This chapter investigates the sorrows and, more particularly, the joys of lowstyle feminine desire as it appears in the chansons d'ami. Like the lust of the pastourelle, low-style feminine desire is presented by the trouvères as not really desire at all. A knowledge generated intergenerically opposes it to the exalted experience of masculine fin'amor. Like her speech, the desire of the amie is presented as trivial and childlike.

The joys of the amie are sometimes underemphasized by scholars. For instance, although Bec allows the variant in which the ‘young girl […] sings her joy at having a friend who loves her’ (Lyrique française 62–3), he then proceeds to describe the unhappy amie who is betrayed and abandoned (63), ignoring the sanguine energy of the more optimistic chanson d'ami heroines. Elsewhere he categorizes the chanson de femme in general as ‘a lyric monologue with sorrowful overtones’ (‘ “Trobairitz” ’ 252). Jeanroy, opening up the topic of women's song for critical attention, saw happy love as a rarity in the chansons de femme (Poésie 158), although he also acknowledged, in European woman's song, ‘the heroines [who] congratulate themselves on having a lover to their taste’ (158). Other critics seem to have taken the word of these seminal studies for the sorrowful overtones of woman's song in general. Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner, for instance, notes it without comment (‘Trobairitz’ 221).