Princess Henrietta of England, Duchess of Orléans - the first ballerina?: Women’s History Month in Dance, 2021
Women’s History Month in Dance 2. Who was the first ballerina? Traditionally, the title has been accorded to Mademoiselle de Lafontaine, who made her debut in 1681 at the Paris Opéra, led onto the stage by the composer Lully himself. But a few years ago, in her blog “Dance in History”, Moira Goff, an astute historian of baroque dance, made a counter-claim with “Madame. The first ballerina?” https://danceinhistory.com/2015/02/12/madame-the-first-ballerina/
The “Madame” to whom she refers was Princess Henrietta of England (1644-1670), daughter of Charles I of England and Scotland and his wife Queen Henrietta Maria. Princess Henrietta spent most of her childhood in Paris; she escaped the English Civil War, after which her father was executed and no king or queen was allowed, although she found herself in a series of French civil wars, the five-year Fronde (1648-1653), during which forces sought to limit the powers of the young king, Louis XIV. Ultimately Louis won those French civil wars, successfully proclaiming regal absolutism with a completeness that was seen as a form of genius. The etiquette of court life was choreography; all public behaviour was formally significant. This was an era when court ballet - the ballet de cour, in which the royal family and its courtiers performed - was a form of propaganda. Louis, his own finest dancer, danced the roles of the Sun and Apollo in 1653, aged fourteen, in the thirteen-hour-long “Le Ballet de la Nuit”. The roles provided the idea for his most celebrated feat of symbolism: he became the Sun King, le roi soleil, source of energy and inspiration to his realm, the sun published everywhere as his sign.
Henrietta - first known as Henriette d’Angleterre, then as Anne - was Louis’s first cousin (and a strong candidate to be his bride). In 1660, when she was almost sixteen, her eldest brother returned to Britain as King Charles II; Louis married another of his first cousins, the infanta of Spain; Henriette or Anne - now sought as bride by Louis’s only brother Philippe, duc d’Orléans (1630-1701), known as “Monsieur”, who was already at the epicentre of a long series of homosexual court scandals - joined her brother Charles, who loved her dearly, in England for some months. During that time, her marriage to Philippe was arranged. When she returned to France in 1661, before her sixteenth birthday, she was transformed from a quiet girl into a sparkling princess - and the finest dancer at court.
She now married Philippe, became a leading patron of the arts, and enchanted all who met her. As wife of Monsieur, she was known as Madame. Although he remained homosexual, with a number of boyfriends who were a constant source of intrigue and sometimes perhaps of poison, he too felt affection for her. As she wryly remarked at a later date, “Even Monsieur loved me for six weeks.” Moreover, he sired three children by her. (The paternity of one was privately doubted at the time, but not all.)
Nobody was more evidently enamoured by her than her royal brother-in-law. He and she were the finest dancers at court. Apollo was one of his most celebrated roles; her first role in court ballet was as Diana (Diane), Apollo’s sister, in the “Ballet des Saisons” (1661). In the 1663 Ballet des Arts, she was a bergère (shepherdess) to his berger ; she later returned as the goddess Pallas Athene. In 1665, she danced the role of Vénus in the “Ballet de la Naissance de Vénus”, performed in her own apartments. In a later entrée in this ballet, she danced Roxane, captivating mistress of Alexander the Great; Alexander was Louis himself.
The infatuation between the king and Madame was intense for a while. (Some rumours also had it that he was the father of her first child, a daughter, though another candidate was one of her husband’s most handsome and bisexual lovers, the Comte de Guiche.) Soon, to disguise the reason for his many visits to her apartments, Louis feigned a love for one of her ladies-in-waiting, Louise de la Vallière - but almost at once his love became real. (Nancy Mitford’s classic book “The Sun King” begins with the words “Louis XIV fell in love with Versailles and Louise de la Vallière at the same time; Versailles was the love of his life.”) Indeed, it was among Madame’s entourage that Louis met his three most prestigious mistresses - Louise de la Vallière (1644-1710), whom he made a duchess and who, after giving him five illegitimate children in five years, became a Carmelite nun for the final thirty-six years of her life; Athénaïs, marquise de Montespan (1640-1707), mother of seven of his illegitimate children; and Françoise, Madame de Maintenon (1635-1719), who became his morganatic wife after the queen’s death. All of them danced in the court ballets of the 1660s.
Madame’s apartments were a hub of the arts. She had paintings by Correggio and van Dyck; the playwrights Molière and Racine were her friends. She reached her ballet apogee in 1666 in the Ballet des Muses, dancing again beside Louis in several roles. Pregnancies kept her from appearing in later ballets, one of which, the “Ballet de Flore” (1669), was planned for her.
The next year, 1670, Madame suddenly died, aged only twenty-six. (One possible cause was immediately considered to be poison.) As Moira Goff observes, the “Ballet de Flore” may have been the last ballet in which Louis XIV himself appeared. There were several reasons why he retired from court ballet (and soon handed it over to professional dancers); Goff speculated that the absence of Madame may have been one of them.
She is often referred to as “the first Madame”; Monsieur remarried. The second Madame, “Liselotte” (also in the line of succession to the English and Scottish throne) was less of a dancer (though good enough to win Louis’s admiration - he danced with her in court balls), but has become more celebrated as one of the wittiest and most vivid of all writers of letters. (The Duc de Saint-Simon in his memoirs relates an anecdote about this second Madame and Louis XIV that perfectly illustrates the connection of ballet terminology to court etiquette: when the king offended her by marrying her son to one of his illegitimate daughters, he paid his apologetic respects for her by making a “révérence”, bowing low, but Liselotte indicated her annoyance by making a “pirouette”, a sharp turn, so that when Louis rose from his bow, he found he was now facing her back.) She regarded ballet as one of the most eminent arts. In 1718, after the deaths of her husband and Louis, even though her son was now Regent of France, she wrote “When I came to France, I got to know people who will probably not be around for centuries. There were Lully for the music; Beauchamp for the ballet; Corneille and Racine for tragedy; Molière for comedy; the Chamelle and the Beauval, actresses; Baron, Lafleur, Torilière and Guérin, actors. All of these people were excellent in their field ... Everything you see or hear now does not match them.”
The first Madame is only one of the women we may consider as the first ballerina. Goff has also written of Mademoiselle Verpré https://danceinhistory.com/2015/03/23/mlle-de-verpre-the-first-female-professional-dancer/ , who, a more virtuoso technician and a professional dancer, danced in court ballets between 1658 and 1665, sometimes in the same performances as Madame. Because Madame and other leading dancers of the court were active, dance history has tended to ignore these professionals. But Louis XIV had made ballet an art in which the ruling class shone; and no dancer better exemplified the female principle of court ballet than Princess Henrietta, or Henriette, or Anne, or la duchesse d’Orléans, or the first Madame.
#women’shistoryindance
Thursday 4 March
Princess Henriette-Anne, duchess of Orléans,
posthumous portrait by Peter Lely