In this paper I propose a view of counterpoint in two songs of Machaut as an enactment of fourteenth-century French fin'amor, or courtly love. The composition of the two songs examined here are documented by a character appropriately named "Guillaume" in Machaut's great semiautobiographical masterpiece, Le Voir Dit (The True Story) of the 1360s. For the first song, I will present a possible reenactment of Machaut's compositional process, following the letter exchange of Guillaume (aged 63) and Peronne (aged 19), a fervent admirer and student of his poetry, as the composer spruces up a monophonic rondeau, "Puis qu'en oubli," which received an apathetic response, into a polyphonic one by adding an accompanimental tenor/contratenor pair. By following the harmonic and syntactic guidelines of medieval treatises and composition manuals, I will arrive at a remarkably close approximation of the song's harmonic structure. Yet the resemblance between structure and elaboration is perhaps too obvious. Could this relative lack of harmonic inspiration in the revered composer have elicited Peronne's tepid response to so simple (if haunting) a chanson?

In another song from Le Voir Dit, "Nes que on porroit," one that Peronne herself requested of him, Machaut as "Guillaume" plays it far less safe. His letter describes this song as "very foreign and very novel" and he will rush to send it to her. Its formes fixes cadential layout and tonal structure will be shown to be very strange indeed, with no relief even to the last cadence.