Medieval lyric poets constitute a melancholy lot. Happy springtime renewals foreshadow a dolorous love never reciprocated and forever unsatisfied. If hallucinations can make winter frost metamorphose into May-time flowers, the wintry reality of a forlorn love quickly thrusts itself onto the lovelorn singer as his or her song moves on to its unhappy, seemingly inevitable conclusion. As the epigraph from Bernart de Ventadorn’s well-known canso on the lark’s flight states, the lover has much to learn, and what he or she learns is that singing for joy is deceptive. The song must end because the joys of love never really begin. Such vexed love corresponds ‘à la volonté du poète de trouver sa joie dans un amour sans possession et sans réciproque; à l’ambiguïté de ses réactions et de ses sentiments, où se mêlent vraie douleur, apparence de la joie, joie réelle au sein de la douleur’.Given the uncertainties of such love, Chaucer claims in the voice of his narrator to understand little or nothing about it because he is himself, ‘for myn unliklynesse’ (Troilus, p. 473, v. 16), not a lover. Machaut provides nuance on the theme of ‘unliklynesse’ by means of his alter ego, an aging Guillaume, who is a lover and also writes of the self-inflicted pain that the second epigraph describes metaphorically as a thrashing that punishes his failure to realize the joys of love.

In the Voir Dit, Guillaume’s ‘unlikely’ figure relives the centuries-old commonplace of self-inflicted violence in troubadour and trouvère poetry by depicting the relationship between the old master poet and his apprentice, Toute Belle. Three factors explain their relationship and clarify the art of love that Toute Belle and Guillaume exemplify: the evolution of Machaut’s conception of good love up to the composition of the Fontaine amoureuse; the poet–patron relationship in the Confort d’ami; and the commonplace role of the dominant lady vis-à-vis her suitor and, occasionally, her lover in Machaut’s oeuvre.