Who has not felt interested in the jetees and pas de bourrees of the ancien regime, when accomplished at court by Condes, Contis, Montpensiers, Montmorencys, Rohans, Guises!  The Marquis de Dangeau first recommended himself to the favour of the royal master whose courts he was destined to journalize for posterity, by the skill of his pas de basques; and long before the all but conjugal influence of the lovely La Valliere commenced over the heart of the grand monarque, his early love, and more especially his passion for the beautiful niece of the Cardinal, may be traced to the rehearsals and rondes de jambes of Maitz and Fontainbleau.

The reign of Madame de Maintenon (la raison meme) over his affections, declared itself by the sudden transfer of a ballet-opera, expressly composed by Rameau and Quinault for the beauties of the court, to the public theatre of the Palais Royal.  No more noble figurantes at Versailles!  Louis le Pirouettiste’s occupation was gone; and the maitre des ballets du roi arrayed himself in sackcloth and ashes.  But, lo! the glories of his throne took wing with the loves and graces; ballets and victories being effaced on the same page from the annals of his reign.

During the minority of Louis XV., the same royal dansomania was renewed.  The regent, Duke of Orleans, entertained the same notions of kingly education, on this head, as his predecessor the cardinal; and Louis le Bien-aime, like his great-grandfather before him, was the best dancer of his realm.  Such dancing as it was! such exquisite footing!  In the upper story of the grand gallery at Versailles, hang several pictures representing these court ballets; Cupids in coatees of pink lustring, with silver lace and tinsel wings, wearing full-bottomed wigs and the riband of the St Esprit; or Venuses in hoops and powder, whose minauderies might afford a lesson to the divinities of our own day for the benefit of the omnibus box.

Some of these groups, by Mignard, Boucher, and their imitators, are charming studies as tableaux de genre.  But in nothing, by the way, are they more remarkable than in their decency.  The nudities of the present times appear to have been undreamed of in the philosophy of Versailles.  That simple-hearted, though strong-minded American writer, Miss Sedgwick, who has published an account of her consternation as she sat with Mrs Jameson in the stalls of our Italian opera, might have witnessed the royal performance unabashed.  On being told, as she gazed upon the intrepid self-exposure of Taglioni, “qu’il fallait etre sage pour danser comme ca,” Miss S. observes, that it requires to be more or less than woman, and proposes to divide the human species into men, women, and OPERA-DANCERS, little suspecting that half her readers translate such a classification into “men, women, and ANGELS;” or that they would see herself and her sister moralist go down in the President without a pang, provided Elssler and Taglioni were saved from the deep!