SOURCE: Calin, William. “Le Livre du Voir-Dit.” In A Poet at the Fountain: Essays on the Narrative Verse of Guillaume de Machaut, pp. 167-202. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974.

[In the following essay, Calin discusses Le Livre du Voir-Dit, Machaut's principal work, concluding that the ultimate reality implied by the poet's text is the reality of artistic creation itself.]

Toute-belle sends a rondeau to the Narrator, in which she says that she offers him her heart. The Narrator replies in kind. Soon the aging poet and his youthful admirer are involved in an amorous correspondence. He visits her several times, and they indulge in physical intimacies. After the Narrator returns home, he dreams that Toute-belle's sentiments toward him have changed. The lovers continue to write to each other. However, a harsh winter, the plague, fear of highwaymen, and losengiers' reports against Toute-belle cause the Narrator to postpone further meetings. Finally Toute-belle convinces him of her good will, and the book ends as they swear eternal love and plan once more a reunion.

Le Livre du Voir-Dit¹ has received more attention than any of Guillaume de Machaut's other tales. It is perhaps the only one which has caught scholars' fancy. However, most studies devoted to VD [Voir-Dit] are concerned largely with whether or not the poem is “real,” that is, recounts an autobiographical episode in the poet's life.

In the title of VD (The True Story), Machaut makes an unusual claim for authenticity; he invites comparison with other romances of the day and with his own previous dits, presumed less “true” than the new one. Machaut justifies his choice of title, which may have appeared pretentious, in the following words:

Le Voir-dit vueil-je qu'on appelle
Ce traictié que je fais pour elle,
Pour ce que jà n'i mentiray.

[p. 17]

(Cf. also “Letter XXXV,” p. 263: “Et aussi, vostre livre avera nom le Livre dou Voir dit; si, ne vueil ne ne doy mentir.”) He declares that the VD narrative occurred in real life, that he has told of his amours with Toute-belle at her command. She wants everyone to know their story, even if her reputation suffers because of it.

Machaut's first modern editor, Prosper Tarbé, accepted the Comte de Caylus's suggestion that Toute-belle stands for Agnès d'Evreux, sister to King Charles II of Navarre (who played so important a role in JRN [Le Jugement dou Roy de Navarre] and CA [Le Confort d'Ami]) and wife of Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix.² Tarbé, like Caylus, assumed Agnès wrote the poems ascribed to Toute-belle in VD, as well as other lyrics in the Machaut canon where the speaker is feminine, and attributed them to her in a separate edition.³ In 1875 Paulin Paris demonstrated that Agnès de Navarre cannot have been the prototype for Toute-belle, characterized in the story as an unmarried young girl, by proving that Machaut wrote VD in the early 1360's, a good fifteen years after Agnès had wed Count Gaston Phoebus. Instead, he identified Toute-belle with Peronne or Peronnelle d'Unchair, Dame of Armentières, a wealthy heiress, whose stepfather was Jean de Conflans, Vidame of Châlons and Lord of Vielmaisons in Brie (P. Paris, pp. i-ii, xviii-xxxi). However, Paris joined Caylus and Tarbé in proclaiming that VD is fundamentally autobiographical and that in this quality of truth resides one of the poem's chief merits: “On ne lira pas sans plaisir cette espèce de Journal amoureux du quatorzième siècle: il présente au moins un mérite assez rare dans les Journaux, celui d'être sincère et parfaitement véridique” (P. Paris, p. xxxi). Tarbé and Paris set the tone for subsequent scholars, some of whom proclaim that Machaut invented the roman vécu or mémoires intimes and that, a Romantic avant la lettre, he anticipates Rousseau, Goethe, Chateaubriand, and Stendhal.

In my opinion, the finest piece of scholarship devoted to VD is an 1898 doctoral thesis by Georg Hanf.⁴ Hanf's work, which has not received the recognition it deserves, sets out to prove that VD in its entirety is a work of the imagination—fiction, not reality. His arguments are sufficiently important to be summarized in some detail.

1. Machaut's narrative contains internal contradictions, plausible enough if VD is a work of fiction jotted down hastily by an author in his sixties but not if it is an autobiographical memoir transcribed only months after the events took place. For example, in “Letter XVII” (p. 134) the Narrator refers to Toute-belle's book, that is, VD itself, although supposedly he has not yet begun to write down their True Story. In a complainte Toute-belle shows she is aware that the Narrator compared her to Semiramis (p. 243), but, if we accept Machaut's text at face value, there is no way she could have discovered this fact.

2. The VD is full of gross chronological errors. In “Letter VI,” purportedly answering one of Toute-belle's epistles received in April 1363, the Narrator promises he will make an effort to visit her by Easter time. Yet in 1363 Easter Sunday had already fallen on the second day of that month. Letters “XXXIX,” “XL,” and “XLI” are all dated November 13 [1364]; however, a long time passes between the writing of “XXXIX” and “XL” alone. Then “Letter XLIII,” which answers “XLII” (June 16) immediately, is dated October 10, to be followed only fifteen days later by “Letter XLIV,” dated March 8.

3. Several times letters are alluded to which are not transcribed in the text. Rather than that Machaut should have lost them or forgot where they are situated in the narrative, Hanf believes that these allusions were invented for the occasion, for needs of the plot.

4. The Narrator's correspondence and Toute-belle's are indistinguishable. Their letters are constructed identically and written in the same style. They both contain motifs such as: I have received your letter; I am in good health; I am glad you are in good health; I will not forget you; I hope you will not forget me; I desire so much to see you. So too, the lyrics ascribed to Toute-belle employ identical rhyme, meter, imagery, and diction as the Narrator's. Her poems are of the same high quality as his. So extraordinary a talent as Toute-belle's, bursting forth at the age of twenty, making her the equal of the leading French poet of the age, would have been noticed by her contemporaries. But they say nothing of Agnès de Navarre, Peronne d'Armentières, or any other lady poet until Christine de Pisan. According to Hanf, the brilliant young poetess existed only in Guillaume de Machaut's imagination. A fictional character, she is not to be identified with Peronne d'Armentières or anyone else who actually lived in the fourteenth century.

Almost forty years after the publication of Hanf's thesis, Walther Eichelberg arrived at a totally different conclusion.⁵ He does not deny inconsistencies and contradictions within the narrative but proposes that they be ascribed to the failing memory of an old poet. Machaut would have had in his possession almost his entire correspondence with Peronne. In the process of arranging the letters chronologically and pinpointing the exact circumstances of their redaction, he presumably committed the errors observed by Hanf. Although Eichelberg agrees that much of VD is fiction, a residue of courtly convention, he maintains that the central plot line and all the poems and letters are authentic.

I readily grant Eichelberg's point that internal contradictions do not necessarily prove the narrative to be fictional. It is possible that Machaut first composed the letters, both the Narrator's and Toute-belle's, and later fitted them into a frame. His process of creation would then indeed have anticipated, mutatis mutandis, Rousseau's in La Nouvelle Héloïse. But, in my opinion, Hanf's most important argument stands unrefuted: the lyric poems and the letters, whether ascribed to the Narrator or to Toute-belle, must have been written by Machaut himself. Astonished at Toute-belle's facility as a poet, some scholars, including Eichelberg, suggest that the Narrator may have “touched up” her contributions prior to publication, noting that in the story Toute-belle asks him specifically to do it. However, no amount of correcting can account for the extraordinary genius she demonstrates. To any objective reader, her poems can only be the work of Machaut himself. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that two lyrics purportedly composed months apart (according to VD) in fact were written at the same time, and that lyrics VD claims to have been composed during the period of the Narrator's amours with Toute-belle were written long before 1362-1365.⁶

The letters and poems are central to the plot of VD, the skeleton on which the story itself hangs. In a sense, the story exists to set them off, to explain why they were composed. Once they are admitted to be fictional, not much is left to the domain of reality. It is quite possible that the prototype for Toute-belle was a certain Peronne; perhaps this Peronne can be identified with Machaut's young contemporary, Jean de Conflans's stepdaughter. But we will never know the exact relationship between this Peronne and the author of VD, whether or not they exchanged a poetic correspondence, whether or not they were in love. The “I,” whether he be the lover in Le Roman de la Rose, the pilgrim in the Divine Comedy, or Marcel in A la recherche du temps perdu, must never be assimilated in absolute terms to the historical Guillaume de Lorris, Dante, and Proust. The narrators in these three masterworks are the presumed or mock authors. They resemble to a greater or lesser extent their creators but also partake of convention and artifice, are literary characters, no less vital to the structure of their respective narratives than are Reason, Virgil, and Swann. At the very most, the details of Machaut's private life gave him inspiration. Just as Proust drew upon his experience to create A la recherche du temps perdu, so too Machaut's creative imagination has transformed autobiographical elements into a work of art, the world of his novel.

The majority of scholars have failed to distinguish between reality and realism. Although realism encourages the reader to believe in a narrative's authenticity, to bring about Coleridge's temporary suspension of disbelief, it is a literary technique, subject to the laws of literature and capable of depicting only literary reality. Tendencies toward a form of realism existed in the Old French period, even in highly idealized genres such as epic and romance. The later Middle Ages then produced an aesthetic combining the most outlandish stylization with concrete detail and an intimate, creaturlich representation of the domestic scene.⁷ Of course, realism is a relative term at best. We can only use it to reflect measurable contrasts within a work of art or between closely allied works. It must never be presumed aesthetically desirable in and of itself. But as long as authors seek to represent life as it really is (as distinguished from how it might be), to depict characters and events existing in the realm of the probable instead of the merely possible, or simply to obtain an aura of credibility in readers' eyes, the study of reality in art will never be entirely fruitless.

REALIA

Perhaps the most obvious trait of realism, especially in the modern novel, is the concrete representation of objects, décor, property—the external world of surfaces. In courtly romance and late epic, extended descriptions of dress, habitation, arms, food, and entertainment serve as ornament or to provide local color but rarely enter into the narrative fabric of the work in question. The same can be said for Machaut's own depiction of an ideal court in JRB [Le Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne], RF [Remede de Fortune], and FA [La Fonteinne amoureuse]. The pilgrimage to Saint-Denis in VD, however, has a different function. After having dined, Toute-belle wishes to sleep; a sergeant of arms, so drunk that tears flow from his eyes and he weaves back and forth on his feet, sends them to a peasant's house on the other side of town, where, sharing two beds, Toute-belle, her sister, her confidante, and the Narrator doze off. This episode evokes the reality of life at a fair and also treats an interior scene, the intimacy of the bed, in a manner foreign to the early Middle Ages.

SPACE AND TIME

The action of VD takes place neither in the mythical world of King Arthur nor in the idealized, allegorical dream-locus of Le Roman de la Rose. On the contrary, its locale is shown to be the France of Machaut's own time, known perfectly to him and his public. The Narrator lives in Reims, Toute-belle in Paris and the South; she travels to her lands in Brie; he visits her in Paris and Duke Charles in Normandy and Brie; they both travel to Saint-Denis.

By dating the letters and through other devices, Machaut pinpoints chronology. In spite of the occasional contradictions noted above, scholars have determined when the major events in the story took place.⁸ Toute-belle first contacts the Narrator in August or September 1362. He sets out to visit her on April 27, 1363. The lovers go to the Lendit Fair on June 12, and Toute-belle gives the Narrator the “key to her treasure” on June 20 of that same year. The story is not compressed into one highly charged day or day and a half, as in some of Machaut's early tales. It develops over a span of years; the characters also are transformed in time. We notice weather and the change of season: a rainy day when Toute-belle visits the Narrator in church or winter storms that prevent him from rejoining her. Anticipating one aspect of the novel, VD creates a sense of duration quite modern in tone.

CONTEMPORARY ALLUSIONS

These storms, characterized by wind, rain, snow, freezing cold, the uprooting of trees, and collapse of houses, correspond to unusually harsh winters in 1362-1363 and 1363-1364. Further obstacles separating the lovers are a resurgence of the Plague in the second half of 1363 and the presence of the “Grandes Compagnies,” bands of mercenary soldiers that roam the countryside and pillage at will. The leader of one of the most ferocious bands in Champagne, Arnaud de Cervoles, Archpriest of Vélines, is mentioned by name, and Toute-belle continually warns the Narrator of the risks he takes when visiting her. Aside from the Narrator himself (assimilated to the poet Guillaume de Machaut), other verifiable personages of the 1360s are alluded to in passing: Machaut's brother Jean; the Duke of Normandy; and the Duke of Bar. The Duke of Normandy, John of Bohemia's grandson and brother to John of Berry, is known to have had warm relations with the poet. Machaut praises him in La Prise d'Alexandrie and, according to reports, entertained him in his own home during one of Charles's visits to Reims (December 1361). In VD the Narrator is summoned to the Duke's court on several occasions and, in a dream-sequence, has a long conversation with a “King,” who probably also may be assimilated to the man who, in 1364, became Charles V, king of France. These seemingly irrelevant episodes illustrate the poet's snobbery, a pride in high connections, but also help create an aura of verisimilitude for the tale as a whole.

CLASS AND MORAL PROBLEMS

It has been claimed that modern realism coincides with the rise of the bourgeoisie and reflects an author's willingness to depict social classes other than the aristocracy and to treat the most deep-seated issues of his day. From this perspective, VD remains firmly imbedded in the Middle Ages. Although she does not dwell in a fairy castle, Toute-belle is a Lady, a member of the nobility. True, she participates in the daily life of her age—goes on pilgrimages, visits fairs, has a family and a secretary, is never free to choose her husband. But those issues which ripped apart French society in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—poverty, famine, civil war, plague, rebellion—have no real impact on her life. When they are mentioned at all, they serve only as a backdrop to her amours.

The Narrator is identified as a poet and cleric, of unmistakably plebeian origins, and whose professional commitments—a novena, a trip to the court—play a role in the action. He is also a writer, and passages in VD shed light on physical circumstances of book production in the fourteenth century.⁹ However, the theme of the poet who adores a lady of vastly superior status entered romance literature with the troubadours. In VD the Narrator exists only to love and write poems. How he earns a living, whether or not he keeps warm in winter, what he does when not meditating on Toute-belle are of no concern to the author or his public.

On one occasion Machaut does satirize contemporary manners. When, in a dream, the Narrator visits the King Who Never Lies to seek counsel, he first lectures the king on how to rule (cf. CA) and later complains of the ills that beset his age: taxes, war, brigands, and the plague. However, this one dream-episode is structurally not indispensable to VD. The profound concern for moral issues which characterizes works such as Raoul de Cambrai and La Mort le roi Artu was foreign to Machaut, as to most other writers of his century.

PSYCHOLOGY

Unlike many protagonists of allegory and romance, the two main characters of VD give the impression of being individual, clearly delineated, believable human beings. Toute-belle is a coquettish, egotistical vravelette (p. 111), attracted by the fame of an older poet, then perhaps caught up in her own game. She permits him to kiss her and enter her bed, knowing she runs little risk, and can then reproach him both for timidity and aggressiveness. Whether the critics attack or defend Toute-belle, they never have been indifferent to her peculiar charm. The same is true for the poet who is torn by jealousy, uncertainty, an inferiority complex, and the purely physical incapacity of old age. His scruples over paying court to Toute-belle and over writing down their story for the world to see partake of centuries-old literary conventions but are indeed appropriate to a sexagenarian who dreads ridicule. Certain episodes sparkle with life: the Narrator in bed with Toute-belle, content yet afraid to touch her and rationalizing his cowardice with a tirade against “bad” lovers; the Narrator, riding home from a visit to his lady, terrified at assault by brigands, and then joyfully at ease, relaxing in his room, contemptuous of the brigands, who cannot hurt him now, God curse them! or the Narrator's fits of estrangement, alternating with equally violent manifestations of tenderness, which portray the reality of Eros in a way not generally to be seen in French literature prior to the Classical theater.

PLOT

With the exception of the Narrator's dreams and a few episodes where allegorical figures appear, the plot of VD is remarkably credible. For all intents and purposes, the supernatural makes no appearance, nor is the action complicated by a piling-up of adventures, secondary characters, or the intrusion of melodrama. In general, it is more amorphous, less consciously literary, than in Machaut's other dits. Whatever the loss in purely aesthetic terms, however, it gives the impression that normal, believable events happen to normal, believable people. And sexual matters are treated with a greater freedom than is usually the case in fourteenth-century poetry or, to judge from the scathing moral denunciation the Narrator or Toute-belle has received from certain scholars, the habitual reading matter of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century academics.

The letters and the poems serve to guarantee the narrative's authenticity. Machaut creates the illusion that they existed first as historical fact and that he wrote the frame-story later to explain how they came into being. In reality, we do not know whether the letters or the frame were composed first, or both approximately at the same time. Structurally, the frame-tale exists independently, the letters do not. The latter serve primarily to document the frame, perpetuating the illusion of historical truth. That Machaut succeeded in this endeavor is proved by the fact that so many scholars believe the tale to be autobiographical and that, although for his edition Paulin Paris often deleted material from the narrative frame and on one occasion (perhaps by inadvertence) from the lyrics,¹⁰ to the best of my knowledge he cut not one line from the epistles.

STYLE

According to Auerbach, the use of low style (sermo humilis) or a mixture of low, middle, and sublime styles is central to the development of realism in Western literature. In this respect, VD, like Machaut's other tales, partakes of an older, nonrealistic tradition. Machaut's elegant, charming couplets adhere to roughly the same register as in Chrétien de Troyes and Guillaume de Lorris: a worldly, sophisticated, aristocratic sermo mediocris. With the exception of a few minor lyrics (Chichmaref, 2, Appendice), nowhere do we find in Machaut's canon the scurrilous vulgarity of some chansons de geste and fabliaux, nowhere the extraordinary variety of styles in Adam de la Halle, Jean de Meun, and Dante. On the other hand, Machaut's style corresponds perfectly to the milieu he portrays, especially in his handling of dialogue. Toute-belle's short, charming speeches are eminently appropriate to her status and character. Furthermore, on at least one occasion, Machaut employs sermo humilis to add verisimilitude to what is obviously a non-realistic scene: when Honte and Espoirs visit the Narrator in his hostel (pp. 85-91). Honte leaps at the Narrator like a bear or wild pig, crying, “Qui t'éust tantost mené pendre, / Il n'éust perdu que la corde” (p. 86); upon which, Espoirs berates Honte, calling her “garce … chetive, nice et fole” (p. 89), a spoilsport and killjoy, who, if she drowned in the ice floes of Prussia, would not be mourned for long.

Stylistic variety is provided by the lyrics, written in sermo gravis, and the prose letters, which may have given the impression of a more humble register. The sublime, passionate amatory epistle à la Ovid, Abelard, and the Provençal Salut d'amour, is here reduced to a repetitive, long-winded, frankly dull correspondence. Machaut consciously emphasizes the prosaic character of the epistles to give the impression that these letters are authentic historical documentation. The medievals, like our twentieth-century public, considered prose the appropriate medium for history. Although the VD epistles, which correspond to forms elaborated in the Artes scribendi, are as stylized as a ballade or rondeau, they do reflect the epistolary style of their century; letters like theirs were written. Therefore, this artificial, fictional correspondence is indeed “realistic,” though not quite in Auerbach's terms.

Compared to most other romances and allegories of his day, Machaut's VD portrays reality in a relatively honest, forthright manner. We must not exaggerate his success in this domain, however. The VD remains a medieval poem adhering to the conventions of medieval narrative. Eichelberg has convincingly demonstrated that traditional courtly motifs appear throughout. We are told of love's power, how, tormented, the Narrator nonetheless praises to the sky Amour and Toute-belle. He and Toute-belle become enamored from afar on the basis of good reputation, before ever having laid eyes on each other. They exchange hearts and other, more tangible love-tokens. Toute-belle's friend Colombelle, her cousin Guillemette, her sister, her secretary, her confessor, the Narrator's secretary, his brother, and other friends serve as confidants and intermediaries. Machaut compares the good amant couart with the bad fol hardi and emphasizes the role of trust in a relationship. Finally, whole episodes are devoted to allegory: a debate between Honte and Espoirs, Esperance's career as a bandit, and lengthy portraits of Amour and Fortune. The total fabric of VD gives an impression different from that of a modern novel or even the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales.

Traits which appear to reflect contemporary life and succeed in convincing the modern reader of the story's authenticity may have originated as literary convention or opposition to convention. It seems likely that many of the early troubadours and trouvères adopted a distinct literary personality: Bernart de Ventadorn the timid lover, Peire Vidal the boaster, Arnaut Daniel the lunatic,¹¹ Colin Muset the glutton, Rutebeuf the pauper, Adam de la Halle the frustrated would-be scholar. Machaut too adopted a persona: the timid, inept, bumbling narrator-witness or narrator-lover. Frequent changes of season in VD may be pathetic fallacy, the joy of the Lendit Fair a symbolic marriage. Machaut describes Toute-belle's attire in detail (pp. 82-84); however, this lush, concrete evocation of external reality serves in part to elicit an allegorical interpretation of the colors she is wearing.

In VD, as in Rabelais, Cervantes, Fielding, Diderot, and Stendhal, realism is a manifestation of antiromance. The author exposes traditional courtly artifice, indulges in a parody of fin' amor. The courtly and the noncourtly, the romantic and the down-to-earth, are juxtaposed, one convention played off against another for literary purposes, to create a mood of laughter and sophisticated, ironic detachment. For example, the Narrator burns without evidence of heat and light and shivers without being cold. When Toute-belle has not written for a time, he falls into melancholia (“Si pris à merencolier … Si devins merencolieus,” p. 24), turns pale, changes color, loses sleep, and cannot eat. In a ballade (pp. 25-26) the Narrator swears he will die unless God and ladies help him; later in the story he is about to perish at the hands of Desir. Needless to say, he does not pass away. Someone or something always turns up to cure him: Toute-belle, her poem, her letter, her portrait, the God of Love, Esperance, or a messenger. Yet no matter how often the Narrator recovers, he shortly reverts to melancholia and, as often as not, is put to bed within an inch of his life. This oscillation between joy and sadness is a hallmark both of courtly lovers and poets born under the sign of Saturn.¹²

The Narrator has not been felled by lovesickness alone. He was ill in bed before ever having heard of Toute-belle, even though at that time he had not been in love for a good ten or twelve years. He suffers from the gout, several times is physically incapacitated, and bewails that he is neither handsome nor worthy enough to appear before his beloved, a reference perhaps to the fact that he has lost the sight of an eye, for he refers to himself as “vostre borgne vallet” (Letter XIII, p. 118). These plaints represent not the conventional humility of a well-read courtly lover but an inferiority complex deriving from concrete, physical infirmity. The truth of the matter lies in the fact that to some extent the Narrator evokes Guillaume de Machaut, who was in his sixties when he wrote VD. Machaut's poem narrates a love story between a young girl and an old man. Toute-belle declares, and the Narrator agrees, that their love has come too late. The Narrator also compares his lady to Hebe, who, in l'Ovide moralisé, rejuvenated Iolaus; in similar fashion, says the Narrator, Toute-belle restores my youth and cures my ills (pp. 210-11). Thus are to be explained allusions to the Narrator's feeble health and his having been immune to love for so many years.

Andreas Capellanus denies love to men over sixty and women over fifty years of age (p. 14). Whereas Andreas's strictures are based on purely physical criteria (that love is grounded in physical desire, which must at least bear the potentiality of consummation), we know that the troubadours exalted youth or jovens as one of the qualities most important in a lover.¹³ True, Moshé Lazar has striven to minimize the term's concreteness. He writes: “Jovens ne signifie guère (sauf dans quelques rares passages …) jeunesse d'âge, jeune homme, esprit particulier à la jeunesse. Il semple plutôt représenter un ensemble de vertus et de devoirs exigé par le code de la cortezia, une somme de qualités morales qui font qu'un homme est courtois.”¹⁴ Nonetheless, however general or abstract the virtues associated with jovens may have been, youth still means youth. The medieval public, when confronted with the word and/or the traits it evokes, could not remain oblivious to its more concrete, direct meaning. Furthermore, are not many of the virtues associated with jovens and cortezia—enthusiasm, good nature, a warm heart, exaltation of love and the love discipline—often ascribed, even if mistakenly, to youth? In the courtly realm, as throughout world literature, love is a game for the young. Sons triumph over fathers, young girls over their guardians, young women over doddering or blind husbands. Like the protagonist of JRN, the VD Narrator is an old poet. In the winter of life, he suffers from melancholia and phlegm; the Greater Infortune Saturn is more appropriate to his state than bright-shining Venus. His continual indispositions reflect symbolic impotence, for it is by no means coincidental that, despite Toute-belle's repeated advances, she probably remains virgo intacta throughout VD. The Narrator is as inadequate as that other famous one-eyed lover, Polyphemus. Machaut tells the latter's story at length. We see an ugly, ridiculous personage, who, though he believes himself to be ravishingly handsome, cannot fool Galatea. Both the Narrator and Polyphemus fail in their amorous quests. The VD tells of an old poet who had renounced love but then is driven to folly by a young girl no wiser than he. It is the story of May and January, young and old, beautiful and ugly, two people totally mismatched in spite of themselves.

In his interpretation of the portrait of Amour, Machaut repeatedly tells us that a lover must be brave. He may be timid before his lady but must show courage to other men, be willing to earn her favor with love-service. However, although in this aventure (p. 2) the Narrator is offered two occasions to test his prowess, he fails lamentably both times. Returning from Toute-belle's residence, he dreads an encounter with brigands. Real bandits do catch sight of him, but he is taken prisoner by an allegorical figure, a woman. Esperance is angry at him because he has neglected to mention her in VD; his ransom then is to compose a lai in her honor. Once he has been ransomed, the Narrator rides home and hides in his chamber. Machaut has created an amusing parody of courtly adventure. The episode is patently fictitious, an excuse for inserting in VD the poet's elegant, technically sophisticated lai, but it also tells us something about the Narrator's character, his inability to conform to Arthurian romance in a post-Jean de Meun world. Toute-belle goes along with the joke. She pretends to be overjoyed that the Narrator survived these “aventures vous avés eu en chemin” (“Letter XXII,” p. 182). Her use of the term aventure indicates that she too is aware of the tradition which her lover can follow only in jest.

The second occasion occurs when the Narrator permits his secretary and others to dissuade him from visiting Toute-belle. The weather is bad, says the secretary, and bandits prowl the land. “If they hold you prisoner for three or four days in a tower, you will surely die, Car vous estes un tenres homs” (p. 285). The times are too harsh even for a young man, not to speak of one suffering from gout; in any case Toute-belle would not want her suitor to risk his life. Indeed she does not, but cannot help reproaching him for not having come to see her (“Letter XLIII”). For, as Toute-belle points out, the Narrator not only stayed at home in winter and when the grandes compagnies were ravaging the land but also in summertime when the roads were open and his health improved. In fact, from June 20, 1363, to the end of the story (May 1365) he makes no concerted effort at all to visit the Star of Day and the Flower of Flowers. Toute-belle says that if she had been in his shoes, she would have acted differently. All this implies, of course, that, judged from a courtly perspective, he fails as a lover and as a man.

As in DL [Le Dit dou Lyon] and JRN, Machaut's protagonist is measured against the traditional hero of romance. The romance hero receives a call to adventure and leaves his home to follow a road of trials to the Other World, where he is aided by his squire or a supernatural protective figure. He enters a fairy castle, meets a divine maiden or temptress, triumphs over Other World monsters, and wins a boon, perhaps treasure or the divine maiden's hand in marriage. Then he returns to his homeland to enjoy the fruits of victory. His story, which recounts a rite de passage from childhood to adult status, generally ends with his initiation into the community. In VD, on the other hand, the Narrator refuses the call to adventure or, when he does set out, the obstacles he faces are only wind and rain or a few bandits in the distance. His quest takes the form of a novena in Paris and a pilgrimage to Saint-Denis. His homeland is Reims, the divine maiden's castle her family estate in or near Paris. Her secretary acts as the Herald of Adventure. Supernatural aid is provided by Venus, Esperance, and the Narrator's secretary (a surrogate squire), who is indeed wiser than his master but sometimes impedes the quest. The Narrator attains no victory. He does not marry Toute-belle; for most of the story they are separated except for an endless correspondence; the only token he wins is a key to her “treasure” he never has an occasion to use. By comparing himself to Gawain, Lancelot, and Tristan, the Narrator only reveals how his conduct differs from theirs, that in fact he resembles more closely King Arthur and Mark. His only adventures are psychological, his ordeal merely to face a lady. Normally in the world of romance a youth desires a beautiful maiden but is separated from her by a husband or husband surrogate. The hero's victory implies defying the husband's will and winning the girl for himself. In VD no father or husband prevents the Narrator from loving Toute-belle, and the chief opposition he must overcome is not the plague, bandits, or cold weather, but his own fear. He himself is old enough to be her father or grandfather; he is the father figure and bears within himself the obstacle to fulfillment.

The atmosphere of VD is more sensuous than in any other of Machaut's tales. Toute-belle allows the Narrator to kiss her in the garden, then gives him the pax in church. At Saint-Denis she suggests he join her in bed and, upon awakening, she makes him embrace her. Later, she asks him to visit her in her chamber at daybreak. He looks in by the open window, sees her nude, and enjoys some sort of possession. …

I have already said that sex is by no means absent from fin' amor. However, scaling the gradus amoris is a long, torturous process. At each stage the lover must prove himself worthy of his lady's favors, which she bestows only after lengthy debate. The erotic theme in VD resembles instead the noncourtly tribute of a Colin Muset to his touzette, the free, easy amours in pastoral, or the epic and romance hero's temptation by a passionate Saracen princess, an Other World fay, or simply a femme fatale married to someone else. The VD flatly contradicts the dictum that a lady must under no circumstances be the first to declare her love (cf. Lavine in Enéas, Soredamors in Cligès, and Brunissens in Jaufré). Toute-belle makes the advances, and it is the Narrator who recoils from physical contact. The very essence of fin' amor is turned into derision.

Both lovers recognize the importance of discretion. The Narrator takes care not to be seen too often alone with Toute-belle. She warns him to conceal part of their relationship from her brother and not to let him see [her] portrait over the Narrator's bed. We are also told it was necessary for Venus to descend in a cloud, covering the lovers from public view, before they indulged in physical intimacies. The Narrator protests often that his duties as a courtly lover include preserving Toute-belle's reputation and honor. It is obvious, however, that he is more concerned with the former than the latter. And, cloud or no cloud, Toute-belle tosses aside all reserve. She insists that the Narrator tell the whole story of their liaison, suppressing nothing, not even the physical details, and takes pride that at court her name is on everyone's lips. She even writes the Narrator that she will be disgraced if their affair is publicly broken off, not because people will discover she loved an old poet socially her inferior but because they may assume that it was her fault. For Toute-belle, honor has ceased to reside in chastity or the reputation of chastity. It derives instead from the fame of a notorious relationship. A lover, seeking desperately but ineffectually to adhere to the old code, is set off against a lady who repudiates the code with effrontery and imposes upon him a totally different scale of values.

The Narrator shows no mercy to the traditional enemy of fin' amor, the losengier. He adheres to courtly tradition by castigating false lovers, braggarts, talebearers, and jaloux: they are like venomous serpents, he says, and should be transformed into boars, trees, and rocks. The Ovidian story of Coronis of Larissa is retold as a warning against them. Upon a closer reading of VD, however, we discover that the losengiers who speak against Toute-belle are a noble lord, another friend, the secretary, the Duke of Normandy, and the Narrator himself. These are worthy, respected people, whose statements are not to be rejected out of hand. Is Machaut telling us that losengiers tell the truth and courtly lovers are fools? Furthermore, unlike the conventional talebearer of lyric and romance, these losengiers do not slander the lover to his lady, nor both young people to her husband. They undermine the lady in her lover's eyes, and he, who ought never to dream of doubting her, half believes the tattle.

Away from the court, fin' amor is inconceivable. Courtly society exists to sanction love; love is society's ethos, and love-service a formal social rite. In JRB, RF, JRN, and FA Machaut in no way deviates from the traditional perspective. And in VD, whether because people have discovered the Narrator's new liaison or for her own inherent good qualities, Toute-belle becomes an object of praise in society (“Letter XXV,” p. 191). The Narrator's trips to court and his pilgrimage to Saint-Denis establish an atmosphere of bustle, play, gallantry, and spectacle. Love flowers in a social situation, symbolically part of a spring festival.

On the other hand, although this love takes place in society, society seems to disapprove of it. The Noble Lord praises Toute-belle but ridicules the Narrator for loving her in a passionate, all-consuming way; and his other friends attack Toute-belle to his face. Machaut's plebeian suitor adheres to courtly doctrine, while aristocrats act like anticourtly losengiers. Perhaps the Narrator's passion is unseemly in a low-born, overage rhymester, in which case it is not courtly love in the abstract but only this one amour that is undermined. Or perhaps Machaut tells us how ridiculous the conventions of fin' amor appear outside the world of books, even to the class which gave it birth. In any event, at the end of the poem the Narrator does not return to the court. With or without Toute-belle, he is not integrated into courtly society; both he and his beloved are condemned to solitude. Since the Narrator makes the mistake of taking a game (The King Who Never Lies; Fin' amor) seriously, his excesses are reproved by the community.

An ideal courtly lover is patient, submissive, and well disciplined, the epitome of mezura, ever faithful to his lady even though she mistreats him. The VD Narrator does conform to the stereotype, at least in part: his Complainte (pp. 252-56) and Le Lay d'Esperance (pp. 172-80) would not be out of place in the most orthodox courtly circles. He declares that if all the women in the world offered themselves, he would refuse them for love of Toute-belle; on the contrary, he will serve ladies and sing their praises entirely out of respect for her.

However, such declarations are juxtaposed to episodes where the Narrator acts in an uncourtly manner. In Toute-belle's presence he either bursts into tears without provocation or remains silent in the face of her most charming advances. Admittedly, an amant couart can neither maintain control over himself nor live up to the highest ideal of mezura. However, the Narrator goes too far. His temper tantrums, inappropriate to a young lover, are ridiculous in a man three or four times Toute-belle's age.

More damaging still are his fits of jealousy. Because he has heard that Toute-belle's sentiments toward him have changed, without making any further investigation the Narrator curses his eyes, the day he was born, Toute-belle's beauty, Fortune, and Loyalty, and then takes out his wrath on the beloved's portrait by locking it in a chest. Although the Narrator does not wholeheartedly subscribe to his friends' insinuations against Toute-belle and with a fine show of prudence decides not to condemn her in haste, he does withdraw into himself, finds that artistic inspiration has abandoned him, and debates whether or not he should leave her. His lukewarm response, the way he mulls over the losengiers' slanders, are an insult to Toute-belle and to fin' amor. He even descends to antifeminism: this poet, who proclaimed he would sing the praises of all ladies in Toute-belle's name, tells how falcons are trained and draws the lesson that lovers should train their ladies in the same way (cf. DA [Le Dit de l'Alerion]). A man should love a woman if she responds well to training but cast her off if she does not. Then he compares Toute-belle to Dame Fortune, accusing his beloved of indifference, blindness, and deception.

The old Narrator attacks ladies in general, and Toute-belle in particular, with the same verve as in JRB, DA, and JRN. He too is as much a disciple of Jean de Meun as of Guillaume de Lorris. Yet, unlike the witty, sophisticated defendant in JRN, he mocks ladies from weakness not strength. He is a cowardly, suspicious lover who flaunts his failure, who berates Toute-belle for what he imagines rather than for what she has done. Nor can he be consistent even in error, for he vacillates between jealousy and confidence, reproaches and humble submission. Toute-belle's priest points out that Dame Fortune resembles the Narrator, not Toute-belle; he acts like a woman, blindly credits tattle, and falls into melancholia over a trifle. In every respect he is totally ill equipped to enter into a meaningful relationship with his beautiful young admirer.

He adores Toute-belle as a goddess. He sends her a verse epistle in which every two or three lines appears the refrain, “Mon cuer, ma suer, ma douce amour” (pp. 184-85); in a poem of only fifty-one lines the refrain recurs twenty-four times, thus creating an effect not unlike the mock litanies in Baudelaire and Verlaine.¹⁵ Twice the Narrator proclaims that Toute-belle has cured his illness. Saints perform miracles to heal people, he has been told, but he has never seen one nor witnessed any so great as reviving a dispirited lover. The Narrator also adores the poems, letters, and love-tokens Toute-belle sends him; he kneels before her portrait as an icon; and we are told that the image heals him and appears in his dreams. It is obvious that Toute-belle has been assimilated to Mary and that the Narrator venerates her as he would the Holy Virgin. This does not prevent our clerical hero from worshiping Venus too, nor from transforming Toute-belle herself into a pagan deity, higher in station than Pallas, Juno, and Venus, who after she dies will become a star to illumine the world.

The Narrator's immediate ecclesiastical superior would probably be more concerned to discover that his canon undertakes a novena as an excuse to visit Toute-belle, and every day in church thinks only of her; that he reads the Hours while waiting for her at a rendezvous or, worse still, composes lyrics in her honor instead of performing his devotions. They go on a pilgrimage to Saint-Denis, where the Narrator meditates only on her, and they snuggle in bed. Of course, the Narrator is not Toute-belle's only contact with Holy Church. One of her confidants is a priest, who, after Toute-belle tells him of her love in the confessional, discloses all to the lover in question. The lover commends Toute-belle for confiding in this ecclesiastic and at no time does he rebuke the man's conduct.

We can readily agree with Paulin Paris when he writes: “Peut-être serons-nous aujourd'hui scandalisés de cette sorte d'accord entre l'amour divin et l'amour profane; mais le quatorzième siècle n'avait ni les mêmes scrupules ni la même délicatesse” (p. xxxiii). However, although Machaut's contemporaries would not have been shocked by his narrative, they could have responded to it as comedy. Unlike Lancelot, Guilhem de Nevers, and other heroes of romance, the VD Narrator is not a knight parodying or temporarily masquerading as a cleric, but the contrary: a cleric aping a knight. Profane love is ennobled by contact with the divine in the Lancelot-Grail Cycle and in Dante. In VD the opposite takes place: Toute-belle and Venus replace the Virgin, and flesh triumphs over spirit. The Narrator, a man of the cloth, is successfully tempted from the true path and consciously, willfully whores after strange gods. A scholar and poet, he takes himself seriously as a lover, abandons Reason for Love, and fails miserably. We discover that the knight-lover and poet-scholar are distinct entities. Any effort to play both roles at the same time results in disaster.

In VD the roles of lover and beloved, knight and lady, are reversed. The Narrator manifests cowardice, prudishness, vacillation, and a quick temper, and is compared to Dame Fortune. Toute-belle, on the contrary, makes the advances and gives evidence of pluck and courage. For all her innocence, she appears more experienced in the code of fin' amor than the Narrator himself. He teaches her poetry and music, but she instructs him in love. Wisdom is to be found in the girl, a puella senex, not in the distinguished poet who, despite his advanced years, acts like a child. The Narrator functions as a woman, while Toute-belle assumes the man's role; their attributes have been exchanged or, at least, merged.

The reversal of roles and a series of contrasts in the love-relationship (young-old, beautiful-ugly, natural-artificial, profane-sacred) give rise to humor. Certain episodes are frankly comic, such as the Narrator's encounter with Esperance in the guise of a bandit, his timidity with Toute-belle in bed, and an earlier rendezvous when the Narrator's secretary acts as go-between, urging his timid master to kiss a leaf he has placed on the lips of Toute-belle, who pretends to be asleep. Of course, at the decisive moment the secretary withdraws the leaf, and Toute-belle feigns anger, to the Narrator's exaggerated consternation. The Narrator has only, while dreaming, to see Toute-belle's portrait wear green (the color of change and renovation) instead of blue (the color of loyalty), to run in panic to the King Who Never Lies, but, despite his haste, he loses valuable time giving a lesson in princely conduct to the “monarch” whose advice he seeks and interrupts his own love-plaint to discourse on high taxes and the war. Meanwhile, the King chaffs the Narrator: “A real example of metamorphosis, such as Ovid or Josephus recounts, would terrify you far more than what has happened to Toute-belle's portrait; furthermore, all the sages of Antiquity cannot help you in erotic matters. You shouldn't attack Love or your Lady. And in any case you have talked too much.” A general burst of laughter sets a dog barking, whereupon the Narrator wakes up to see Toute-belle's portrait also laughing at him. Later in the story, when his secretary urges him not to visit Toute-belle in winter, the Narrator rejects his advice, accusing him in turn of having spoken too much. This does not prevent him, however, from believing the secretary in petto and postponing his trip indefinitely. He does so because a noble friend also counsels him not to go. “You are besotted by love and won't listen to me,” he says. “I don't say anything against Toute-belle; she is splendid. But you have degraded yourself by becoming love's slave. Ah! I knew you wouldn't listen to me; my time is wasted.” The scene's irony lies in the fact that the friend does indeed attack Toute-belle, accusing her of infidelity, and that, in spite of himself, the Narrator does cease to trust his beloved.

In Bergsonian terms the Narrator is guilty of rigidity. His cowardice, jealousy, and prudishness become obsessions and render him ridiculous. The realities of life—his age and social status as a cleric—interfere with his desire to be an ideal courtly lover. He is directed from without, as a puppet: by his dreams, by the hearsay of others, by what he suspects to be a change of tone in Toute-belle's letters. And, whatever manifestations his obsessions take—tears, sickness, anger, reproaches—they occur again and again, repeated in almost identical fashion. Additional humor is created by this element of repetition, central to Bergson's notion of raideur mécanique. Furthermore, the Narrator is the victim of what Bergson calls the snowballing technique. On the one hand, assuming his amorous life is in peril, he complains to kings, merely on the strength of an admittedly unreliable dream or of hearsay from equally unreliable sources. On the other hand, when evidence does pile up against Toute-belle, whether it be valid or not, Machaut's helpless suitor does nothing to confirm his suspicions one way or the other. Thus great causes give rise to disproportionately tiny effects, and earth-shattering forces are unleashed by insignificant events.

As in JRN, Machaut's undermining his own persona becomes perhaps the major theme of VD. Although this is a peculiarly modern phenomenon, Jean de Meun, Machaut, Chaucer, Gower, and Juan Ruiz laid the groundwork. The total effect is a corrosion of romance by what may be called the ironic vision. The lyrics contribute a courtly tone, a representation of love in the abstract, which is then belied by rhyming couplets that tell of a liaison between two people in the world. The exalted language of the ballade and complainte does not fit the day-to-day existence of Toute-belle and her suitor. Sentimental rhetoric is deflated when characters who try to live up to the romance ideal are forced into a situation where their code proves worthless. The public discovers that people cannot live up to the ideal, and that the ideal itself is invalid when it no longer relates to everyday reality.

The plot line of VD is subject to more than one ambiguity. When the Narrator comes to say good-bye to Toute-belle (pp. 153-63), we do not know whether their love is consummated or not. Since in the course of the poem the two will never meet again, the question is of some importance. After gazing upon a nude Toute-belle, the Narrator prays to Venus for hardement. The Goddess of Love then descends in a cloud of manne and fin baume, which permits the Narrator to satisfy his desires hidden from public gaze:

Que de joie fui raemplis
Et mes desirs fu acomplis:
Si bien que plus ne demandoie
Ne riens plus je ne desiroie [,]

[p. 157]

Car a la deësse plaisoit
Par miracles qu'elle faisoit.

[f. 255 r^o (b)]

Some scholars assume that, having given herself to the Narrator, from that moment Toute-belle ceased to be a maiden. However, the Narrator protests at length that Toute-belle's honor has not been sullied and that only people with dirty minds will accuse them of sin. Perhaps Machaut believes that the last of the quinque lineae amoris is praiseworthy or that Toute-belle's honor will be preserved if talebearers do not catch them in the act, that her reputation remains untarnished regardless of the state of her virtue. Or perhaps the Narrator's paean of satisfied desire should not be taken as literally as in a contemporary novel. He says that his soul became satiated by Toute-belle's fruit (p. 159), but we are then informed that Pité plucked this fruit from Toute-belle's “colored” face. The fruit may then be nothing more than a silent avowal of passion (Toute-belle's blushing countenance), rather than more concrete sexual favors.

I propose a solution to this problem based on the fact that just after the bed scene and before the Narrator leaves, Toute-belle gives him the key to her treasure:

… “Ceste clef porterez,
Amis, et bien la garderez,
Car c'est la clef de mon tresor.
Je vous en fais seigneur des or,
Et desseur tous en serez mestre.
Et si l'aim plus que mon oeil destre,
Car c'est m'onneur, c'est ma richesse,
Et ce dont puis faire largesse.
Par vos dis ne me puet descroistre,
Ainsois ne fait tousdis qu'acroistre.”

[p. 162]

La clé du cœur is a standard motif in Chrétien de Troyes, Claris et Laris, and Le Roman de la Rose. Toute-belle explains that the key represents her honor. If we interpret “honor” as “reputation,” then we can assume that Toute-belle lost her virginity and the Narrator has become temporary master of her person and permanent master of her good name. Only if he remains discreet will her honor be preserved. His power over her is symbolized by the key. However, we may also interpret the key, coffer, and treasure as sexual images, in accordance both with Freudian dream-theory and traditional literary erotic metaphor. Jupiter visited Danae as a shower of gold (cf. FA); in VD also the Narrator comes into Toute-belle's room by the window, but he is in quest of treasure. However, although later in the poem both lover and beloved look forward to the day when he will return to unlock her coffer, since they never have an occasion to do so and since Toute-belle gave him the key but he has yet to use it (the Narrator compares himself to Tantalus dying from thirst or to Midas who cannot enjoy his inexhaustible treasure), I conclude that she did not lose her virginity. Presumably the Narrator was able to satisfy his desires without defloration having taken place.¹⁶

In “Letter XLV” the Narrator blames Toute-belle for having sent him a jewel from her treasure (his secretary served as go-between). He begs her never again to send such a gift in that manner, “pour ce que trop grant familiarité engendre haine” (p. 362). He prefers to wait twenty years before relying on an intermediary. Paulin Paris (p. 361, n. 1) comments on the Narrator's exquisite tact and prudence. But how can the Narrator object to his secretary's bringing him the jewel since the latter knows all his master's secrets and has served as his internuntium from the beginning? I ask, may not the jewel from Toute-belle's treasure be a sexual favor, perhaps a kiss? Toute-belle would have given the secretary a kiss, asking him to deliver it to the recipient, but the latter fails to appreciate her tact (or her unpleasant joke) and begs her to cease such familiarities. Toute-belle accedes to his request, declaring (tongue in cheek) that she would never have done so had she divined the Narrator's reaction; she swears that she has never yielded any portion of her treasure except that one precious stone she just sent him (“Letter XLVI”), further proof that Machaut speaks of kisses, not rubies. If my interpretation of these passages is correct, Machaut intentionally veils the telling of what went on in Toute-belle's room and of her relations with the secretary, much as in the story Venus veils the physical act.

No less a subject for misinterpretation is the ending to VD. The majority of scholars have assumed that, in the closing pages, the lovers agree to separate forever, probably because of Toute-belle's forthcoming marriage, and that the Narrator returns her key. A careful reading of the text, however, proves the above interpretation to be without foundation. Nowhere in VD is Toute-belle's hypothetical marriage alluded to in any way. In “Letter XLV” (pp. 360-63) the Narrator swears he believes in her fidelity. No one can now convince him of the contrary. When he says that all things done, said, and written between them will be forgiven and forgotten, he simply echoes Toute-belle's similar request in “Letter XLIII” (p. 345). He is making up a quarrel, not ending their relationship (as claims Eichelberg, pp. 121-22), and asks that their disagreements, not their love, be terminated. And he continues: “Si menrons bonne vie, douce, plaisante et amoureuse” (p. 362). The Narrator also declares not that he will send back her key but that he will bring it as soon as he can, “pour veoir les graces, les gloires et les richesces de cest amoureus tresor” (p. 362). Then he declares that he and Toute-belle are joined forever by Venus (p. 366). In “Letter XLVI” (pp. 367-69), the last in the book, Toute-belle, her sorrow gone forever, exults in the defeat of Fortune. She once again invites the Narrator to visit her, and her warning to beware of bandits differs in no way from similar ones in the course of the story. And in a passage, most of which was deleted by Paris, the Narrator embroiders on the theme of reconciliation and harmony:

Ainsi fusmes nous racordé,
Com je vous ay ci recordé [,]

[p. 370]

Par tresamïable concorde.
Grant joie ay quant je m'en recorde,
Et grant bien est dou recorder,
Quant on voit gens bien acorder,
Et plus grant bien de mettre acort
Entre gens ou il a descort,
Et, pour ce, encor recorderay
Briefment ce qu'a recorder ay:
Comment Toute-bele encorda
Mon cuer, quant a moy s'acorda …

[f. 305 v^o (d)]

Far from closing out the love affair, these last letters open up possibilities for a lasting relationship.

How could such a gross misinterpretation of the text have arisen? It was natural, indeed inevitable, that Tarbé should have assumed VD ended with Toute-belle's marriage, because he identified her with the historical Countess Agnès de Navarre, who married Gaston de Foix in 1349. When Paris refuted Tarbé's identification and “proved” Toute-belle's historical prototype to be Peronne d'Unchair, dame d'Armentières, he still maintained the marriage-hypothesis (pp. xxiv and 363, note 2), even though we have no evidence that the historical Peronnelle ever married. Perhaps Paris was so imbued with Tarbé's version of the story that he allowed it to twist his own reading; perhaps, like Tarbé, he believed the poems attributed to Toute-belle in VD, and Machaut's other lyrics where the speaker is feminine, to have been written not by Machaut but by his inamorata: Agnès-Peronne. Therefore, when a ballade and a complainte treat explicitly the traditional courtly liaison between a bachelor lover and a married lady (Chichmaref, 1:208 and 249-50), Paris, like Tarbé, assumed they refer to details of Machaut's own life, that is, his continued relationship to Agnès-Peronne shortly after her marriage (pp. 406-8). However, the marriage-hypothesis crumbles when we remember that neither Agnès nor Peronne nor anyone else but Guillaume de Machaut wrote the VD lyrics, whether ascribed to the fictional Narrator or to his fictional mistress, and all other lyrics in the Chichmaref, Ludwig, Schrade, and Wilkins editions, whether the presumed speaker is male or female. Because they have confused fiction with reality, and art with history, scholars not only have falsified the “composition” of VD but even the details of the plot.

Paris and his successors may also have imagined Toute-belle's marriage to explain the estrangement that develops between her and the Narrator in the second half of VD, because they sympathize with the Narrator and believe his suspicions to be justified. These are generally the same men who condemn Toute-belle as a person, claiming she is less sincere than the Narrator, that she took up with him only out of caprice or to make a reputation—that she never really loved him at all. I agree that there must be some physical or psychological reason to explain why the lovers, so close to consummation (or already there), do not meet again for over two years. But should we ascribe their estrangement to Toute-belle's fickleness or to the Narrator's cowardice and jealousy? Who is “in the right,” Toute-belle or the Narrator?

On the one hand, a certain number of people persuade the Narrator of Toute-belle's infidelity. Some are notables at the court, and their word is not to be treated with contempt. Perhaps Toute-belle does urge her suitor not to visit her a trifle too often. On several occasions she appears overly concerned with her personal glory. And although Toute-belle's portrait recounts the story of Coronis of Larissa to prove that tattling is folly, the myth also tells against Toute-belle, since, according to Ovid, Coronis was indeed guilty of deceiving Apollo and Pallas did have something shameful to hide.

It is also true that Toute-belle never ceases protesting that she adores the Narrator and no one else. She points out that although he claims to be in love, he causes her nothing but pain. Her portrait says that the Narrator will lose Toute-belle if his doubts persist; yet, tormented by jealousy, he ceases writing to her and avoids visiting her even in good weather, even though it is his role, as the male, to bestir himself. In the end, he half believes the stories told against her. And one character of at least as much integrity as the Narrator's friends bears witness to Toute-belle's honor: a distinguished ecclesiastic who himself confessed her.

Ascertaining the truth is rendered difficult by space and time. The story begins at summer's end, 1362, when Toute-belle first sends a rondeau to the Narrator, and ends with the forty-sixth letter, which can be dated after May 1, 1365. It covers almost three years, a longer duration than for any of Machaut's previous tales, with the possible exception of DA. We are made aware of the passing of time, of the change of seasons, of a lover's frustration without word from the beloved. People evolve over so long a period, and their sentiments change too. The Narrator insists too much on the theme of metamorphosis in Ovid and the Bible not to be conscious of metamorphosis in his own life. But he is never certain of who and what have been transformed at any particular moment, whether at a given instant Toute-belle does indeed love him or, on the contrary, his suspicions are justified.

He would have little difficulty in discovering Toute-belle's true feelings but for the fact that communication between them is precarious. He and Toute-belle are separated for almost the entire dit. Much of the external décor of VD, and secondary characters too—bandits, storms, winter, the plague, allegorical figures such as Malebouche and Dangier—serve one function only: to keep the lovers apart. Although the Narrator sets forth more than once to find his beloved, his quest is never realized; the lovers attain neither permanence nor total commitment. Space stands between them, preventing understanding. Each lover remains in solitude or surrounded by people who cannot help him, unaware of or hostile to his love.

They are eager to see each other, for sight nourishes love and truth. Toute-belle's eyes possess curative powers; even in a dream, she heals the Narrator by gazing at him. On the other hand, he dreads appearing in Toute-belle's presence, lest his physical unattractiveness should dampen her ardor. Dazzled from afar by her beauty, he doubts whether he can dazzle her in return. The first time they lie together in bed he cannot see her, for they are in the dark: he touches her gropingly, is paralyzed by fear, and she must make the advances. The second time he enters through an open window (phallic imagery) and contemplates her in the nude. Venus's cloud covers them from the gaze of outsiders while their passion triumphs; they see each other without being seen. Yet the Narrator's victory is short-lived, since he is not permitted to behold Toute-belle again. How well did he ever see her, this one-eyed old man? The bad lover, Polyphemus, also one-eyed, never discovered the truth about Galatea; he was later blinded by Odysseus, as perhaps the Narrator has been all along by the God of Love.

Toute-belle and the Narrator do communicate by mail, although their correspondence is hindered by a variety of material considerations and Toute-belle's limited freedom of action as an unmarried young lady of the gentry. A person's letters are an artificial, semiliterary projection of himself, not necessarily more authentic than if he were writing a novel. The Narrator can never be certain that Toute-belle's letters are sincere, nor can she count on his. In fact, he informs us that in one epistle he intentionally tampers with the truth (p. 313). Furthermore, by the time one of them reads the other's letter, it no longer necessarily reflects the writer's sentiments or how their situation has evolved in the interval. The lovers also communicate in their dreams, but the Narrator does not believe dreaming to be an infallible source of truth, for he declares: “Car clerement vi que mon songe / N'avoit riens de vray fors mensonge” (p. 233). Dreams, letters, lyric poetry, even the portrait, are mediators; they help the lovers to come together but, objects or external happenings, they contain no guarantee of validity. The Narrator and Toute-belle each is aware of his own sentiments but can never “prehend” the other's. And the reader cannot arrive at objective truth either.

Machaut tells his story in the first person, through a narrator who (as in DV, RF, and DA) is also the protagonist and a lover. Except for the letters and poems ascribed to Toute-belle, VD is filtered through the Narrator's consciousness, whether he recounts events as participant or observer. His is the central focus; the action is seen almost uniquely through his prism. Although an I-narrator will often elicit from the reader sympathy and a heightened emotional reaction, he cannot create the illusion of omniscience we find in most third person narratives. Machaut is himself aware that the reader places limits on how much an “I” can reasonably be expected to know outside his own purview: hence the Narrator's explanations that he was informed of certain events by Toute-belle's confidante or by Toute-belle herself.

For the first time in Machaut's fiction the Narrator's limited perspective has an important function in the plot. If we accept his truth-claim, relate to his norms, and allow his point of view and ours to coincide, then we must agree with his version of the story. However, the “I” is not necessarily reliable nor are we obliged to accept without question his interpretation of the events he recounts. We have the right to disagree with him. We know the Narrator's interpretation of events but not that of Guillaume de Machaut the poet, for whom the “I” is a literary character the same as Toute-belle. Earlier scholars unconsciously sensed a dichotomy between poet and narrator when they criticized Toute-belle as a person, in spite of her suitor's praise. This blurring of focus is the key to the tale's structure. Narrative omniscience is totally out of place in a story which reveals the Narrator-hero's lack of omniscience. Ironically, in VD, The True Story, neither protagonist knows the truth, nor do we, the readers.

Does Toute-belle love the Narrator for himself or for his reputation? Is she moved primarily by love's ecstasy or by the desire to acquire worldly fame? Who sees farther, the wise man (the Narrator's friends, his secretary) or the fool (the Narrator himself)? If these aristocratic friends fail to tell the truth or, in telling it, undermine fin' amor and a lady's honor, can they be truly noble? And are they real friends? The Narrator's dream proclaims Toute-belle's infidelity, yet the dream may be pure illusion. The King Who Never Lies, who defends Amour's interests, may be telling the truth or lying, yet he too appears in the same dream. Who interprets correctly the allegorical portrait of Fortune, the Narrator or Toute-belle's priest? Illusion is taken for reality, and reality for illusion. Truth is perhaps revealed through illusion (a dream), or perhaps a lie is told in seemingly truthful terms and given the authenticity of a dream-vision. Neither the Narrator nor the reader ever succeeds in unraveling the VD mystery.

One thing is certain, however: knowing no more than the Narrator, we perceive his weakness and vacillation. In the course of the story he unconsciously reveals his own failings. We do not see the reality behind Toute-belle's mask (her portrait, letters, and dream appearances), but we do recognize it is a mask, and that the Narrator is incapable of distinguishing between it and reality. Regardless of the true state of affairs, the Narrator demonstrates a crushing lack of trust. His tragedy lies not in the Other but in himself, and the ultimate truth of The True Story concerns not his external relations to another (over which he agonizes) but his inner self, of which he is almost totally oblivious. In this sense surely the reader discovers a “truth” the Narrator never dreamed of and arrives at a point of knowledge far beyond the Narrator's.

The Toute-belle perceived by the Narrator, in part a product of his imagination, inevitably differs from the real Toute-belle, whom neither he nor the public ever gets to know. She is his inspiration, his Muse, but as such takes on a universal, not a particular, aura. He conceives of her as the domna of tradition, not a living fourteenth-century girl less than twenty years old. He writes his best poetry when they are separated, perhaps unconsciously seeks obstacles to keep them apart, for the reality of Toute-belle's presence cannot but interfere with his idealized picture of her and silence him. Significantly, in the second half of VD Toute-belle's portrait comes to replace the real girl. Just as Toute-belle is dehumanized in the relationship, so too in the Narrator's mind she is metamorphosed into an object (the portrait) and a phantom (who comes to him when he dreams), on whom he projects fantasies at will.

As we have seen, one mode of communication in VD is the written word, embodied in lyric poetry, prose letters, and the book itself, a True Story, which the Narrator is supposed to be writing. The theme of art is more fully developed in VD than in any of Machaut's other narratives. In spite of his age, ill health, and loss of an eye, the Narrator attracts Toute-belle because of his reputation as a poet. Throughout the story she sends to him for lyrics, declares she adores reading them and will learn them by heart, song and verse. As critics have pointed out, she takes pride in winning the love of a celebrity. The Narrator goes along with her pretensions by composing lyrics uniquely in her praise. He also agrees, though with misgivings, to transcribe the whole of their affair in his book. Toute-belle sacrifices her honor and defies convention for the sake of fame. And, it cannot be denied, she succeeds in her objective. Within the context of the narrative, she becomes known in society as the Narrator's muse. And, in a larger sense, she has won a degree of immortality comparable to Dante's Beatrice, Petrarch's Laura, and Ronsard's Cassandre, Marie, and Hélène. She is known even today only because she was a character in a poem by France's leading writer of the fourteenth century.

A second reason for Toute-belle's paying court to the Narrator centers on her own artistic ambitions. Although she demonstrates commendable modesty (“et se il y a aucune chose à amender, si le vueilliés faire, car vous le sarés mieus faire que je ne fais; j'ay trop petit engien pour bien faire une tele besongne, et aussi n'eus-je onques qui rien m'en aprenist. … Car je en apenroie plus de vous en un jour que je ne feroie d'un autre en. i. an,” “Letter V,” p. 48), she does engage in a poetic correspondence with the master and requests that he correct her poems and set them to music. It can be said that the Narrator's letters are as much those of a professor as a wooer, that he and Toute-belle discuss poetry almost as often as they speak of love.

The Narrator is a lover and a poet, a lover because he is a poet and vice versa. In Floris et Lyriope, Cléomadès, La Divina Commedia, Il Filocolo, and VD, a book causes two people to meditate on love and on each other. Poems, letters, and the tale itself, viewed as the lovers' story in the making, bring the Narrator and his beloved together; they are mediators, perhaps the only mediators, in a love situation which would never otherwise have come into being and which is kept alive only by poetry.

The Narrator of course does ultimately fail as a lover. Machaut laughs at the melancholic, decrepit old rhymester who dares assume the role of chevalier-servant. The Narrator is ripe in years, but a lover must partake of jovens. As a poet, he depends for inspiration on books weighing down much of his tale, especially the second half, with mythological or allegorical lore. He tells stories and draws conclusions but does not act to win his lady, as a young suitor must. Although the Ancients teach him that love brings in its wake suffering and death (the exempla of Polyphemus and Coronis), he should be oblivious to everything in the universe that does not emanate from his lady. A bookish man, the Narrator is afraid to experience the world directly, yet without concrete activity he cannot succeed in love. The VD is a tale of language—speech, poetry, prose correspondence—in which words and the poetic art impede rather than encourage physical action. An educated poet is as much a fool as other men sub specie Veneris, and all his knowledge turns out to be useless. The Narrator would never have had a chance with Toute-belle if he were not a great poet, but the absence of concrete human experience implicit in the clerical life also condemns him to failure.

However, whatever his success or failure as a lover, the Narrator's status as an artist is never left in doubt. He takes pride in his work, is conscious of his preeminence as a poet, and on more than one occasion brings off a tour de force: answering Toute-belle's or Thomas Payen's poems in their own rhyme scheme, writing a technically sophisticated lai and complainte, and composing impromptu rondeaux, ballades, and virelais which illustrate intense emotional states as they occur, the most extraordinary being the virelai he composes at the very moment he enjoys Toute-belle in bed.

Likewise, Toute-belle, said to be an excellent singer even before she met the Narrator (p. 4), develops into a fine poetess herself. She learns to answer the Narrator's poems following his rhyme scheme and, like him, to compose rondeaux spontaneously in moments of intense emotion. It can be said that Toute-belle turns out better as a poet than the Narrator as a lover. She improves in the one realm, while he falters in the other, and, to give him his due, he is a more successful professor of literature than she is an instructress in the ways of love.

The two protagonists collaborate on their story, which will become VD; the writing of VD becomes the subject of VD. This book is purportedly written by the Narrator pretty much as the story takes place, from July 1363 to May 1365. Toute-belle declares that her greatest pleasure lies in reading parts of it as it comes into being; surely her love is nourished by the book and her own role in its elaboration. Then, at the end of the narrative, although the Narrator's passion has not been consummated and the future of his relationship with Toute-belle remains uncertain, he has the book to fall back on: he will complete the story of their love. It exists, when all else proves to be illusion.¹⁷ In a sense, this man, who loves his craft more than his lady, sublimates an impossible yearning for Toute-belle by creating VD. As Apollo kills Coronis but their son, Aesculapius, is saved, so too the Narrator's love eventually dies, but his creation, the Book, will live on. The poet becomes truly educated by experiencing life and by creating out of his failure in life a successful poem. Ultimately, art triumphs over life because life itself, as Machaut's protagonists live it, has no meaning or permanence apart from art. It is not coincidental that whereas in Machaut's other tales Lady Fortune, the Lion, the Trial, the Allerion, or the Fountain appear in the title, in VD the book itself is the archimage that dominates a poem which refers to and is justified only by itself.

The VD is less obviously structured than Machaut's other tales; the absence of a tight pattern of correspondences and antitheses explains in part why scholars have been willing to assume that the story is autobiography not fiction. Nonetheless, certain themes, motifs, or episodes repeated in the course of the poem do create a rhythm of recurrence: letters, poems, love-tokens, visits, pilgrimages, bedroom scenes, and dreams. Especially in the first half, these increments are shaped to form a progression or gradation leading to a climax; the resultant pattern corresponds to the quinque lineae amoris or to Andreas Capellanus's hierarchy of the stages of love: “Ab antiquo quatuor sunt gradus in amore constituti distincti. Primus in spei datione consistit, secundus in osculi exhibitione, tertius in amplexus fruitione, quartus in totius personae concessione finitur,” p. 38). We follow the Narrator's slow, uncertain, but tangible progress in the conquest of his lady. They communicate by letter; he beholds her face, first in a portrait, then when they meet at her house; they speak; he kisses her hand at their first rendezvous, her lips at the second and when she visits him in church; they embrace at Saint-Denis and later enjoy something approximating totius personae concessio. The high points in the affair are concentrated into two bed scenes. In the first, chaperones are present, Toute-belle is the aggressor, and nothing much happens; in the second, the lovers are alone (but for Venus and her cloud), the Narrator takes the initiative, and his desires are satisfied.

In the second half of VD artistic “composition” is less overt. Scholars have claimed that Machaut lost interest in the story once the Narrator entered Toute-belle's bed or that other literary concerns caught his fancy, and that Part 2 contains mostly “fill-material” of a mythological or allegorical nature inserted to keep the tale from dying.¹⁸ In my opinion, on the contrary, Machaut has sought to portray what happens in a love affair after the happy ending. Influenced by the conventions of romance, people believed that love crystallizes according to more or less fixed patterns of physical conquest, but the tradition seldom if ever dealt with the dissolution of an affair. Machaut examines in a truly “realistic” manner how easy it is in the first flush of passion to adhere to the precepts of fin' amor, to play at love according to the rules, but in time lovers must find their way on their own. And their failings as human beings—Toute-belle's fickleness, the Narrator's jealousy and cowardice—are revealed to the public and to each other. The protagonists seek to follow the code and indeed succeed in creating beautiful words, but they do not communicate, and in the process love, understanding, and human values disappear.

The VD is the most complex of Machaut's tales. His ending especially is ambiguous because, although the lovers do reconcile, we are never made aware of the exact relationship between them and to what extent either one loves the other or is capable of a mature relationship. The Narrator believes in their reconciliation, but he and the reader are ignorant of Toute-belle's sentiments in the matter. Whether he ever will unlock the maiden's coffer is open to question. This incomplete ending gives the poem an aura of truth, for tensions are left unresolved as is so often the case in real life. The plot is open, not closed; the characters live on, and their problems persist, not to be resolved by a fortuitous marriage or death. Machaut anticipates contemporary fiction by creating the illusion that his book takes shape as the characters live it, that they create their own story, and that the work of art itself becomes a living organism, free from convention and an author's will. Yet, as we know, such is not the case in Machaut's world any more than in Gide's and Sartre's. An author does shape his characters; he adheres to or rebels against literary conventions; he constructs a narrative. The contrast between the reality of artistic creation and the illusion of realism, as well as between the ideal of fin' amor and the reality of two people living on our planet, is central to the ironic vision of Machaut's True Story.

Notes

1. Ed. Paulin Paris (Paris, 1875) (cited hereafter as VD). The Paris edition contains 8,437 lines, plus forty-five interspersed epistles in prose. Due to an error of 600 lines in numeration, pp. 272-73, Paris's version appears to claim 9,037 lines. In reality, however, the original text of VD is longer than 8,437 lines, for, as I pointed out in the Introduction, Paris leaves out bunches of lines, of a descriptive or allegorical nature, without warning the reader, as well as a more important 265-line sequence, Polyphemus's song to Galatea, published subsequently by Antoine Thomas: “Guillaume de Machaut et l'Ovide moralisé.” Romania 41 (1912): 382-400. I have consulted Ms 1584, fond français, of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and will quote from it when appropriate.

2. M. le Comte de Caylus, “Premier Mémoire sur Guillaume de Machaut, poëte et musicien dans le XIV^e siècle: Contenant des recherches sur sa vie, avec une notice de ses principaux ouvrages,” in Mémoires de littérature, tirés des registres de l'Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres 20 (1753): 399-414, esp. 413-14; Prosper Tarbé, ed., Œuvres de Guillaume de Machault (Reims-Paris, 1849), his introduction entitled “Recherches sur la Vie et les Ouvrages de Guillaume de Machault.”

3. Prosper Tarbé, ed., Poésies d'Agnès de Navarre-Champagne, dame de Foix (Paris-Reims, 1856).

4. Georg Hanf, “Ueber Guillaume de Machauts Voir Dit,” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 22 (1898): 145-96.

5. Walther Eichelberg, Dichtung und Wahrheit in Machauts “Voir Dit” (Frankfurt am Main, 1935).

6. Paris, Le Livre du Voir-Dit, p. 25, n. 2; Reaney, “A Chronology of the Ballades, Rondeaux and Virelais set to Music by Guillaume de Machaut,” and “Towards a Chronology of Machaut's Musical Works”; Günther, “Chronologie und Stil der Kompositionen Guillaume de Machauts”; Poirion, Le Poète et le Prince, p. 200; Williams, “An Author's Role in Fourteenth Century Book Production,” p. 453.

7. Pierre Jonin, Les personnages féminins dans les romans français de Tristan au XII^esiècle (Aix-en-Provence, 1958), and “Aspects de la vie sociale au XII^e siècle, dans Yvain,” L'Information Littéraire 16 (1964): 47-54; Anthime Fourrier, Le courant réaliste dans le roman courtois en France au moyen-âge (Paris, 1960), I; Jeanne Lods, “Quelques aspects de la vie quotidienne chez les conteurs du XII^e siècle,” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 4 (1961): 23-45; William Calin, The Old French Epic of Revolt (Geneva-Paris, 1962), chapt. 5, and The Epic Quest, chapts. 1 and 2; Faith Lyons, Les éléments descriptifs dans le roman d'aventure au XIII^esiècle (Geneva, 1965); Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Garden City, 1954), chapts. 16, 21, and 22; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Berne, 1946), chapt. 10.

8. Hanf, “Ueber Guillaume de Machauts Voir Dit,” pp. 158-60, 170-92; Chichmaref, Guillaume de Machaut, I: liii-lxiv; Armand Machabey, Guillaume de Machault: La Vie et l'Œuvre musical, I: 56-62.

9. Williams, “An Author's Role in Fourteenth Century Book Production.”

10. Page 243, vv. 5556-57 read:

    En dueil, en tristesse et en plour,
                        Sans nul meffait,
    Resgarde, amis, comment je plour,
    Oy mes souspirs, oy ma clamour …

    Cf. also p. 255, vv. 5870-75, read:

    Aussi Pallas, vostre sage baisselle,
    Li Dieu feront feste de la nouvelle,
    Et quant tous biens avez soubz vostre aisselle
    (Qu'il vous servent bonnement sans cautelle),
    Serez-vous donc a mon depri rebelle? …

    And lines 5907-34, pp. 256-57, part of the narrative frame and separated from the complainte by a miniature, should not have been printed in smaller type, as if they were a continuation of the lyric.

11. See D. R. Sutherland, “L'élément théâtral dans ‘la canso’ chez les troubadours de l'époque classique,” in Actes et Mémoires du III^eCongrès international de Langue et Littérature d'Oc (Bordeaux, 1965), 2: 95-101.

12. See above my analysis of JRN, pp. 123-29 [in this text] and Heger, Die Melancholie bei den französischen Lyrikern des Spätmittelalters, pp. 217-19.

13. See Alexander J. Denomy, “Jovens: The Notion of Youth among the Troubadours, Its Meaning and Source,” Mediaeval Studies 11 (1949): 1-22; cf. with René Nelli, L'Erotique des Troubadours (Toulouse, 1963), pp. 85, 111-14.

14. Moshé Lazar, “Les éléments constitutifs de la ‘cortezia’ dans la lyrique des troubadours,” Studi Mediolatini e Volgari 6-7 (1959): 67-96, esp. p. 81; reprinted in Amour courtois et “fin'amors” dans la littérature du XII^esiècle (Paris, 1964), p. 33.

15. See Gustave Cohen, “Le Voir Dit de Guillaume de Machaut (vers 1365),” Lettres Romanes 1 (1947): 99-111, esp. pp. 109-10.

16. Cf. with Paris, Le Livre du Voir-Dit, p. 160, n. 1, and Poirion, Le Poète et le Prince, pp. 529-30, and Le Moyen Age: II. 1300-1480 (Paris, 1971), p. 193. Note that in Le Dit de la fleur de lis et de la Marguerite Machaut compares the daisy's green stalk, white petals, red corona, and yellow pollen to a lady's youth, joy, modesty, and “treasure”:

    Une greinne a toute jaunette
    Qui est si plaisant et si nette
    Qu'il semble qu'elle soit dorée,
    Einsi Nature l'a formée.
    Mais c'est mervilleuse chose,
    Quar quant la marguerite est close,
    En ses fueilles enseveli,
    Ha son tresor aveques li—
    C'est sa greinne qui samble or fin.
    Et croy qu'elle le fait a fin
    Que sa greinne ne soit gastée,
    Ravie, tollue, ou emblée.

    [231]

    According to Machaut, the daisy closes at night to protect her treasure, then opens in the morning to the sun (243-50).

17. For the symbolism of the book in the Middle Ages, see Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, chapt. 16.

18. Hanf, “Ueber Guillaume de Machauts Voir Dit,” pp. 195-96; B. J. Whiting, “Froissart as Poet,” Mediaeval Studies 8 (1946): 189-216, esp. p. 200.

Bibliography

Editions of the Works of Guillaume de Machaut

Chichmaref, V., ed. Guillaume de Machaut: Poésies lyriques. 2 vols. Paris, 1909.

Machabey, Armand, ed. Messe Notre-Dame à quatre voix de Guillaume de Machault. Liège, 1948.

Paris, Paulin, ed. Le Livre du Voir-Dit de Guillaume de Machaut. Paris, 1875.

Tarbé, Prosper, ed. Les Œuvres de Guillaume de Machault. Reims-Paris, 1849.

———, ed. Poésies d'Agnès de Navarre-Champagne, dame de Foix. Paris-Reims, 1856.

Thomas, Antoine, ed. “Guillaume de Machaut et l'Ovide moralisé.” Romania 41 (1912): 382-400.

Studies on the Life and Works of Guillaume de Machaut

Cohen, Gustave. “Le Voir Dit de Guillaume de Machaut (vers 1365).” Lettres Romanes 1 (1947): 99-111.

Eichelberg, Walther. Dichtung und Wahrheit in Machauts “Voir Dit.” Frankfurt am Main, 1935.

Günther, Ursula. “Chronologie und Stil der Kompositionen Guillaume de Machauts.” Acta Musicologica 35 (1963): 96-114.

Hanf, Georg. “Ueber Guillaume de Machauts Voir Dit.” Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 22 (1898): 145-96.

Heger, Henrik. Die Melancholie bei den französischen Lyrikern des Spätmittelalters. Bonn, 1967.

Machabey, Armand. Guillaume de Machault, 130?-1377: La Vie et l'Œuvre musicale. 2 vols. Paris, 1955.

Poirion, Daniel. Le Moyen Age: II. 1300-1480. Paris, 1971.

———. Le Poète et le Prince: L'évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d'Orléans. Paris, 1965.

Reaney, Gilbert. “Ars Nova in France.” In The New Oxford History of Music. III. Ars Nova and the Renaissance, 1300-1540, pp. 1-30. London, 1960.

———. “A Chronology of the Ballades, Rondeaux and Virelais Set to Music by Guillaume de Machaut.” Musica Disciplina 6 (1952): 33-38.

———. “Towards a Chronology of Machaut's Musical Works.” Musica Disciplina 21 (1967): 87-96.

Williams, Sarah Jane. “An Author's Role in Fourteenth Century Book Production: Guillaume de Machaut's ‘livre où je met toutes mes choses.’” Romania 90 (1969): 433-54.