Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE GREAT ERA OF THE FRENCH BALLET I THE FAMOUS DANSEUSES ANY inquiry into the evolution in the nineteenth century ballet tempts only a word about that long period of the dance which coursed from the era of Louis XIV, its first magnificent patron in France, to the epoch of Taglioni. Yet during the eighteenth century the theater dance flourished preeminently among the Parisians. One reads of Camargo who, about 1730, leaped the first entrechat in their capital. She mounted entrechats-4. Thirty years later en- trechats-6 were seen there, followed after a time by entrechats-8. In her days, too, there was the famous Salle, whom Voltaire made the pendant to her in some memorable verses. Salle invented the ballet-pantomime and did more to form the ballet into what it is to-day than any danseuse before Taglioni. One learns that the dance of Salle was nai've, graceful, frilled neither with gambades nor sauts, and that she never scaled an entrechat nor twirled a pirouette. Ballets were the favorable diversion in the fetes of the Court and nobility in.those times, as may be judged from the fact that the famous duchess of Maine disported in at least thirty-seven. The theater dance supplied the models for the manners and courtesies of society. French politeness and grace were due in no small measure to the cult of the ballet among the best classes. It is well known that the dancer Martel said he could always tell a statesman by his walk. For, as a rule, the leading Frenchmen of the century not only loved the spectacular dance, but took pride in imitating its elegancies. Frederick the Great, the then Frenchman of Germany, spoke from experience when he observed that he "should rather manage an army than a ballet, for it is easier to win a battle than make a ballet dance." In th...