Throughout her tempestuous life, Marguerite de Valois danced. Whether she was beset with marital troubles, exiled or imprisoned, serving on diplomatic missions for her brother or her husband, as a child participating in international festivities, or standing in for the king of Navarre or the king of France, the queen danced, and organised balls and ballets.

This essay presents a picture of her choreographic endeavours from her youth into old age, and attempts to capture the quality of her dancing, thought by all who saw her as remarkable. Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, for example, tried to put into words the effect upon him of her beauty and her superlative talent.Footnote ¹ He envied the poet who could capture, better than he could, the transformative nature of her dancing. Her grace and her seductive powers when dancing could only be conjured up and transmitted (he wrote) either by reference to heroines from the past (Nicquée from Amadis de Gaule, for instance; or the goddess Aurora who brought light to the world), or by a poet as gifted as Pierre de Ronsard, whose dazzling evocation of her performance of the volta performed with her music-loving brother, Charles IX, will form my conclusion.

I begin at the end of her career: in Paris in 1612, when the marriage negotiations between France and Spain had almost reached a satisfactory conclusion. The Spanish ambassador, the duc de Pastrana, had arrived in the French capital, and it was necessary to keep him fully entertained. Marguerite de Valois took her share of the burden by organising a magnificent ball in her Paris residence, the main hall of which had been arranged as if it were an amphitheatre. Details of the occasion were recorded in Le grand bal de la royne Marguerite faict devant le Roy, la Royne et Madame, an account published immediately after the event held on 26 August 1612, by Jean Rigaut in Paris.Footnote ² In order to impress, Marguerite, who, after her divorce from Henri IV had reconciled herself with the Royal Family, and subsequently played a very active role in all its affairs, had decked herself out in her usual fashion, that is to say in the most expensive manner, her gown covered all over with pearls and diamonds. Despite the elegance and richness of the clothes of other ladies and courtiers, and especially the attire of members of the Royal family, no one could rival their hostess’s extravagance.

The ball began with branles when the king took charge of the dancing; courantes followed, and then canaries – a form of galliard which was more vigorous and challenging than the previous well-known social dances, during which the duc de Pastrana, an accomplished and lively dancer, performed for a while on his own. This choreographic spectacle culminated in the late evening with a dazzling display from a gentleman from Provence, named Monsieur d’Antibon, otherwise unknown yet famous at the time for his astounding ability to leap into the air and perform multiple caprioles and entrechats. After these feats, the desire to dance persisted, and the branles began again, danced by the whole company until late into the night. The importance of Marguerite’s contribution to the efforts to impress the ambassador extraordinary from Spain is signalled by the immediate publication describing in unusual detail the dances, the jewels and the expensive costumes. A point to note is that not all those invited were expected to dance. The large majority formed the audience filling the amphitheatre; they witnessed the choreographic spectacle and participated in it insofar as their elaborate outfits represented a show in themselves.

The Grand Bal of 1612 shows that Marguerite de Valois took her court duties very seriously, and there is further evidence of this. Since her return to the capital in 1605, her presence at court ceremonial had been assiduous. For the celebrated Ballet de Monseigneur de Vendosme, for example, performed in 1610,Footnote ³ Marguerite sat prominently at the side of the king himself: ‘Le roy assis sur son siège Royal, et magnifique au dessous dudit Detz, la Royne et la Royne Marguerite auprès de sa Majesté.’Footnote ⁴ In the same year as the Grand Bal, 1612, in the month of April, the famous Carrousel had taken place on the newly constructed Place Royale, where the same mixture of courtly viewing and noble activity was apparent.Footnote ⁵ Although she was a mere observer of the so-called military feats performed on this occasion, Marguerite’s importance was visibly acknowledged. She had her own tribune located at the extreme south end of the lists. It was a mobile structure, mounted on wheels for her convenience and that of her large entourage. Thus, her presence as a significant court figure and her role as a provider of entertainment for visiting dignitaries were underlined. How had she acquired this degree of respect and distinction?

From a very early age Marguerite had been taught by Catherine de Médicis to appreciate the importance of appearances, and to master the skills needed to present an accomplished figure to the world: notably, deportment, conversation, dance and music. She showed an early interest in ceremony, and a particular penchant for the dance, having studied its diverse forms closely. Her skills were readily appreciated and used, not to say exploited. At Lyon, in 1564, for instance, at the age of 11, she was seen dancing with her brother at a ball given by the duc de Guise, and her performance was much admired.Footnote ⁶ In 1565, now 12 years old, she accompanied her mother and the French court on the long two-year journey which took them through France before arriving at Bayonne, where important negotiations with Spanish representatives from Philip II trailed on for many weeks.Footnote ⁷ Marguerite was witness to all the multiple festivities, and especially enjoyed the danced spectacles, put on to divert both courts. So interested was she in the choreography that, in remarkable detail, she recalled some of these performances in her memoirs. In her account, written many years later, it is possible that she conflated memories of later festivals as she tried to pin down the figures she had so admired at Bayonne.Footnote ⁸ However, what is interesting is not so much the accuracy of the evidence but the nature of her observations.

In her memoirs, she described a set of dances performed by the provinces of France; she may actually have been recalling here the ballet performed to entertain the Polish Ambassadors on their visit to Paris in 1573,Footnote ⁹ but she attributes the dances to Bayonne, and describes the use of musical instruments, which were certainly not employed in Paris at the later date. The famous choreographer Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx and the dancing master Pompeo Diabono had accompanied the court on its journey; the former devised the ballets at Bayonne while the latter rehearsed the ladies in their steps.Footnote ¹⁰ Marguerite, in her recollections, specified that each province displayed its particular style of dancing, accompanied by musical instruments popular in each region. She describes these dances as follows;

Marguerite also remembered ‘le beau ballet’ danced by nymphs who had come into the temporary hall, descending from a mobile mountain filled with lights; the violin music which accompanied the dancing was played by a great troupe of satyrs.Footnote ¹² In her recollections, Marguerite displays her sound knowledge of the diverse musical instruments;Footnote ¹³ she distinguishes between the different dance steps: the famous high-leaping volta which originated in Provence and the fast movements of the ladies from Brittany. She also throws light on the diversity of court dances as well as on the fact that court ladies could imitate different styles and fashions of diverse countries while also participating in the complex figures of a ballet de cour.

Obviously, such interest and such power of recall came from a highly educated person. We know that the princess had her own dancing master, for very early in her life while she was still at Amboise, she had lessons from dancing master Paul de Rege.Footnote ¹⁴ Her music instructor was the celebrated Estienne Le Roy, who was to sing at her wedding, and who was singularly loved by Charles IX, who regarded him as the ultimate judge of what was best in music.Footnote ¹⁵ Long before, however, in 1560, Charles Chevalier (oboe player and violinist) had been employed to teach the 7-year-old princess.Footnote ¹⁶ She was learned in letters so that she could make speeches in Latin to foreign visitors who knew no French, and she wrote elegantly in prose and verse. She had the Hellenist Pierre Du Chastel as her teacher, and had studied theology and philosophy to the extent that, throughout her life, whether in favour or in disgrace, she surrounded herself with learned scholars. Guy du Faur de Pibrac was chancellor of her household for six years; other scholars in her entourage were François Hotman, Jean Baudoin and Mademoiselle de Gournay (the so-called niece of Michel de Montaigne), to cite but three examples. Indeed, so renowned was she for her talents and eager curiosity that, in his Histoire du roy Louis XIII (published in 1635), Scipion Dupleix described her household as resembling an Academy dedicated to Apollo and the Muses: ‘Sa maison sembloit estre une Académie consacrée à Apollon et aux Muses’.Footnote ¹⁷ In her Library, she had editions of Aristotle’s Politics and a copy of Plato’s Republic; Bénévant’s translation into French (or rather paraphrase of Plato’s work) was dedicated to Marguerite: ‘Les discours de la Philosophie ausquels vostre Majesté se plaist particulièrement’.Footnote ¹⁸

Such expertise was appreciated and exploited to the full at the French court. A precious document survives in the Vatican archives, the diary of an eyewitness at the French Court in the Spring of 1572.Footnote ¹⁹ It was written by Giovanni Venturino da Fabiano, who had accompanied cardinal legate Alessandrino di Santa Maria sopra Minerva, who came to France on the pope’s business. In his account, Venturino noted all the spectacles given at court during their stay: 8–24 February.Footnote ²⁰ Overwhelmed by the diversity, ingenuity and expertise of the dances he saw, Venturino describes in detail the entertainments at Carnival time when the French Court was at Blois.Footnote ²¹ Many performances involved Marguerite, both as dancer and deviser of ballets. From Venturino’s reminiscences, we gain some insight into her passion for dancing, into the variety of dances which she could perform, and into the extraordinary range of costumes and music created for these occasions. Consider those entertainments enjoyed at Blois from 12 February, the beginning of carnival time, to 24 February, when the court left Blois for Paris. On 12 February, Marguerite, with ten of her ladies in waiting, all dressed as men, performed a simulated joust dancing opposite ten other male dancers dressed as women. They danced, writes Venturino, as though they were making love:

The following day, Marguerite offered a mascarade of Moors for which she and her ladies were dressed in white and yellow garments, arms, hands and ears all adorned with jewels. For their moresco they were led into the hall with pipes and viols;Footnote ²³ a Spanish pavane followed with measured steps marked out by the beat of drums; while the final gypsy-type dance was done to the music of kettledrums and pipes. The next night, having shown her skills in a ‘gaillarde à la lombarde’, devised for the occasion by the Milanese dancing master Pompeo Diabono, in common with other members of the court, Marguerite danced ‘des allemandes’. For the performance of this slow and stately dance, Charles IX and Marguerite wore long robes of cloth of gold and silver, caught at the waist with broad, ornamented belts; their heads were decorated with high and complex headdresses and they moved elegantly across the floor controlling their long trains. The harps, violins and other musical instruments (‘con varii stromenti musicali’)Footnote ²⁴ that accompanied their dance sometimes performed to the harmonies of choirs; or, as on the evening of 17 February, to the sound of more military music when they danced in the manner of Hungarians, all dressed up with helmets, plumes and other warlike accoutrements. A ball provided the climax to the marriage of the comte de Tende with Mademoiselle de Turin, which was celebrated during carnival and when, as was the custom, the king danced with the bride and Marguerite with the duc de Bouillon. On the following evenings, Venturino witnessed other varied dancing, that of bohemians intermingled with traditional ballroom dances.

It is not surprising that the celebrations arranged by the Cardinal de Bourbon for Marguerite’s marriage to Henri de Navarre in August 1572 were designed to reflect her tastes and skills.Footnote ²⁵ Major artists and poets collaborated to create the first royal ballet to be danced in the Salle du Petit Bourbon du Louvre, the largest and tallest hall in France, erected by Métézeau in 1570. The action of the ballet was built on Ronsard’s Paradis d’Amour, which began with a simulated combat between Charles IX and his brothers defending paradise against Henri de Navarre and several Protestant noblemen.Footnote ²⁶ Their fierce exchanges, representing a stylised kind of Pyrrhic, were probably performed to the music of Claude Le Jeune, whose works ‘Arm’arm’ and ‘Chercher de combler’ were composed for the wedding, and were sung and danced together and much appreciated by an enthusiastic audience. Their performance was suddenly interrupted by the descent from the heavens of Mercury, played by Estienne le Roy, who sang verses composed by Ronsard; he was accompanied by Cupid. Both argued most persuasively that it was Love which had interrupted the contest (an undoubted reference to the current tense political and religious situation); they sang that royal love had brought down heavenly influences, creating harmony that would radiate through the court. Such harmonies had been striven for by the experiments in the Académie de Poésie et de Musique founded two years earlier for Charles IX.Footnote ²⁷ Antoine de Baïf and Jacques Mauduit, members of that Academy, had both collaborated on the music for the wedding choreography created by the master Beaujoyeulx, whose ballet was made up of ‘danses très ingénieusement figurées’.Footnote ²⁸ Both musicians knew how to accord the measure of their music with the movements and steps of the dancers, thus the ballet, by twelve nymphs (ladies of the court), through the figures of their dancing, enticed the whole company – the king and his adversaries – into Paradise.Footnote ²⁹ The ballet lasted for over an hour and required assistance from outside over and above the resources which the court could provide. Musicians were borrowed from the city of Paris, and violinists were brought in from as far away as Avignon.Footnote ³⁰ Charles IX also enhanced the emoluments of his own musicians, such as Jehan Coulon (‘maître joueur d’instruments’), in the king’s employ since 1567, for the extra service they gave on the occasion of the wedding.Footnote ³¹ What is interesting for the historian is that the ingenious figurations of the ballet mirrored the harmonic and conciliatory intentions which, for the next thirty years, were to be the hallmark of French ballet de cour.Footnote ³² From her own knowledge of and expertise in the choreographic arts, Marguerite de Valois was in her element during her wedding celebrations, although they were to be forever marred by the Massacre of Saint Bartholomew which followed.

We know that Marguerite’s talent for dancing was remarkable partly from the number of times the court called upon her to perform before important strangers and to impress them with the quality of culture at the French court, and partly from the many contemporaries who commented on her skills as a dancer and on her elegance. The most enthusiastic and devoted admirer was (as noted above) Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme. In his account of the French court for the final decades of the sixteenth century, he praised her talents as a dancer many times. Describing her dancing a pavane (in 1570), for example, he emphasised her dignified bearing, her stately demeanour and her steps, which slid softly along the ground, arousing the admiration of all those who saw her dance. And, he continued:

The stress is here on her expertise and the elegance and simplicity of her changes of rhythm. Continuing, he said that in no way was her dignity affected by the sudden gaiety of her disposition when she moved from the slow pavane to the sprightly galliard. A drawing made by Antoine Caron for the Valois TapestriesFootnote ³⁴ shows Marguerite dancing such a pavane with her brother Charles IX; they are performing to impress the Polish Ambassadors who had come to Paris in 1573 to claim the duc d’Anjou for their king.Footnote ³⁵ About the same time, in a ballet designed by Philippe Desportes, she danced disguised as the goddess Diana while her brother Charles IX took on the role of Apollo.Footnote ³⁶ The following year, 1574 at Lyon, she astonished foreign visitors by the quality of her dancing in a branle de la torche (a torch dance) when she turned a social dance into a dramatic spectacle to greet her brother, the new king Henri III, on his return to France.Footnote ³⁷

In the late 1570s, Marguerite, now Queen of Navarre, resided in her kingdom at Nérac.Footnote ³⁸ With the thirty-three ladies who served her regularly, she carried her dancing mania with her. The duc de Sully was at her court in these years; a lover of dancing himself, he was happy to report on the ‘festins, ballets et fêtes galantes’ which occurred daily, and now a queen, Marguerite was the chief organiser, presiding and acting as the lead performer, ‘au bal, qui mène la danse’.Footnote ³⁹ Her husband, Henri de Navarre, shared her fondness for dancing and disbursed a fortune in providing for the violinists and other musicians required for the dancing,Footnote ⁴⁰ which, according to Agrippa d’Aubigné, who was also of the company, happened twice a day, after dinner eaten at midday, and again in the evening.Footnote ⁴¹

Marguerite was on diplomatic mission to Flanders in 1577, for which she had prepared her own entertainment. According to the archives, she was accompanied by trumpeters, tambourine players, violinists, oboe players and Moresque dancers.Footnote ⁴² Thus, she was assuming that she would have to provide her own amusement since she expected to endure a rather uncouth reception in the towns she visited, encountering what she called ‘this natural rusticity . . . characteristic of the Flemish’ (‘cette naturelle rusticité . . . propre aux Flamands’). To her astonishment and delight, she found that Flemish nobles equalled ‘our most perfect courtiers’ (‘nos plus parfaits courtisans’). Everywhere, balls had been organised, at Cambrai and at Mons, for example; Don John of Austria had an arbour specially built at Namur so that Marguerite and her ladies could enjoy banquets and balls daily. The bishop of Liège was not to be outdone, for he had organised dancing before and after Vespers. Throughout this journey, choreographic pleasure was intermingled with politics, diplomatic discussions going forward often simultaneously with the dancing. Indeed, the rhythm of dance and music, and politics, continued unabated on her return to Paris, where she arrived, in 1578, in the nick of time to enjoy an evening’s dancing.Footnote ⁴³

What do we know about her own choreographic production once she was settled again in Paris, rue de Seine, from 1605? One might have thought that at 52 she was past the age of dancing. We have already glimpsed her presence among the ladies viewing the ballets de cour designed for Henri IV and his sons. Her own contribution seems to have been considerable. The Archives nationales record many payments made from her budget to costume makers, dress designers and jewellery experts.Footnote ⁴⁴ From this same source, we know that five violinists were kept permanently in her employment, receiving regular wages. In fact, the archives are eloquent on the number of musicians employed by Marguerite; Isabelle Handy mentions the following:

Violinists – Michel de la Porte (p. 132) and Pierre Bout (p. 527)

Lute players – Guillaume Raspot (p. 139) and Nicolas de Cambronne, who were both rewarded for having had repaired the lute case of the queen’s own instrument (pp. 93, 105, 139); also, Jean Raspault (p. 542)

Spinet player – Jehan du Lyon (p. 532)

Trumpeters – Lambert Fay and René Le Breton (pp. 533 and 538)

Dancer [baladin] – Jehan Paulle (p. 542).

The archives also inform us that all the better-known court poets worked for her, composing themes for ballets and writing verses in her praise to be put to music. There was Philippe Desportes, who had been Henri III’s favourite poet. There was Mathurin Regnier, who created the ambitious entry for Marie de Médicis into Paris in 1610, a festival which never took place. Also, there was Théophile de Viau, who, for three decades, was to design ballets for the court together with his colleagues Maynard and Jean Bertaud, who were continually busy creating ballets or writing verses which were distributed to elite members of the audience before or after each performance.Footnote ⁴⁵ Then, there was Guillaume du Baïf, son of Antoine de Baïf, who had helped to found the Académie de Poésie et de Musique; Guillaume carried on his father’s work, blending poetry and music in ways calculated to imitate the harmonies of the spheres.Footnote ⁴⁶ This formidable array of poets and musicians could be relied upon to produce fêtes at Marguerite’s residence which would attract crowds. The English ambassador, Herbert of Cherbury, for instance, was a frequent visitor, enjoying the mascarades and ballets which she organised:

Although Cherbury did not learn to dance at an early age, he loved to see balls and ballets and he advocated acquiring that art for the control it brought to the body, a kind of souplesse (he writes) which is taught most accurately by dancing masters in France. Music he acquired, however, through his own unaided efforts. For example, arriving in his early teens to pursue his studies in Oxford, he learned to sight read: ‘I attained also to sing my part at first sight in music, and to play on the lute with very little or at most no teaching.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Cherbury became so enamoured of the lute that he compiled his own lutebook (between 1626 and 1640), ‘containing / diverse selected Lessons of excellent Authors / in severall Countreys. Wherein also are some / few of my owne Composition’.Footnote ⁴⁹ While he was in Paris, Cherbury was preparing for future performances and was, therefore, an eager participant on the occasions he went to Marguerite de Valois’s residence. So popular, in fact, were her entertainments that the queen had to restrict entry to them so that her guests could enjoy the dancing comfortably.

The verses and music for many of the ballets survive, but often only in a fragmentary fashion. The manuscript of the musician Michel Henry (one of the twenty-four violons du roy) records titles of some, noting that Marguerite organised them so that they could give pleasure to the king, Henri IV.Footnote ⁵⁰ There is one ballet organised by her, in 1609, which merits special attention. The theme and verses were composed by well-known poets of the time, Jean de Lingendes and François Malherbe, and were printed in an independent collection, Recueil des vers du Balet de la Royne (1609).Footnote ⁵¹ The ballet was first danced on 31 January in the Arsenal, and a few days later in Marguerite’s own residence. Gabriel Bataille composed all the music for the songs (many performed by Mademoiselle Paulet), published in the year of the performance,Footnote ⁵² while Charles Chevalier, a veteran contributor to court ballets, provided the dance music.Footnote ⁵³ To please the king, the ballet’s political theme promoted the great qualities of the king and the dauphin. Again, the archives have preserved payments to workers who arranged the hall for the spectacle and brought in the provision for the five collations which the king ordered for the guests after the performance.Footnote ⁵⁴ This ballet is notable not only for the amount of detail available for its study but also because it was during the rehearsals for the performance, and at the spectacle itself, that Henri IV fell in love with Charlotte de Montmorency, one of the dancers. This amorous attack had multiple social and political consequences involving ramifications of flight and exile. It seems also that this fête was fraught with other alarming incidents, for it was on the night of the performance that the Spanish ambassador, Pierre de Tolède, apparently chose to insult the Venetian ambassador, and persuaded twenty gentlemen witnesses to the fracas to have recourse to arms, causing further entertainment from the duels which were subsequently fought. On the other hand, the chevalier Camillo Guidi, the grand duke of Tuscany’s representative in Paris, was so charmed by the ballet that he wanted to get it all down into an architectural plan, so that it might be printed out to be admired. If made, his design has not, as far as I know, survived.Footnote ⁵⁵

A last glimpse of ‘la reine Marguerite’, who did so much to promote French culture, could be the grotesque picture of the queen, transformed by the poet René Bordier into the Grande Duchesse de Billebahaut in a ballet with that name performed in 1626, designed to turn into ridicule Le grand bal de la Reyne Marguerite of 1612.Footnote ⁵⁶ At a time when burlesque ballets were in vogue and used as their theme blatant satire of members of the court, it must have seemed a legitimate source of amusement to depict the queen as a gross, ugly and clumsy duchess, and to show her consort, le sieur de Sotteville, dressed all in black as the duc de Pastrana had been. It is true that Marguerite had become unaccountably large with age, and Tallemant des Réaux, who first made the comparison between the two works, defends the parallel in his customary rather gleeful tones, describing the aged queen thus:

In other words, the queen deliberately exaggerated her proportions. Whether or not the caricature was intended, it would not do to leave the learned and ebullient queen immured in such an extravagant image.

In conclusion, therefore, let us turn to the celebrated images conjured up by Pierre de Ronsard of a female figure dancing: first the dancer alone, and then Marguerite in company again with her brother Charles IX. In one of the many sonnets addressed to his mistress, Hélène de Surgères, Ronsard evokes a ballet, in which he describes the sinuous movements and figures which repeat themselves, come together and break up again; turning, separating and blending time after time, imitating the whirling flight of birds across the sky or the flow of the river Meander.Footnote ⁵⁸ From the outset of the sonnet, Ronsard claims divine standing for the ballet: ‘Le ballet fut divin . . .’, opens the poem. It is no surprise, then, that the female dancer, too, achieves divine status as her dance transforms her movements into those of a goddess:

In a long poem, entitled La Charite (The Grace), Ronsard produced an astounding vision of Marguerite dancing the volta with Charles IX on the eve of her marriage to Henri de Navarre, although the poem was not published until 1578.Footnote ⁵⁹ Here divinity is again a given from the start of the work. It inhabits the person of Pasithée, the most gifted and the most beautiful of the Graces, who, at the request of the goddess Venus, has descended to earth in order to discover a lady who can match her own sublime qualities. She searches far and wide, and finally arrives in the midst of a ball at the Valois court. Sensed but not seen, Pasithée glides into the hall, and proceeds to fuse her own form into the dancing body of Marguerite. In Ronsard’s words, ‘Les deux corps n’estoient plus qu’une chose’ (‘The two bodies were now but one single being’). The poet then describes at length the figures of the volta, a boisterous dance with its twists, turns and leaps; yet, despite the velocity, the princess’s movements are swift and light, for she dances like the goddess she has become, and her transformation affects all who gaze upon her:

This is vision which matches the adulation of the seigneur Brantôme, and that of all those other contemporaries who praised Marguerite’s choreographic skills.

University of Sussex