Guillaume de Machaut's extraordinary talents as both a poet and musician allowed him to circulate in courtly or ecclesiastic milieus for his entire adult life. It is perhaps in his narrative dits (or poems) into which he often interpolated lyric poems—some with musical settings—in the formes fixes, where Machaut's skills as a writer and musician are most thoroughly fused. The text of Machaut's rondeau Dix et sept, cinc, which he interpolated into his verse narrative Le livre dou Voir Dit (The Book of the True Story), plays an important role in decoding some of the subtleties of the Voir Dit itself, and thus helps define the greater, perhaps autobiographical meaning of the dit. Written between 1363 and 1365, the Voir Dit takes the form of an epistolary exchange between an aging poet, Guillaume, and Toute Belle ( literally, "all beautiful"), a younger woman with whom Guillaume self-consciously enacts the protocol of late medieval courtly love. Although Machaut apparently casts himself as one of the work's two central personages, and although the poem contains a number of references to authentic events and people, there has been considerable scholarly controversy about the veracity of Machaut's "true story." In 1998, however, musicologist Daniel Leech-Wilkinson argued for a reading of the Voir Dit as a somewhat poetically adorned but still essentially truthful autobiographical document. The question of the identity of Toute Belle has puzzled scholars since the beginning of studies on the Voir Dit in the eighteenth century. If the story is indeed true, then Toute Belle was likely a real person whose identity Machaut protected with a pseudonym. An anagram embedded in the last line of text of the dit has revealed to scholars more than one woman's name. The text of the rondeau Dix et sept, cinc offers a numerical solution to the puzzle of Toute Belle's identity. The numbers mentioned in the full first line of text—17, five, 13, 14, and 15—correspond to the letters R, E, N, O, P (when A=1, B=2, etc., and the letter "j" is omitted from the alphabet). The resulting five letters combine to spell the name "Peronne," possibly referring to Peronne d'Armentire, a younger contemporary of Machaut whose haunts were in the region between Reims and Paris so familiar to the poet/composer. The music of Dix et sept, cinc exemplifies the grace of Machaut's late song style. Each of the three voice parts has a unique character and all combine into a multi-textured whole imbued with the percolations of rhythmic syncopation and nuances of sweeping melodic lines. The tenor and contratenor lines intertwine in frequent voice crossings and together create a bed of support for the higher cantus voice. The tenor largely unfolds in graceful descending scalar gestures, and its straightforward rhythmic profile is challenged by the contratenor, which is marked by lively syncopations. The cantus combines clear melodic and tonal direction with gently syncopated rhythmic motives characteristic of the melodies in Machaut's songs in imperfect tempos with minor prolation. Machaut articulates some of the subtleties of the rondeau form (which can be schematically represented as ABaAabAB) by clever melodic repetitions. The rondeau's firm tonal anchor on C is articulated by a swift and decisive return to C just before the song's final phrase, after cadential points on a DAD octave/fifth sonority and octave Es at the end of the "A" section.

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