This is the lute song arrangement of one of the most popular French tune for about 2 centuries. There are possibly hundreds of settings of this tune, dozens of them for the lute at various levels of virtuosity. The Bésard version, published in his monumental Thesaurus Harmonicus ca. 1603, is fairly simple but it offered some challenges for the software, which is the main reason I am posting it here.

Of those challenges, the main one included the key of the tune, mostly because I foolishly transcribed the lute part for a lute in "standard" Renaissance G-tuning. So the melody part did not make much sense unless it was transposed. Fortunately, Django offers some handy tools to reconcile mismatched parts. So, I ended up setting the melody on a C clef lowered by 4 steps - as in the original - , but transposed one full step up (to match the 3 flats in the G-tuning lute part). For the MIDI output, I transposed the output by one full step to get to the "right key" (D minor) on a lute in A. Now, those distinctions of key make no sense whatsoever for an era that preceded the invention of the tuning fork of course. Depending on the singer - and possibly the geography - , one would have chosen a bigger or smaller lute. The lute would have had in turn determined the exact pitch for the melody part. This in turn depending on how tight you could tune that treble gut string without having it snap.

How to tune a lute: tighten the treble until it breaks, then unwind a quarter turn. Tune the other strings according to the resulting treble pitch.

A second challenge was the settings of the verses in columns, which DjangoTab did not support. So I gave it a try at the code level and the result is not too bad I think (see PDF transcription).

There are always questions when transcribing verses from that period about whether it is best to preserve the original spelling, accents and punctuation. I admit I was not totally consistent there, but you have the facsimile to refer to. Of special interest is the rime between "plus" and "Vénus" perhaps, that makes me think the final "s" in Vénus may have been silent, contrary to current practice.

The original lyrics are not innocent. They tell the story of a young girl forced to enter a convent and renounce the pleasures of life. In its beginnings and with its original title, Une jeune nonette, the song was anti-Catholic at a time when religious wars were ravaging France. It was also a bit of a Huguenot soldier's song: Why waste your youth away, when we could roll in the hay? sort of concept. Besard's version by contrast  has quite sophisticated verses and the young nun is now just a girl. The story, from being quite contemporary, took on a more universal and Classical tinge - just one more Carpe Diem inspired entreaty, void it would seem from the political and religious fervors that gave it birth 30 years earlier. In concert with this depolitization of the verses, the arrangements of the tune would become increasingly more sophisticated and international in nature. Daniel Batchelard in England, Piccinini in Italy, an anonymous setting in the Schele MS in Germany and countless others would weave intricate virtuosi divisions on the basis of what was originally a simple catchy song.

Below is a version of the original text of the song: