En mon cuer (“In my heart,” Ex. 9-5), for example, is found as a two-voice composition in all the
composer-supervised “collected editions” of Machaut’s works—all, that is, except the one generally
considered to be the earliest such manuscript, where its “cantus” is entered, like the other virelais in that
manuscript, as a monophonic dance song. That was how it must have been originally composed. It is self-
sufficient as a single voice. That is, it has a stable and satisfying cadence structure, and unlike its eventual
accompanying tenor, it has enough notes to accommodate all the syllables of the text.
EX. 9-5 Guillaume de Machaut, En mon cuer (virelai a 2)The remaining piece of evidence that Machaut wrote his songs from the top down, beginning with the
self-sufficient cantus, comes from another of his famous narrative poems, Le Voir Dit (“The true tale”),
composed in the early 1360s. This, too, is ostensibly an autobiographical poem, far less conventional in
its scenario than Le Remède de Fortune and possibly, therefore, more reliable as autobiography. Its ten
thousand lines embody, along with the narrative itself, some forty-six ultraliterary love letters exchanged
between the sexagenarian poet and a precocious lass of nineteen, Péronne (or Péronnel) d’Armentières,