Machaut wrote almost twice the number of ballades as motets (42 versus 23) and his ballades are arguably his greatest achievements. Most of them were composed later in his life after he settled into a cozy canonry at Rheims, in 1339. They are the fruit of his long experience in monodic songs and of his polyphonic experience gained through composing motets. Drawing on his extraordinary way with monophony, he simply adds new layers of interest. He seems to have composed the texted line first, based on the metrics of the poem, and then added between one to three extra voices. Almost all the ballades have a wonderfully adept sense of line that even influences the vertical plane, making harmony into a functional aspect of melody. Une vipere au cuer is a wonderful, later ballade, the 27th in the catalog. It is deliberately less fluid than some of the pieces, perhaps to express communication breakdown depicted in the text. He makes each phrase feel like an entirely new section of the song. Working across this, he creates a subtle unity by using consistent, homogenously melodic material throughout. The last refrain phrase is similar (to just the right degree) to the phrase at the openings of the stanzas. But many touches stand out as especially fine, such as the tragic second phrase (over the second couplet of the stanza), which carries its descent with increasing emotive heaviness. The colorful images in the text can't be missed either: the viper, the scorpion, the basilisk are three monsters who seem to be avatars of the beloved's cruel indifference.

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