In any stylistic study of Gautier's writing, including his rhetorical wordplay and audacious rhyming, the architecture of his painstakingly constructed artistic and spiritual edifice can scarcely be relegated to the background. On the contrary, it is central to his enterprise and demonstrates clearly his minute (and continuing) attention to stylistic and textual matters, including his handling of discrete formal units which we shall be considering in this chapter. At the conclusion of his autobiographically enlivened account of Ildefonsus of Toledo Gautier presents himself as a writer exclusively concerned to honour Our Lady, whose favour is his unique inspiration and reward. The mere mention of writing characteristically generates rimes équivoques, homophonous word-rhymes, as he compares and contrasts his activities as a sort of jongleur de Notre Dame with those of the secular poets and entertainers:

Gautier insists that he does not compose for material gain: ‘Je ne truis pas por avoir pris / Ne por robes ne por avoir’ (2322–3), ‘Je ne truis pas por avoir robe’ (2327), ‘Je ne truis mie por avoir’ (2333). Unlike mere entertainers, he is guided only by piety and an aesthetic which is nourishd by that piety.