Introduction

Summary

Je, Nature, par qui tout est fourmé

Quanqu’a ça jus et seur terre et en mer,

Vien ci a toy, Guillaume, qui fourmé

T’ay a part.(Prologue, 1, 1–4)

Guillaume de Machaut is known today for works that depict an art of love as well as an art of poetry. Indeed, he fused the two arts – ‘in many texts “love” seems to become a metaphor for “poetry”’– so that his art of love is an integral part of his art of poetry. As Machaut puts it in one of many variations of the same idea: ‘Car qui de sentement ne fait, / Son oeuvre et son chant contrefait’ (Remede, v. 407–8)[for whoever does not write with true feeling falsifies both his poem and his song]. The sentement, Machaut claims, must be sincere. Since love is the ‘feeling’ about which Machaut composes almost all his poems and much of his music, love becomes inextricably bound to poetry in his corpus; he can write only when in love, whether singing love dirges or good and happy loves. Indeed, as Zeeman suggests, Machaut’s arts of love and poetry are virtual allegories of one another; they thus become mutually illuminating. We observe this in the Voir Dit, Machaut’s last ‘love dit’,in which a young woman, Toute Belle, asks the aging poet Guillaume to mentor her in his art of poetry because he practices the art with such distinction and success. Since she and her tutor must love de sentement in order to write good poetry, they fall in love at the very beginning of her apprenticeship.

Toute Belle and her Poet-Lover as Mentor

Scholars today find Toute Belle to be just as intriguing as she is problematic, even perplexing. To be sure, in Machaut’s time members of the nobility sought advice and guidance from poets on writing poetry and Toute Belle is described as noble. But she is a young woman who begins a love story with an elderly master who is not noble. Here is where their master–pupil relationship begins to grow problematic; it becomes ever more complex and conflicted as the plot unfolds.

We can put the problem in its pedagogical context by consulting Jacques Legrand’s early fifteenth-century treatise, the Archiloge Sophie, on proper master–pupil relations.