The French version, Craindre vous vueil (“To fear you is my wish”), is in the standard rondeau
cinquain form, with a five-line stanza and corresponding refrain, and this fits the shape and cadential
structure of the music very ingeniously. The poem has the rhyme scheme A A B/B A, with the slash
showing the division between the refrain (first part of the music) and the remainder of the stanza. The
music associates cadences on C with the “A” lines and cadences on G with the “B” lines. (By contrast,
the Italian text has a four-line stanza, and the music ends with the cadence in m. 25—off the final. That
seems a sure sign of clumsy contrafactum.) In addition, the French text embodies an acrostic linking the
names “Cateline” (whoever she may have been; some suggest the composer’s sister) and “Dufai.” The
music was more likely fashioned to fit it than the other way around.
The octave leap noted earlier in Du Fay’s “contratenor sine faulx bourdon” for Ave maris stella
occurs in the very first cadence of Craindre vous vueil. It was standard contratenor behavior at cadences,
alongside (and fast replacing) the “doubled leading tone” variety that had been customary in the fourteenth
century (compare the second cadence a couple of measures later). Notice, though, that the “new” cadence
is just another way of filling the same frame: the “structural pair” of cantus and tenor still make the