The epigraphs to this chapter pose in dramatic pedagogical language the quandary that emerges in Machaut’s Fontaine amoureuse and, more profoundly, his Voir Dit. Like Esperance in the Remede, Toute Belle in the Voir Dit teaches Guillaume by her good and stable love how he himself should return her love – what the Echecs moralisés calls ‘reamacion’ (271r17). In Toute Belle’s case love is based on good hope and souffisance, virtues that Guillaume describes as characterizing her love for him in this dit that he writes for her about their love. She, Guillaume asserts, teaches him how to love well, not with the traditional grammarian’s rod but by her eloquence and comportment. Like the lover in Lay 19 (also quoted as the epigraph to chapter one), Guillaume, an unstable and badly performing lover, thrashes himself with the rods of desire and jealousy, thereby evincing a possessive love that has, moreover, enslaved and mastered him: he is himself possessed. Robbed of good hope and souffisance by submission to his master, he loses the constancy and trust in good love that Esperance propounds in the Remede and that Toute Belle practices and promotes in the Voir Dit.

Given this depiction, the Voir Dit as well as the Fontaine amoureuse may well seem a partial retreat from the idealism and the almost superhuman virtue, rationality, and steadfastness Guillaume exemplifies in the Alerion. But, as we have seen, both the Remede and the Confort d’ami warn of the potential instability of love’s see-sawing between bad desire and good hope. By juxtaposing these emotions as contraires choses, Machaut actually defines two kinds of love more precisely, sharpening the distinction between the two emotions and, consequently, between the two kinds of love they exemplify.