World-famous musician Josquin Desprez retired to his hometown of Condé in 1505 and wrote songs. After 30 years of service to kings and dukes, popes and cardinals, in which time he composed at least 100 motets and three books' worth of masses, Josquin seems to have developed a late fascination with the canonic chanson. In this miniature genre, he challenged himself to create effortless counterpoint despite the severe canonic strictures. Chansons only slowly filtered into manuscript collections, later breaking on the European scene in large posthumous anthologies printed by Susato and Attaignant. Unfortunately, this pattern of sources makes it nearly impossible to discover a chronological order for these works, as important as they are to the chanson's development. There is only one five-voiced canonic chanson attributed to Josquin in a source dating from his lifetime: Faulte d'argent. It could thus represent one of his earliest essays and has been seen as central to understanding his "late" chanson style.

Though Faulte d'argent is quite brief, in it Josquin displays both a masterful command of local detail and an elegant formal structure. He bases the piece on a popular chanson rustique, well known in other chanson settings, and even French secular theater. The lighthearted tune serves as cantus firmus in the contratenor voice, and in canon a fifth below in the second tenor. Josquin does subtly manipulate his disposition of these preexisting materials. The popular melody repeats its own first phrase to conclude a four-line stanza, yielding a closed musical structure. For text, on the other hand, Josquin truncates the much longer original poem, concluding the first three lines of his single stanza with a later line; the lighthearted opening that complains about the state of having no money becomes a more serious ironic comment about Woman ("The woman who sleeps will wake for money"). One highly perceptive analysis of the music reveals how Josquin reflects the literary process of this punchline. Though the opening stands firmly in G dorian mode, Josquin quickly inserts several confusing cadences on D. The tonal ambiguity only resolves at the very end, with strong final cadences on D, just as the irony of the text only coalesces at its end. Josquin's musical punchline is underscored by a convergence of repeated musical motives. Nicolas Gombert quoted from this very chanson in his lament on Josquin's death, and it is also featured in Richafort's Requiem Mass.

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