On February 18 and 20 of 1635 Louis XIII and select noblemen, including the newly reconciled Gaston d’Orléans, danced in the Ballet des Triomphes, ou de la vieille Cour, a grand-scale ballet that deployed comic and burlesque ballet traditions in the service of Louis XIII and his chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu’s political agenda. Theophraste Renaudot, author and editor of the official news organ, the Gazette de France, published an eyewitness description of this ballet as an Extraordinaire of the Gazette on February 21, 1635. In addition to his description of the content and flow of the entries, information absent from the printed livret, Renaudot’s text provides one of the most detailed descriptions of costume, music, and dance for a seventeenth-century court ballet. Despite this, the ballet has received little attention because it was believed to have no surviving music, which renders the descriptions interesting, but without musical context. Through a close reading of the libretto alongside Philidor’s second volume of Louis XIII ballets, F-Pn Rés F 497, I have determined that a substantial portion of the music for this ballet survives intact, some of it in both 2- and 5-part versions. Despite the lack of choreographies and costume drawings, the richness of Renaudot’s descriptions coupled with the surviving music help to create a more vivid sense of the sonic, embodied magnificence and humor of this particular spectacle. In addition, the political context of this ballet, one of six court ballets performed in the 1635 season, which even extended into Lent, offers new insight into the ways even comic and grotesque music, theater and dance functioned within the political sphere of Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIII’s France.
This paper examines the performative and political implications of the music and dance of this ballet as the spectacle simultaneously served as a vehicle to pave the way for France’s declaration of war on Spain and as a means of reincorporating (and disciplining) the rebellious Gaston d’Orléans, whose close collaborater, the Duc de Puylaurens was arrested during the rehearsals for this ballet. The conceit that all of the performers are shades called back to life by the now and future triumphs of Louis XIII allowed the ballet creators to indulge in fancy that combined old-fashioned dancing and costumes, grotesque characters, and depictions of Paris past and present in the service of the King and Richelieu’s political goals. Throughout, the ballet scenario, especially in the first two parts, asserts the superiority of Bourbon performance—both military and dance—to the Valois court. Charles de Valois, duc d’Angoulesme, illegitimate son of Charles IX dances as a decrepit, grotesque prince of the former court whose role is to watch the unfolding festivities, while the princess, whose Lady of Honor is danced by Louis XIII, is modeled on Marguerite de Valois, and presented here as a ridiculous figure and danced by a professional dancer. Renaudot’s newspaper account asserted Louis XIII as a virtuoso performer, able to dance in the role and ungainly costume of a Lady of Honor for nearly three-quarters of an hour, and remaining in perfect character while also maintaining his royal dignity. Gaston’s roles place him first as a courtier, of lesser rank than the Lady of Honor (danced by the King), and secondly, as a potentially disruptive figure, a Follet, whose costume and music (and presumably, dance) suggest a flighty, malign figure, but one who can do no real harm. The surviving music as illuminated by the descriptions of the dance and actions reinforces an understanding of this ballet as both comic and deadly serious. Vivid grotesque and humorous music and dance served serious political ends, and remained enough in the memory of the court that just over half of the 15 airs making up the misdated “Concert à Louis XIII par les 24 Violons et les 12 Grand hautbois” are drawn from this 1635 ballet.
The wealth of source material for this ballet offers glimpses of the ways the political can be embedded within the comic and serious elements of scenario, dance, music and costume at the court of Louis XIII. With its detailed description, newly identified music, and political positioning in official accounts as a magnificent spectacle intended for the King’s personal divertissement and that of his courtiers, with whom he may circulate as does the sun among the planets, and unofficial accounts that suggest a darker understanding of the ballet’s politics, the 1635 Ballet des Triomphes ou de la vieille cour offers unprecedented insight into how a comic ballet can function as both entertainment and discipline.
