting disparity between infirimity and health. Here, however, the two states, by convention incompatible, are shown to complement each other. The narrator is old, and ill at the beginning of the work:

Car trop plus pale que vermeille
Estoit ma coulour, et destainte;
Que j'avoie éu dolour mainte,
Pour ce qu'avoie vraiement
Esté malades longuement.

(Voir-Dit, 62-6, p. 3)

Yet Toute-Belle sees in the narrator not the weight of years, but that of reputation, and instead of shying away from an aged lover, comes towards him, offers herself to him without reserve, and even appears to communicate some of her youth and vigour to him:

Car vous m'avez ressuscité et rendu mon sentement que j'avoie tout perdu.

(Ibid., Letter 2, p. 20)

The physical imperfections of the narrator—his small stature, his lameness, his having lost the sight of one eye—are, as has been seen, essentially ‘clerkly’ attributes. These are rendered more apparent by contrast with the beauty of Toute-Belle. That she should love the narrator in spite of his deformities is thus the more striking, and is indicative of the vitality of their interaction.

A recognition of the difference in social and professional status between the ‘I’ as clerkly narrator and the ‘Other’, the noble knight or lady, is of still greater importance in establishing the independence of the former, in literary terms, serving as a thematic ‘symptom’ of the aesthetic distance maintained between the ‘I’ of the poet and the poetic ‘I’. A noble protagonist, or set of protagonists, is present in every one of Machaut's dits, to complement the narrator. In the Dit dou vergier and Jugement dou roy de Navarre, these figures are allegorical; in the Fonteinne amoureuse and Confort d'ami, they are historical—the Duc de Berry in the former work, the imprisoned king of Navarre in the latter; in the Dit de l'alerion they are a succession of noblemen and of ‘noble’ birds; in the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, they are a knight and his lady; in the Dit dou lion, Remede de Fortune and Voir-Dit the figure is a noble lady. Moreover, the social gulf which separates these two classes is unbreachable in its own terms. The nobility may, on occasion, acquire certain clerkly or, more precisely, ‘writerly’ qualities, thanks to the narrator's instruction; thus, for example, Toute-Belle learns to compose lyric poetry under her lover's guidance. The narrator-figure, for his part, can never become noble. His poor appearance, his lack of self-assurance, his ineptitude as a lover, all militate against his elevating himself to the status of a ‘chevalier’. As Jacqueline Cerquiglini has pointed out, the attempts of the ‘clerc’ to adopt the habits and pursuits of the ‘chevalier’ are ridiculed by the nobility.³⁹ The narrator's hunting in the Jugement dou roy de Navarre and his interest in falconry in the Dit de l'alerion, for instance, receive rather patronising recognition. It is strictly in his capacity of writer/interpreter that the narrator achieves a position of equality with, and even superiority over, noble protagonists.

A certain discrepancy is observable between both the manner in which the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ perceive the world around them and in the quality of their perception. The ‘Other’, unlike the ‘I’, has good sight, and consequently may judge according to what he or she can see. The ‘I’ is often prevented from seeing, either, implicitly, through his poor eye-sight, or, explicitly, by physical obstacles such as the bushes of the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, or the partition wall of the Fonteinne amoureuse. He therefore relies on hearing rather than sight, and notes down accurately everything he hears.⁴⁰ The ‘Other’, though he sees well, does not always understand well—the knight and lady of the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne do not know how to resolve their difference of opinion; the knight of the Fonteinne amoureuse and the king of Navarre in the Confort d'ami cannot see any escape from their unhappy positions; the lion in the Dit dou lyon cannot approach his lady. To all of these problems the narrator provides a solution, since though the quality of his sight is poor, that of his insight more than compensates for this. The ‘Other’, moreover, is an active and effective lover, whereas the ‘I’ is manifestly ineffectual in this capacity: the ‘Other’ cannot, or does not, always write down or interpret his actions and feelings, whereas the ‘I’ frequently writes down and interprets the actions of the ‘Other’—as, for example, in the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, the Fonteinne amoureuse and the Voir-Dit—and is shown to be a highly competent poet. Thus the ‘I’ is present as a poorly seeing but perfectly comprehending ‘eye’, frequently hidden from the ‘Other’ who appears as a centrally active protagonist, with a sound ‘eye’ which sees nothing.

Yet here, more than ever, the inter-dependence of the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ is manifest. The activities usually associated with the ‘chevalier’ and his ‘dame’ are vital to the ‘I’ as poetic subject matter; the literary and interpretative abilities of the ‘I’ are vital to the ‘Other’, to clarify his present feelings and indicate his future course of action. It is as though a marriage were to be effected between the theory and practice of ‘courtly love’. Thus the Duc de Berry shows his dependence on and appreciation of the help of the narrator in the Fonteinne amoureuse:

Pour ç'amis, je vous vueil prier
Que tant vueilliez estudier
Que de m'amour et de ma plainte
Me faciés ou lay ou complainte.
Car je say bien que la pratique
Savez toute, et la theorique
D'amour loial et de ses tours.

(Fonteinne amoureuse, 1501-07)

This ‘marriage’, moreover, manifests itself in terms of a quasi fusion, in physical terms, between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’. In the Fonteinne amoureuse, the noble lover and the professional writer become, briefly, one flesh by joining hands. The significance of this fusion may be recognised from the fact of the narrator's referring to it three times in quick succession:

Et tout en l'eure vers moy vint
Et par la main destre me prist.

(Ibid., 1218-19);

Einsi main a main en alames.

(Ibid., 1291);

Si me mena par la main nue.

(Ibid., 1299)

In the Voir-Dit, the union of the ‘I’ who writes well and the ‘Other’ who loves well is still more complete, being cemented not only by joining of hands and kisses, but also by sexual intercourse.

This marriage of theory and practice in turn produces offspring—the shared dream in the Fonteinne amoureuse, the book itself in the Voir-Dit. In sharing a dream with the narrator, the lover of the Fonteinne amoureuse shares obliquely in the formation of the text as a whole. In the Voir-Dit such cooperation is made more explicit. Thus, for example, in “Letter 33,” the narrator stresses both Toute-Belle's part in creating the text and the book's quality as concrete product:

Et se il y aucune chose à corrigier, que vous y faites enseignes. Car il vous a pleu que je y mette tout nostre fait, si ne scay se je y met ou trop ou po: et sachiez vostre rondel s'il vous plaist; car je l'aime trop. Quant vous arez vostre livre, si le gardez chierement, car je n'en ay nulle copie et je seroie courrecié s'il estoit perdu et se il n'estoit ou livre ou je met toutes mes choses.

(Voir-Dit, Letter, 33, p. 259)

The link between theory and practice is still further stressed by the gradual diminution of the lapse between the time of action recorded and the time of writing.⁴¹ In the extract quoted above, they have all but caught up with each other.

In the Fonteinne amoureuse and the Voir-Dit, particularly, the distinction between ‘je’, ‘nous’, ‘vous’ and ‘il’ (or ‘elle’), becomes fluid, voices appearing to be interchangeable. Thus in the former work, the ‘il/chevalier’ overheard by the narrator, first becomes a lyric ‘je’ in his own Complainte, then the ‘vous’ who communicates and joins hands with the narrator, and finally part of the ‘nous’ who dream by the enchanted fountain. In the Voir-Dit, the narrator not only alternates between ‘je’ and ‘vous’ according to whether he or Toute-Belle is speaking, but also, on occasion as will be seen in the following section, refers to himself as ‘il’. Toute-Belle, for her part, whilst alternating in the same way between ‘je’ and ‘vous’, also refers to herself in the 3rd person, and is so designated by the narrator in the main body of the narrative. It may be noted, in passing, that the many misunderstandings between the lovers, especially those—the greater number—which occur when they are apart, stress the vastly differing conceptions of Toute-Belle's thoughts and actions which distinguish her use of ‘elle’ from her lover's use of the term. The easy interplay of voices displayed in Machaut's work prompts Jacqueline Cerquiglini to coin the axiom: ‘L'autre est au coeur du je’.⁴² Such would undoubtedly seem to be the case. However, as has been seen in the foregoing examples, at the very centre of the relationship between the ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ is the text.

THE USES OF UNCERTAINTY

As has already been seen, Machaut's ‘I’ is frequently defined in negative terms—by the absorption of the thinking activity of the 1st person in the absence of the 2nd, the possession of physical deformities or the membership of an inferior social class. Further, its perceptions, though accurate, are frequently mediated through apparent obscurity—poor sight, a hedge or a wall. It would seem then, that the poet is as much concerned with that which cannot be defined in the ‘I’, as with that which can, with concealment as with revelation, with the unresolvable as with that which can be ascertained. This cult of ambiguity may be observed at a grammatical level, through the transposition of the 1st person voice to the 3rd. This transposition is usually effected through the use of the demonstrative pronouns ‘cil’ (‘cils’) and ‘celle’, and instances are common throughout Machaut's works.⁴³ The use of ‘cils’/‘celle’ has two functions, the first of which is to link the example of the ‘I’ to that of a common experience, thus simultaneously merging the 1st person voice with the collective voice of all those who are or have been in similar circumstances, and clarifying and strengthening the position of the ‘I’ by association with the greater authority of this collective voice:

Et vraiement de tres humble corage
Penray la mort qu'Amours me vuet donner,
Com cils qui siens liges en heritage
Sui et seray, tant com pourray durer,
Et ay esté longuement. […]
Et s'Amours ha de coustume et d'usage
Qu'elle face morir pour li amer
Ceuls qui sont sien et en son dous servage
Et qui vers li ne saroient fausser,
Ce poise mi vraiement;
Car je sui cils qui sui siens ligement.

(Louange des Dames, 144, 9-13 and 17-22)

Here the ‘I’ three times associates himself with those devoted lovers who stand in a quasi-feudal relationship towards their lady. This universal function of the 3rd person voice as applied to the 1st is employed with much greater frequency in the works of Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan and Alain Chartier. With Machaut, however, the use of the 3rd person voice by the ‘I’ generally serves to make it more remote, both from other personae and from any fixed definition of itself. This is particularly true of the ‘Dame’ in the Voir-Dit. In addition to the celebrated opening of her first rondeau—‘Celle qui onques ne vous vit’—in the third poem which she sends to her lover, she casts herself almost entirely in the 3rd person:

Celle qui nuit et jour desire
De vous véoir
Suis, pour oster vostre cuer d'ire:
N'à nulle autre riens tant ne tire
Ne n'a voloir,
Celle qui nuit et jour desire
De vous véoir,
Com de véoir vostre martyre:
Qu'à son pooir,
Elle fera du garir mire.

(Voir-Dit, 625-35, p. 29)

The effectiveness of this strategy is strengthened by the circumstance of Toute-Belle's never having seen her lover and of her being still physically remote from him. The Voir-dit, indeed, offers the greatest flexibility for the interchange of voices, yet this flexibility is not equally shared between the lovers. Whereas, in the inserted lyrics, Toute-Belle twice refers to herself in the 3rd person, the narrator refers to himself only in the 1st person. Moreover, the narrator as sole author of the main narrative not only refers there to the ‘Dame’ in the 3rd person, but does so also four times in the inserted lyrics.⁴⁴ Toute-Belle only once refers to the narrator in the 3rd person, and under thematic circumstances which fully justify her doing so:

Cent mille fois esbahie,
Plus dolente et courrecie
Suis que nulle voirement,
Quant de cellui proprement
Je suis de tous poins guerpie
Qui et sa dame et s'amie
Me clamoit si doucement.

(Ibid., 8495-8501, p. 343)

Here Toute-Belle is obliged to refer to her lover in the 3rd person, believing that his wrongful accusations of her have made direct communication between them impossible.

Machaut was the first poet to employ extensively, in poetry in the courtly register, 1st person personae from the opposite sex. It is possible—though in the absence of more substantial evidence one cannot make the point with any certainty—that his more extensive cultivation of this particular form of remoteness and uncertainty in the female persona, is itself an indication of the poet's own uncertainty as to what should constitute the emerging female voice in courtly poetic diction.⁴⁵

In addition to what appears to be deliberate self-obfuscation on the part of ‘Je’, concealing itself behind ‘il’ or ‘elle’, there is to be seen in Machaut's ‘I’ an inherent and purportedly involuntary uncertainty, both of action and of identity. This is observable at a grammatical level in the predominance, throughout Machaut's works, of structures denoting uncompleted or unfulfilled action—subjunctives, conditional clauses and hypothetical use of the future tense or of infinitives—all traits which appear in “Ballades 103” and “24,” quoted at the beginning of the chapter. Another striking example of the use of such structures is provided by the following ballade from the Louange des Dames:

Bien me devroit d'aucuns dous mos refaire
Ma tres douce dame, s'il li plaisoit.
Mais je n'en puis ne gieu ne ris attraire,
Einsois me fait pis qu'elle ne soloit;
Et se m'en m'est que mes cuers se recroit
De bien amer; mais se Diex me doint joie,
Cent fois pour li miex morir ameroie.
Car je me vueil en son service faire
Si maintenir que, quel part qu'elle soit,
Servir, amer et doubter sans meffaire
La vueil adès; et se mes cuers pooit
Le mieudre avoir quanque cuers penseroit
Des biens d'amours, ja nul n'en retenroie:
Cent fois pour li miex morir ameroie.
Einsi me fait son gracieus viaire
Vivre en morant, car nuls homs ne croiroit
La tres dure dolour qu'il me fait traire.
Mais nonpourquant, se mes cuers morir doit
Pour li amer, il me plaist bien; s'a droit,
Ne je à nul fuer ne m'en descorderoie:
Cent fois pour li miex morir ameroie.

(Louange des Dames, 22)⁴⁶

The ‘I’ is seen here as though in suspension, in the midst of an inconclusive action of uncertain beginning and still more uncertain ending.

At a thematic level, the uncertain standing of the ‘I’ frequently manifests itself in indecision, and hesitancy. Thus the narrator of the Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, though he is anxious to make the acquaintance of the knight and the lady, hesitates nervously before going to them:

Si ne savoie
De deus choses la quelle je feroie,
D'aler vers eaus, ou si je m'en tenroie.

(Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, 1188-90)

In similar circumstances, the narrator of the Dit dou vergier is diffident of approaching Cupid and his entourage:

J'en os en moy moult grant frëour
Pour le feu, doubtance et paour,
Qu'adès vraiement me sembloit
Que vers moy lancier le voloit.
Pour ce ne savoie que faire,
D'aller avant ou d'arrier traire.

(Dit dou vergier, 195-200)

Cowardice on the part of the narrator, as seen here, is likewise a common manifestation of uncertainty. Thus, for example, the narrator of the Dit dou lyon is terrified by the appearance of the lion, and obliged to look to a power beyond himself—Amours, and, by implication, his lady—for assistance:

Car je cuiday que devourer
Me deüst. Pour ce ne savoie
Comment de moy faire devoie,
Car je n'eus coustel ne espée,
Huche, guisarne, ne riens née
Dont je me peüsse deffendre;
Et li lions, sans plus attendre,
S'en est par devers moy venus
Legierement, les saus menus.

(Dit dou lyon, 292-300)

The narrator of the Fonteinne amoureuse fears initially that what he hears in the room adjoining his is a ghost, is alarmed, and observes: ‘[…] je suis plus couars qu'uns lievres’, (l. 92) The narrator of the Voir-Dit, for his part, is afraid of almost everything—physical contact with his ‘dame’, bad weather, journeys, plague, brigands, mesdisants, and so on.

Still more than by cowardice, however, the narrator of the Voir-Dit is marked by diffidence and lack of self-assurance—an elaborately orchestrated variation on the standard modesty topos of the medieval poet. Thus the narrator expresses his anxiety at being found unworthy to be loved by his lady:

Si vous plaise à savoir que j'ay une trop grief pensée, et une trop mortelle paour: car vous me faites vivre en paix et en joie, loing de vous; et se je estoie en vostre presence, je pourroie bien querir ce que je ne vorroie mie avoir. Et vez-ci la cause: je suis petis, rudes et nices …

(Voir-Dit, letter 2, p. 19)

The conduct of the narrator throughout the Voir-Dit, as has been seen, bears witness to this self-doubt. He is altogether more at home in writing poetry than in himself living through its conventional subject matter.

Yet this pose of diffidence and incompetence is highly disingenuous, subverted at every turn by the implied poet, whose manifestly sophisticated structuring of the text betrays a high level of poetic competence. Thus Machaut's ‘I’, in addition to its apparent cowardice and self-doubt, is presented as an early type of the ‘unreliable narrator’.

The cult of uncertainty and obscurity seems thus to have appealed to Machaut, on a number of levels, as a viable foundation for his poetic ‘I’. Whatever its dependence upon other personae, the ‘I’ remains tentative and remote, forever withdrawing itself from direct confrontation. It continually retreats behind self-imposed barriers, be they physical or linguistic—hedges, hypotheses, letters, and, in the case of the ‘I’ of the poet, behind the distorted image of himself which appears at the surface of the text.

More than any other poet of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Machaut seems to hold himself in reserve from his audience. Poirion has noted in this regard that he is less effusive than many of his contemporaries in his praise and recognition of patrons.⁴⁷ Indeed, the hall-mark of Machaut's poetic ‘I’ is a form of elaborate discretion, comprising both the physical and moral facets of this quality and, at times, being inextricably linked with its inverse. Machaut's ‘I’, whilst recognising the extent of its dependence upon the ‘Other’, defines itself in distinct terms, and frequently remains physically absent from the ‘Other’. Moreover, the ‘I’ of the poet remains morally discreet, and, as has been seen in Chapter One, physically discrete from his creation. Thus, for example, in the Voir-Dit, apparently the most ‘indiscreet’ of Machaut's works, while the elderly, besotted narrator piles revelation upon injudicious and damaging revelation, the structuring consciousness of the implied poet works behind and through him to create a text the essence of which is far from being confessional or self-revelatory.

Above all, however, Machaut's poetic ‘I’ is highly literary. Any poetic persona is by definition a textual phenomenon, yet Machaut, more than any other poet of the later Middle Ages, strove to emphasize the artificiality of his ‘I’. For whatever reason, whether because of physical distance or physical inadequacy, whether to promote rapprochement or to perpetuate separation, the text is forever obtruding itself between the ‘I’ and the outside world.

CONCLUSION

Certes, c'est un sujet merveilleusement vain, divers et ondoyant, que l'homme. Il est malaisé d'y fonder jugement constant et uniforme.

(Montaigne, Essais, 1, 1.)

The ultimately impenetrable character of human nature and the uncertainties of human existence are alike axiomatic. All the poets with whom this study has been concerned foreground both the uncertainty attaching to the character or fate of a given individual, and that which hinders the accurate perception and description of such individuality. Although the binary oppositions—evoked in the introduction and elucidated with regard to the ‘I’ of individual poets in subsequent chapters—may serve as landmarks for the elaboration of both internal and external personae, between these landmarks lie largely uncharted waters, difficult of navigation. Moreover—to restore the metaphor to its traditional classico-medieval application—it is upon these waters that Fortune directs, with a supreme inconstancy acknowledged diversely by all the poets discussed here, the course of the vessel of human life.

Both in the form and in the thematic substance of the work of each poet the precise motives and results of the uncertain status of the ‘I’ are differently reflected. The destabilising element to receive most prominent treatment is that of the novel and precarious stance of the professional poet. Yet, paradoxically, it is precisely this profession which provides the most effective antidote to the vacillating nature of the ‘I’, allowing for its concretisation within the highly formal bounds of the fixed form lyric or the dit.

Thus, for example, the narrator-figure of the Voir-Dit, striving to render a truthful account of his and his lady's feelings and actions, most nearly achieves his end through the discrete, formalised medium of the intercalated lyric. Thus, too, in a broader sense, the skilful, measured depiction of the diffident, imperfectly discreet, unreliable narrator serves to enhance the literary achievement of Machaut, the implied poet.

For Froissart's ‘I’, the vision of the ideal past—clear in his memory but elusive in his present experience—may only be recaptured through a written record, the production of which ultimately becomes a source of gratification outweighing that afforded by the reminiscences which inspired it.

In the case of Deschamps, the ‘I’, however disorientated and fragmented by the imposition upon him of the judgements of others with regard to his character, is nevertheless self-conscious and self-assertive in claiming the right to censure the conduct of others through his writing.

In the work of Christine de Pizan, the uncertain status of the internal ‘I’ is primarily a product of her sex and of the attacks made upon her originator by those for whom her womanhood was an insuperable obstacle to serious literary endeavour. Christine's response to this dilemma, over and above the celebrated thematic transposition of her female ‘I’ into a man, is the elaboration of an accompanying discourse whose authoritative tenor and manifest erudition are its own justification.

The neutrality of Chartier's ‘I’ with regard to every circumstance by which it is confronted makes it difficult to pinpoint any fixed trait as inherently pertaining to it. Thus it is the written accounts of the debates overheard and transcribed by the ‘I’ which, through their comprehensive synthesis of diverse perspectives, alone contain the sum of its identity.

For the ‘I’ of Charles d'Orléans, finally, the vicissitudes of the captive are partly assuaged by the agreeable ‘pastime’ of writing verse, while the perpetual tension between ‘je’,’Cuer’ and its fellows is only resolved by the intervention of a ‘trucheman’, the embodiment of the autonomous text.

As was suggested at the end of Chapter One, the emergence of the text as an independent, dynamic entity was of the utmost importance to the development of the poetic ‘I’ in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The text, valued in its tangible form as a thing of beauty or a monument to personal achievement, also represented an ally, a confidant—‘le livre ou je met toutes mes choses’, a guide and an arbiter. It was at once the ideal forum for the definition of the ‘I’ and, at the same time by virtue of its self-advertised ‘literary’ and exemplary qualities, a guarantee of the inviolable consciousness of the ‘I’'s originator.

The poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did not aim at self-expression or autobiography in the modern sense. Even poets such as Christine de Pizan and Charles d'Orléans, whose unique and historically well-documented careers find considerable vent in their works, clothe all self-reference in the universal garb of allegory and conventional discourse. The poetic ‘I’ of the period was, first and foremost, the voice of the professional writer, its function being to celebrate the artistic form and artistic consciousness which gave rise to it, rather than the personal character and achievements of the man or woman with whose name it might be associated. The overt celebration of the private individual would be inaugurated in the following century by Montaigne, whose innovatory assertion ‘je suis moi-même le sujet de mon livre’, reverses the ascendancy of the book, restoring the first person to first place.

Notes

1. Cf. G. Lote, ‘Quelques remarques sur L'Art de Dictier d'Eustache Deschamps’, in Mélanges de philologie romane et de littérature médiévale offerts à Ernest Hoepffner, (Paris, 1949), 361-67; R. Dragonetti, ‘L'Art de Dictier d'Eustache Deschamps’, in Fin de Moyen Age et Renaissance, mélanges de philologie française offerts à Robert Guiette, (Anvers, 1961), 49-64; K. Varty, ‘Deschamps’ Art de Dictier', French Studies, 19 (1966), 164-66; R. Magnan, ‘Eustache Deschamps and his Double: Musique naturele and musique artificiele’, in Ars Lyrica, journal of ‘Lyrica’—Society for Word-Music Relations, 7 (1993), pp. 47-64.

2. Cf. K. Brownlee, Poetic Identity, pp. 3-23; S. Lukitsch, ‘The Poetics of the Proly: Machaut's Conception of the Purpose of His Art’, Medium Aevum, 52 (1983), 258-71; R. Barton Palmer, ‘The Metafictional Machaut: Self-Reflexivity and Self-Mediation in the Two Judgement Poems’, in Studies in the Literary Imagination, 20 (1987) 23-39.

3. The two extremes of the argument as to the historic truthfulness of the Voir-Dit were first articulated by W. Eichelberg in Dichtung und Wahrheit in Machauts ‘Voir-Dit’, (Frankfurt, 1935), who argues that the work is historically true, and G. Hanf, ‘Über Guillaume de Machauts Voir-Dit’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, 22 (1898), 145-96, who aims to demonstrate that it is purely fictional.

4. J. Beer, Narrative Conventions of Truth in the Middle Ages, (Geneva, 1984), pp. 73-84.

5. Cf. L. de Looze, ‘Guillaume de Machaut and the Writerly Process’, French Forum, 9 (1984), 145-61; S. J. Williams, ‘An Author's Role in Fourteenth-Century Book Production: Guillaume de Machaut's “Livre ou je met toutes mes choses”’, Romania, 98 (1977), 433-54.

6. Cf. M. P. Cosman and B. Chandler eds., Machaut's World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century, (New York, 1976), pp. 235-42; W. Kibler, ‘Self-Delusion in Froissart's Espinette amoureuse’, Romania, 97 (1976), 77-98; ‘Poet and Patron: Froissart's Prison amoureuse’, L'Esprit Créateur, 14 (1978), 32-46; P.-Y. Badel, ‘Par un tout seul escondire: Sur un virelai du Buisson de Jeunesse’, in Romania 107 (1986), 369-79; P. E. Bennett, ‘The Mirage of Fiction: Narration, Narrator, and Narratee in Froissart's Lyrico-Narrative Dits’, Modern Language Review 86,2 (1991), 285-97; N. Chareyron, ‘Froissart le revenant’, Perspectives Médiévales, 15 (1989), 66-73; S. Huot, ‘The Daisy and the Laurel; Myths of Desire and Creativity in the Poetry of Jean Froissart’, in D. Poirion and N. F. Regalado (eds.), Contexts: Style and Values in Medieval Art and Literature, (New Haven, 1991), 240-51; C. Nouvet, ‘Pour une économie de la délimitation: la Prison amoureuse de J. Froissart’, Neophilologus, 78 (1986), 341-56.

7. Peter F. Ainsworth, Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth, and Fiction in the’Chroniques’, (Oxford, 1990). Cf. id., ‘Knife, Key, Bear and Book: Poisoned Metonymies and the Problem of translatio in Froissart's later ‘Chroniques’, in Medium Aevum, 59 (1990), 91-113.

8. Cf. J. Cerquiglini, ‘L'étrangère’, Revue des Langues Romanes, 92 (1988), 239-51; S. Huot, ‘Seduction and Sublimation: Christine de Pizan, Jean de Meun and Dante’, Romance Notes, 25 (1985), 361-73; K. Brownlee, ‘Discourses of the Self: Christine de Pizan and the Rose’, Romantic Review, 78 (1988), 199-221; id., ‘Martyrdom and The Female Voice: Saint Christine in the Cité des Dames’, in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, eds. R. Blumenfeld Kosinski, T. Szell and B. Cazelles, (Ithaca, 1990), 115-35.

9. The following critics are among those holding such an opinion of Christine de Pizan's works: C. C. Willard, ‘Lovers’ Dialogues in Christine de Pizan's Lyric Poetry from the Cent ballades to the Cent ballades d'amant et de dame, Fifteenth-Century Studies, 4 (1981), 167-80; K. Varty ed., Christine de Pizan's Ballades, Rondeaux and Virelais: An Anthology, (Leicester, 1965), p. xxvii; J. G. Schilperort, Guillaume de Machaut et Christine de Pisan: étude comparative, (The Hague, 1936), p. 15; P. Le Gentil, ‘Christine de Pizan, poète méconnu’, Mélanges d'histoire littéraire offerts à Daniel Mornet, (Paris, 1951), 1-10, esp. p. 5; P. M. Price, ‘Masculine and Feminine Personae in the Love Poetry of Christine de Pizan’, Women and Literature, n. s. 1 (1980), 37-53, esp. p. 38; F. Lecoy, ‘Notes sur quelques ballades de Christine de Pisan’, in Fin du Moyen Age et Renaissance, mélanges de philologie française offerts à Robert Guiette, (Anvers, 1961), 107-14; M.-D. Taberlet-Shock, ‘La souffrance et la joie dans les Cent ballades et Rondeaux de Christine de Pizan: tradition littéraire et expérience personnelle’, (unpublished Ph. D. thesis, Rice University, 1981), pp. 235-237. Among the first to counter this view was Daniel Poirion, in Poète, pp. 250-1.

10. William Kibler in ‘Self-Delusion …’ draws certain parallels between the Espinette amoureuse and the Belle Dame. Cf. id., ‘The Narrator as Key to Alain Chartier's Belle Dame Sans Mercy’, French Review, 52 (1979), 714-23.

11. Poirion, Poète, pp. 271-309. Cf. also: P. Zumthor, ‘Charles d'Orléans et le langage de l'allégorie’, in Langue, texte, énigme, (Paris, 1975), pp. 179-213; J. Starobinski, ‘L'encre de la mélancolie’, Nouvelle revue française, 123 (1963), 410-23; A. Planche, Charles d'Orléans ou la recherche d'un langage, (Paris, 1975); N. Goodrich, Charles d'Orléans: A Study of Themes in his French and English Poetry, (Geneva, 1967), pp. 34-43 and 45-55; G. Defaux, ‘Charles d'Orléans ou la poétique du secret’, Romania, 92 (1972), 194-243.

12. Cf. R. C. Cholakian, Reflection/Deflection in the Lyric Poetry of Charles d'Orléans, (Potomac, 1984), esp pp. 12 ff.; also Poirion, Poète, pp. 281-2; Planche, Recherche d'un langage, pp. 766 ff.

13. The first full-length study relative to this aspect of Machaut scholarship was William Calin's A Poet at the Fountain: Essays on the Narrative Verse of Guillaume de Machaut, (Lexington, 1974). Cf. also: J. Cerquiglini, Guillaume de Machaut et l'écriture: l'énigme du Voir-Dit, 3 vols., (thèse de doctorat d'état de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1981).

14. Calin, A Poet at the Fountain, p. 48.

15. Poirion, Le poète et le prince, p. 205.

16. A. Wallensköld ed., Les chansons de Conon de Béthune, (Paris, C.F.M.A., 1968), Chanson 7; A. Wallensköld ed., Les chansons de Thibaut de Champagne, (Paris, S.A.T.F., 1925), Chansons 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 19, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 34, 47; G. Huet ed., Les chansons de Gace Brulé, (Paris, S.A.T.F., 1902), Chansons 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 23, 24, 31, 32.

17. Cf. Zumthor, Langue, texte, énigme, p. 168; Uitti, Story, Myth and Celebration in Old French Narrative Poetry, 1050-1120, (Princeton, 1973, p. 103.

18. Cf. Ballades 57, 64, 101, 104, 108, 144, 155, 189.

19. Cf. Ballades 11, 66, 94, 111, 151, 153, 157, 204, 205, 209, Rondeaux 217, 234.

20. Cf. Ballades 39, 118, 148.

21. Cf. Ballades 12, 20, 31, 43, 154, 206.

22. Cf. Conon de Béthune, Chanson 11; Thibaut de Champagne, Chansons 10, 11, 16; Jehan de Lescurel, Ballades 12, 13, 19 in Chansons, ballades et rondeaux de Jehannot de Lescurel, ed. A. de Montaiglon, (Paris, 1855).

23. Cf. Ballades 105, 194.

24. Cf. Ballades 83, 100, 135, 158, 192, 198.

25. Cf. Ballades 68, 145, 156, 167, Rondeaux 224, 236, 264.

26. Cf. Ballades 21, 27, 28, 31, 40, 48, 76, 82, 87, 129, 133, 136, 141, 143, 160, 164, 177, 178, 181, 198, 199, 206, Chanson royale 5, Rondeau 274.

27. Cf. Ballade 27.

28. Cf. Ballades 129, 164, Rondeau 228.

29. Cf. Ballades 129, 155, 172, 185.

30. Jugement dou roy de Behaingne, ll. 54-55.

31. Fonteinne amoureuse, ll. 224-28.

32. Voir-Dit, Letter 15, p. 122; Letter 16, p. 131.

33. Cf. Ibid., Letter 10, p. 69, Letter 35, p. 265.

34. Calin, Poet at the Fountain, pp. 182 and 197.

35. Voir-Dit, Letter 3, p. 27, Letter 8, p. 58.

36. Cf. Louange des Dames 9, 11, 12, 20, 24, 26, 27, 100, 180, 190, Chansons 2, 4, 5; Lais 9, 10, 11, 13; Motets 7, 16; Ballade 20; Chansons balladées, 24, 37, 38; Sotte chanson 4.

37. Chichmaref, who follows the order of the Louange as it appears in the C. MS, (MS Paris, B.N., f. fr. 1586), in which these poems appear consecutively as 130 and 131, 136 and 137. Cf. also the paired rondeaux in the Voir-Dit, ll. 2607-22, p. 108.

38. Cf. Louange des Dames, 9, 11, 180,

39. Cerquiglini, ‘Un engin si soutil’, pp. 145 ff.

40. Ibid., p. 114.

41. Cf. Brownlee, Poetic Identity, p. 95.

42. Cerquiglini, ‘Un engin si soutil’, p. 103.

43. Cf. Louange des Dames, 39, 59, 65, 103, 132, 144, 160, 165, 189.

44. Cf. Voir-Dit, pp. 51, 204, 275, 336.

45. It has been noted that the trobairitz themselves had so far failed to evolve a poetic voice which might readily be perceived as distinct from that of their male counterparts. Cf. the discussion by Sarah Kay, (in Subjectivity and the Troubadour Poetry, pp. 101-11), where it is argued that the textual politics of the male-orientated gender system of Troubadour poetry rendered the development of a specifically female discourse virtually impossible.

46. Cf. Louange des Dames, 151 and 208.

47. Poirion, Poète, pp. 115-16.

Bibliography

References to the works of the principal poets discussed in this book are to the following editions. I have followed the practice of individual editors with regard to punctuation, spelling and use of capitals.

Works of Guillaume de Machaut

Chichmaref, V. (ed.), Guillaume de Machaut: poésies lyriques, 2 vols. (Paris, 1909; reprinted: 1 vol., Geneva, 1973).

Wilkins, N. (ed.), La Louange des Dames by Guillaume de Machaut, (Edinburgh, 1972).

Hoepffner, E. (ed.), Oeuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, 3 vols., (Paris, S.A.T.F., 1908-21).

Paris, P. (ed.), Le Livre du Voir-Dit de Guillaume de Machaut, (Paris, 1875).

Wimsatt, J. I. and Kibler, W. W. (eds.), (Athens, 1988)

Cerquiglini-Toulet, J., (ed.), Guillaume de Machaut: La Fontaine Amoureuse, (Paris, 1993).

Primary Sources

Arnaut Daniel. Canzoni, ed. G. Toja, (Florence, 1960).

Bernard de Ventadour. Bernard de Ventadour troubadour du XIIe siècle: Chansons d'Amour, ed. M. Lazar, (Paris, 1966).

Boethius. Consolatio Philosophiae, eds. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand, (New York, Loeb Classical Library, 1926).

Brunetto Latini. Le livre dou Tresor, ed. F. J. Carmody, (Berkeley, 1948).

La Chanson de Roland, ed. F. Whitehead, (Oxford, 1978).

Colin Muset. Les chansons de Colin Muset, ed. J. Bédier, (Paris, C.F.M.A., 1938).

Les Congés d'Arras, ed. P. Ruelle, (Paris, 1965).

Conon de Béthune. Les chansons de Conon de Béthune, ed. A. Wallensköld, (Paris, C.F.M.A., 1968).

Dante Aligheri. Il Convivio, eds. G. Busnelli and G. Vandelli, (Florence, 1964).

Francesco Petrarca. De remediis utriusque fortunae, (ed. Basle, 1554).

———. Prose. ed. G. Martellotti et al., (Milan-Naples, 1955).

———. Le familiari, ed. V. Rossi, 4 vols., (Florence, 1933-1942).

———. Rime, Trionfi e poesie latine, (ed.) F. Neri et al., (Milan-Naples, 1951).

François Villon. Le lais Villon et les poèmes variés, ed. J. Rychner and A. Henri, 2 vols., (Geneva, 1977).

Gace Brulé. Les chansons de Gace Brulé, ed. G. Huet, (Paris, S.A.T.F., 1902).

Hélinant de Froidmont. Les Vers de la Mort, eds. F. Wulff and E. Walberg, (Paris, S.A.T.F., 1905).

Jean de Lescurel. Chansons, ballades et rondeaux de Jehannot de Lescurel, ed. A. de Montaiglon, (Paris, 1855).

Jean Meschinot. Les Lunettes des Princes, ed. C. Martineau-Génieys, (Geneva, 1972).

Jean Le Sénéschal. Les cent ballades, (poème du XIVe siècle composé par Jean le Sénéschal, avec la collaboration de Philippe d'Artois, compte d'Eu, de Boucicaut le jeune et de Jean de Crésecque, ed. G. Raynaud, (Paris, S.A.T.F., 1905)

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L'Ovide moralisé, 5 vols., ed. C. de Boer, (Amsterdam, 1915-38).

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Les Confessions, (Geneva, 1782).

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Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Adventures of Tristram Shandy, ed. G. Petrie, (Harmondsworth, 1967).

Thibaut de Champagne. Les chansons de Thibaut de Champagne, ed. A. Wallensköld, (Paris, S.A.T.F., 1925).

Secondary Sources

Ainsworth, P. F. Jean Froissart and the Fabric of History: Truth, Myth and Fiction in the ‘Chroniques’, (Oxford, 1990).

———. ‘Knife, Key, Bear and Book: Poisoned Metonymies and the Problem of translatio in Froissart's Later Chroniques’, in Medium Aevum, 59 (1990), 91-113.

Badel, P.-Y. ‘Par un tout selu escondire: sur un vierelai du Buissson de Jeunesse’, in Romania 107 (1986), 369-79.

Beer, J. Narrative Conventions of Truth in the Middle Ages, (Geneva, 1984).

Bennett, P. E. ‘The Mirage of Fiction: Narration, Narrator and Narratee in Froissart's Lyrico-Narrative Dits’, in Modern Language Review, 86 (1991), 285-97.

Brownlee, K. Poetic Identity in Guillaume de Machaut, (Madison, 1984).

———. ‘Transformations of the Lyric je: The Example of Guillaume de Machaut’, L'Esprit Créateur, 18 (1978), 5-18.

———. ‘Discourses of the Self: Christine de Pizan and the Rose’, Romanic Review, 79 (1988), 199-221.

———. ‘Martyrdom and the Female Voice: Saint Christine in the Cité des Dames’, in Images of Sainthood in Medieval France, eds. R. Blumenfeld Kosinski, T. Szell and B. Cazelles, (Ithaca, 1990), 115-35.

Calin, W. A Poet at the Fountain: Essays on the Narrative Verse of Guillaume de Machaut, (Lexington, 1974).

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