The boldly cavalier discantus keeps rushing ahead, launching into melismas propelled by striking upward leaps and leaving his accompanying friends behind. When this occurs, the lower voices invariably keep a low profile, merely providing a harmonic launch pad, and they never have any florid material at all. Yet their tendency to cadence upwards to a narrow interval keeps the tension high; such cadences are less completely restful than downward or wide ones, and we are wholly deprived in this chanson of that sense of rest. That's perfectly common in this music, but in this piece the effect is felt strongly.

These chansons of course leave open the option of realizing any or all of the voices instrumentally, and the effects of a cappella, mixed, or completely instrumental versions are so different that these scores can rightly be regarded as fields loaded with buried treasure. Their richness is enduring, and they haven't lost one watt of their energy in all this time. Even a song like this, basically built out of clichés of the genre, leaps to life at the first note.

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