"Ballet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Europe, Russia was regarded as an ideal country by officials of all ranks! Literature was in the service of the censorship; military drill was all that was taught at the universities; the troops were trained like a ballet, and the peasants paid the taxes and were mute under the lash of serfdom. Patriotism meant the wringing of bribes from the quick and the dead. Those who did not take bribes were looked upon as rebels because they disturbed the general harmony. The birch copses were extirpated in support of discipline. ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... to go with me. It was the first time for twenty-five years since her farewell performance, that she had been inside the Opera-House. It made a great impression on her. During the ballet, especially, she trembled, she beamed, all her old triumphs sparkled in her eyes. Happy who has emotions like that. A real type, that Nabob. You will have to bring him to see me. He has a head that it would ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... "made a bout of it," and were mutually unbosoming their hearts as they entered the box. Through the fumes of a certain number of bottles and various glasses of various liquors, Giroudeau pointed out to Philippe a plump and agile little ballet-girl whom he called Florentine, whose good graces and affection, together with the box, belonged to him as the representative of an ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... hero in legend, A true type for tragedy, Mythological interpretations, Saint-Saens's opera described, et seq.—A choral prologue, Local color, The character of Dalila, et seq.—Milton on her wifehood and patriotism, "Printemps qui commence," "Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix," Oriental ballet ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... At one time he wrote an opera, which was performed with great splendour in the theatre of his palace. On this occasion the emperor led the orchestra, and his two daughters, Maria Theresa and Maria Anne, danced in the ballet. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu speaks of an opera which she saw at Vienna in 1716, the decorations and dresses of which cost the emperor thirty thousand pounds. He called Metastasio from Italy to compose the operas for his court. Maria Theresa inherited this love ...
— Among the Great Masters of Music - Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians • Walter Rowlands
... then a few of us would have been willing to begin all over, for when again could we have such a ballroom with perfect floor and such excellent music to dance by? But with the new day came a new light and all was changed, much like the change of a ballet with a new calcium light, only ours was not beautifying, but most trying to tired, painted faces; and seeing each other we decided that we could not get home too fast. In a few days the hospital will be turned ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... o'clock procession that was to march through the streets. Early in the morning, Billy was led into the sawdust ring, and a peculiar saddle like a little platform was strapped to his back. This the monkey was to dance on, dressed as a ballet girl, with yellow, spangled skirts, a satin bodice and a blue cap with a feather in ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery
... Russians in the domain of the ballet has already excited a certain amount of not unfriendly criticism. But our Muscovite visitors are not to be allowed to have it all their own way, and we understand that negotiations are already on foot with a view to enabling the Irish Ballet to give a season at a leading ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... see that, they will know what you are really like, Gerty—instead of buying your photograph in a shop from a collection of ballet-dancers and circus women. That is where you ought to be—in the Royal Academy: not in a shop-window with any mountebank. Oh, Gerty, do you know who is your latest rival in the stationers' windows? The woman who dresses herself ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... dancing, capering naked forms around them, and then the cotton duck attracted the eager, fiery tongues, and in another moment the flames seemed to leap high in the air, but the performers in the aboriginal ballet scurried for shelter. The soldiers sighted their rifles for nine hundred yards, and the little hill blazed and sputtered half a minute with a rapid discharge that sent leaden messengers whistling through the ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... damask, the bed was gilded and hung with faded pink silk curtains. Everywhere there was pink and gilding, and everywhere it was old and faded and rubbed. A few early Victorian lithographs hung on the walls, portraits of ballet-dancers and noblemen with waists and whiskers. No one had tidied the room since the night before, and fine underclothing was flung carelessly about on chairs, a fussy petticoat here, the bodice of an evening dress there; everywhere just that touch of mingled daintiness ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... administration, a ballet was invented by the elder Byrne, in which Miss Smith (since Mrs. Oscar Byrne) had a pas seul. This the lady wished to remove to a later period in the ballet. The ballet-master refused, and the lady swore she would ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... furniture, brought down by dog team from "Up River," was established at the rear extremity of the long building, just inside the entrance to the dancehall, where patrons of the drama might, with a modicum of delay and inconvenience, quaff as deeply of the beaker as of the ballet. ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... from Jean's ingenious hand. It was the bow-backed skeleton behind the door, which had been cleverly arranged as and was called "Madame la Concierge." The skeleton had been arrayed in a short conventional ballet skirt and scanty lace cap, and held a candle in one hand and a bottle marked "Absinthe" in the other. The skirt was to indicate her earlier career, the cap and candle gave an inkling of her later life, while the bottle told the probable cause of her decease. This skeleton was so controlled ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... "Like a ballet-girl!" she interjected. "I am really afraid you are old-fashioned. You begin by offering me gewgaws—the paltry price women set on themselves in the days of their intellectual infancy. We know our value ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... being what they are, why should not all the provinces of public labor and usefullness, which they are capable of occupying, be freely open to them? What else is it save prejudice that applauds a woman dancing a ballet or performing an opera, but shrinks with disgust from one delivering an oration, preaching a sermon, or casting a vote? Why is it less womanly to prescribe as a physician than to tend as a nurse? If a woman have a calling ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... brightness of her eyes by glancing up at the cornice. Madame Marneffe's triumph, however, was not face to face like that of other women. She turned sharply round to return to Lisbeth at the tea-table. This ballet-dancer's pirouette, whisking her skirts, by which she had overthrown ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... "Subjectively considered, Faust is a tragedy. Objectively, we might regard it as a comedy. To the subjective-objective view, it is certainly a ballet pantomime. Ach! he was many-sided, our GOETHE. Here in this drama he has accomplished everything. There is food for our laughter and our tears. It excites us and ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various
... attempts to imitate elegant manners. Mad Moll and her husband were another pair who flourished in tawdry, gay-colored rags, and tatters, he brandishing a sweep's broom and she a ladle. Jim Crow and a fancifully bedizened ballet-dancer in white muslin, often swelled the ranks, and the rest of the party rigged out in a profusion of gilt paper, flowers, tinsel and gewgaws, their faces and legs colored with brick-dust, made up ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... so sorry, poor, dear Squirrel,' said Anthea; 'and you were looking so lovely. I'll get a wet rag. Bobs, go and hold your hand under the hot-water tap. It's what ballet girls do with their legs when they hurt them. I saw it in ...
— The Story of the Amulet • E. Nesbit
... followed by this etat major, he is a conspicuous figure upon a field of battle, and produces much the same effect as the head of a circus riding into a town on a piebald horse, surrounded by clowns and pets of the ballet. He was the confessor of the Empress, and is now the aumonier of the Press; but why he wears jack-boots, why he capers about on a fiery horse, why he has a staff of aides-de-camp, and why he has two grooms, are things which no one seems to know. He patronises generals ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... grave and serious mien, in the later pictures, the drapery given to the angel is offensively scanty; his sandals, and bare arms, and fluttering robe, too much a l'antique; he comes in the attitude of a flying Mercury, or a dancer in a ballet. But in the early Italian pictures his dress is arranged with a kind of solemn propriety: it is that of an acolyte, white and full, and falling in large folds over his arms, and in general concealing his feet. In the German pictures, he often wears the priestly ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... satire like the foregoing had by this time begun to attract the attention of the Ministry, whose withers had already been sharply wrung by Pasquin; and it has been conjectured that the ballet of Quidam and the Patriots played no small part in precipitating the famous "Licensing Act," which was passed a few weeks afterwards. Like the marriage which succeeded the funeral of Hamlet's father, ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... who apologized for being late. He had stayed for the ballet, he said, knowing his wife was not alone. He asked Noel to come again, but got no very ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... some people went as far as to say that she disapproved of most things. Disapproval was to her what neuralgia and fancy needlework are to many other women. She disapproved of early morning tea and auction bridge, of ski-ing and the two-step, of the Russian ballet and the Chelsea Arts Club ball, of the French policy in Morocco and the British policy everywhere. It was not that she was particularly strict or narrow in her views of life, but she had been the eldest sister of a large family of self-indulgent ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... upon the stage, which we examined in its various parts and appendages while the ballet practice was proceeding. The curtain was up: the audience part of the house, from the pit to the ceiling, was covered with linen, in order to preserve the satin draperies from dust. Comparative ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various
... tell you how glad I was to see him doing so well, and how I laughed at all his foolish ideas about Maisa Hubbard. Win I felt he would, though all the ladies of the Casino ballet came out to tell him not to; and when old Dobbin, my own particular turn-out, condescended to move again, I pushed on for Belfort, no longer deluding myself that I was to be within a hundred miles of the winner, but hoping that ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton
... another thing which girls and their mothers do not seem to consider. The present mode of dress renders waltzing almost as objectionable in a large room as the boldest feats of a French ballet-dancer. Not to put too fine a point on it, I mean that these girls' gyrations in the centre of their gyrating and centrifugal hoops make a most operatic drapery-display. I saw scores and scores of public waltzing-girls last summer, and among them all I saw but one who understood ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... youth and attractions of the daughter of her first. I do not now recall her name, but she was of a noble family, of which fact the mother and daughter were very proud, and the young girl was a good musician, and sang agreeably; but, which appeared to me as ridiculous as indecent, she danced the ballet before a large company in her mother's house, in a costume almost as light as those of the opera, with castanets or tambourines, and ended her dance with a multiplicity of attitudes and graces. With such an education she naturally thought her position not at ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... a prominent part in all the early oratorios, and the composer has also left detailed instructions for its guidance. During the ritornels the four principal dancers accompanied them in "a ballet enlivened with capers," and at the close of the performance stanzas were sung, alternating with dances to ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton
... James's. Grand dinners were given by the members of the Cabinet; the theatres were free for the night to great and small; at each the National Anthem was sung amidst deafening applause; at Drury Lane there was a curious emblematical ballet—like a revival of the old masques, ending with a representation of the Queen and Prince surrounded by fireworks, which no doubt afforded immense ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... against the will of his family, he married the dancer Lamperi. With her he went first to Warsaw, and then to Berlin, where he supported himself and his children by giving lessons in the languages. One daughter was a prominent member of the Berlin ballet, the other was prepared by a most careful education to be a governess. She gave various lessons to my sisters, and criticised our proceedings sharply, as she did those of her fellow-creatures in general. "I can't help it—I Must say what I think," was the palliating remark ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... John Alien's dance-house we found it in full blast. The hour was eleven in the evening. There were thirteen girls in the saloon, three musicians in the orchestra, and seven customers submitting to the blandishments of an equal number of the ballet- dressed syrens who pervaded the room. Our party consisted of the policeman who accompanied us, three clergymen on the look out for the "elephant," Mr. Albert C. Arnold, of the ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... led the hunt in the days of his opening glory? Later, we might linger on the endless terrace, to watch the great monarch, with his red heels and his golden snuff-box and his towering periwig, come out among his courtiers, or in some elaborate grotto applaud a ballet by Moliere. When night fell there would be dancing and music in the gallery blazing with a thousand looking-glasses, or masquerades and feasting in the gardens, with the torches throwing strange shadows among the trees trimmed into artificial figures, and gay lords and proud ladies ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... while stopping for meals. That high two-wheeled trap with the little ‘tiger’ standing up behind is a tilbury. We used to see the Count d’Orsay driving one like that almost every day. He wore butter-colored gloves, and the skirts of his coat were pleated full all around, and stood out like a ballet girl’s. It is a pity they have not included Louis Philippe and his family jogging off to Neuilly in the court ‘carryall,’—the ‘Citizen King,’ with his blue umbrella between his knees, trying to ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... entertainments—balls, theatricals, concerts or pageants—to which, if they do not care to go themselves, they give away their tickets. Those who intend giving tickets should remember that a message, "Can you use two tickets for the Russian ballet to-night?" sent at seven o'clock that same evening, after the Lovejoys have settled themselves for an evening at home (Celia having decided not to curl her hair and Donald having that morning sent his only dinner coat to be re-faced) can not give the same pleasure that ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... were an abomination to the Independents. Since 1814 they have advanced, and consequently they not only go to plays and dance like other Christians, but the freer, less prejudiced, and more enlightened encourage the ballet, spend their holidays in Paris, and study French character there. Zachariah, however, had a side open to literature, and though he had never seen a play acted, he read plays. He read Shakespeare, and had often thought how wonderful one of his dramas ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... before the palace of the Exhibition, and initiate her into the mysteries of all the fashionables who passed before them. Another time he would drop into their box at the opera, deign to remain there during an act or two, and correct their as yet incomplete views of the morals of the ballet. But in all these interviews he held toward Madame Lescande the language and manner of a brother: perhaps because he secretly persisted in his delicate resolve; perhaps because he was not ignorant that every road leads to Rome—and one as surely ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... which we take from the MS. journal of a highly respectable traveller, is a more correct account: "In 1812 a Signor Guariglia induced several young persons of both sexes—none of them exceeding fifteen years of age—to accompany him on an operatic excursion; part to form the opera, and part the ballet. He contrived to get them on board a vessel, which took them to Janina, where he sold them for the basest purposes. Some died from the effect of the climate, and some from suffering. Among the few who returned were a Signor Molinari, and a female dancer named Bonfiglia, who afterwards became the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... morning when I awoke the sun was just rising behind Vesuvius; and there was a mighty display of gold and crimson in that quarter, as if the curtain was about to be lifted on a grand performance, say a ballet at San Carlo, which is the only thing the Neapolitans think worth looking at. Straight up in the air, out of the mountain, rose a white pillar, spreading out at the top like a palm-tree, or, to compare it to something ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... mentally he is dwarfed, and his effects hardly ever get beyond the orchestra. These new halls, with their circles, and upper circles, and third circles, and Louis XV Salons and Palm Courts, have been builded over the bones of old English humour. They are good for nothing except ballet, one-act plays with large effects, and tabloid grand opera. But apparently the public like them, for the old halls are going. The Tivoli site is to bear a Y.M.C.A. home, and the merriment of the Strand will be still further ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... jaw, watching the unhappy women who dance for gold—sees looming before him, as he lisps out his deep disapproval of increased knowledge and the freedom of obtaining the means of subsistence in intellectual fields by woman, and expresses his vast preference for the uncultured ballet-girl over all types of cultured and productive labouring womenhood in the universe. A subtle and profound instinct warns him, that with the increased intelligence and economic freedom of woman, he, and such as he, might ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... steamer visibly laid over as the wind took them. They gave her nearly three knots an hour, and what better could men ask? But if she had been forlorn before, this new purchase made her horrible to see. Imagine a respectable charwoman in the tights of a ballet-dancer rolling drunk along the streets, and you will come to some faint notion of the appearance of that nine-hundred-ton, well-decked, once schooner-rigged cargo-boat as she staggered under her new help, shouting ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... picture. It is unfortunate that the effect reminds one somewhat forcibly of a transformation scene of a pantomime and thus appears artificial although in reality, it is absolutely natural. The resemblance is still further strengthened by the numerous ladies of the ballet who leisurely stroll along clothed in nature's ebony black. No one seems to know the origin of the name of the town, for the Banana palm is not found ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... scenes was always a fascinating study to Dickens. "One of the oddest sights a green-room can present," he said one day, "is when they are collecting children for a pantomime. For this purpose the prompter calls together all the women in the ballet, and begins giving out their names in order, while they press about him eager for the chance of increasing their poor pay by the extra pittance their children will receive. 'Mrs. Johnson, how many?' 'Two, sir.' 'What ages?' 'Seven and ten.' 'Mrs. ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... as engage ballet singers, denote that disagreeable companions and ungrateful friends will be met with. Business will show ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... and among them were the melancholy Spicca, who was a famous duellist, and a certain Casalverde, a man of rather doubtful reputation. The others were members of what Donna Tullia called her "corps de ballet." In those days Donna Tullia's conduct was criticised, and she was thought to be emancipated, as the phrase went. Old people opened their eyes at the spectacle of the gay young widow going off into the ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... there again. She saw him when she took her first glance at the restless Manhattan audience—down in the front row with his head bent a bit forward and his gray eyes fixed on her. And she knew that to him they were alone together in a world where the high-rouged row of ballet faces and the massed whines of the violins were as imperceivable as powder on a marble Venus. An instinctive defiance ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the screening earth, and underneath we find the roots of all those flowers intertwined and matted, so that it is impossible to tell which belong to the Count and which to Wasner, the coachman, which to Miss Lolo, the ballet-dancer, and which to ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... the Crane, the form in which this ballad is now known is no witness of its antiquity. A 'ballet of the Ryche man and poor Lazarus' was licensed to be printed in 1558; 'a ballett, ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... CREATURE. Drop it. What's the good of the secrecy of the ballet if people are going to remember every single ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... touched. And we, a little envious of those who did once see Grisi plain, always shall find solace in this pretty picture of her; holding it to be, for all the artificiality of its convention, as much more real as it is prettier than the stringent ballet-girls of Degas. ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... would be all different. Everything depended on her own balance and accuracy. It would be all trick work then, not riding. As she slid out of her habit and into the ugly ballet-skirts she loathed, her courage vanished and she trembled as she faced the audience for the second time, transformed in white satin and pale blue, the thinness of her ...
— The Hippodrome • Rachel Hayward
... altogether incapable. For many years he continued to discharge splenetic remarks about his music, and he was always annoyed at being called his pupil. "I never learned anything from Haydn," he would say; "he never would correct my mistakes." When, the day after the production of his ballet music to Prometheus, he met Haydn in the street, the old man observed to him: "I heard your music last night; I liked it very well." To which Beethoven, alluding to Haydn's oratorio, replied: "Oh! ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... going on, where no Viennese lady, so the baroness declared, would think of being seen, because confetti-throwing was only resorted to by the canaille (and officers and husbands of high-born ladies, who went there with their little friends of the ballet and chorus), but where we did go, contrary to all precedent, persuading the baroness to make up a smart party and "go slumming." Her husband being in Italy, she had no fear of meeting him there, and she took good care to send an invitation to any one who might have ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... literature. In one word, education in science produces specialists; and specialists, though most useful and valuable persons in their proper place, are no more the staple of a civilised community than engine-drivers or ballet-dancers. ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... prepared to fulfil their divine mission on earth. An illustration of this truth is the fact that quite recently over six hundred personal applications—mostly made by girls of from fifteen to twenty—were made in one day at the Grand Opera House in New York to fill places in the ballet and Oriental marches of the spectacle of Lalla Rookh. Assuredly this fact is evidence that the women in New York, like so many women in all quarters of the land, are unwilling to do the work which properly belongs to them to do, and prefer any shift, even ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... the officers here the only ones with whom I can find plenty to talk about are the generals. On what subject under heaven could one talk to a lieutenant? I cannot discuss the agility of ballet-dancers or the merits of jockeys with him, because these things are as dust and ashes to me; and when forced for a few moments by my duties as hostess to come within range of his conversation I feel chilly and grown old. In ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Gleaming towers, reflecting the last rays of the setting sun, loomed just ahead of him, and the wavy lines of heat rising out of the sandy deserts seemed to make the buildings dance. It was a sunset ballet that never failed to thrill even ...
— Sabotage in Space • Carey Rockwell
... a turn, and Mademoiselle Le Breton took the hint at once. She called others to the front—it was like a change of dancers in the ballet—while she rested, no less charming as a listener than as a talker, her black eyes turning from one to another and radiant ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Saint-Germain and leave her for a short time until she recovered. This stately coquette did not choose to be seen in the midst of medical appliances and without the splendors of apparel. Catherine arranged, as a welcome to her husband, a magnificent ballet, in which six beautiful young girls were to recite a poem in his honor. She chose for this function Miss Fleming, a relation of her uncle the Duke of Albany, the handsomest young woman, some say, that was ever seen, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... well as children; no grace is equal to their grace; but to go into a hotel at ten o'clock at night, and see little things, eight, ten, twelve years old, who ought to be in bed and asleep, tricked out in flounces and ribbons and all the paraphernalia of ballet-girls, and dancing in the centre of a hollow square of strangers,—I call it murder in the first degree. What can mothers be thinking of to abuse their children so? Children are naturally healthy and simple; why should they be ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... First Quarrel, The Wedding Breakfast, Psyche at the Fountain. The mantel's chastely severe outline was ingloriously veiled behind some pert drapery drawn rakishly askew like the sashes of the Amazonian ballet. Upon it was some desolate flotsam cast aside by the room's marooned when a lucky sail had borne them to a fresh port—a trifling vase or two, pictures of actresses, a medicine bottle, some stray cards out ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... still conscious of stiffness, Esmeralda? That is not a matter for surprise or for anxiety. All your life you have been working for strength, for even your dancing-school teacher was not one of those scientific ballet-masters who, like Carlo Blasis, would have taught you that the strength of a muscle often deprives it of flexibility and softness. You desire that your muscles should be rigid or relaxed at will. Go and stand in front of your mirror, and let your head drop forward toward either ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... patriotic songs they listen respectfully. A song which breathes the glories of literature as represented by Montaigne, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Moliere is tolerated idly. But when the stage is presently cleared for a ballet the young blousards—for they are mostly young men who gather here—are all attention. What is their disgust at perceiving that the dancers are men in ancient Greek costumes, who do a sword-fight ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... radiant afternoon at Moulay Idriss, above the vine-garlanded square, and against the background of piled-up terraces, their vivid groups were in such contrast to the usual gray assemblages of the East that the scene seemed like a setting for some extravagantly staged ballet. ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... words to me about the delight which an artist's soul feels in coming into direct contact with the seething life of the people, and she mentioned with appreciation a French picture, one of Degas' I think, which represents ballet dancers practising their art. Then she and Gorman settled down in two of the three seats reserved for us. Ascher and I retired modestly to the back of what I may call the dress circle. After a while when the performance was well under way, Gorman's brother came in. I suppose the greater ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... the name Canaries to be that of a dance in use in those islands. But he thinks it more likely to have originated in a Ballet in a Mascarade, where the dancers were clad as kings and queens 'de Mauritanie,' as savages, with various coloured feathers. He says it is danced by a gentleman and a lady, from opposite ends of the room, each advancing and then ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... held to be nearer the professional singer's plane. But when people tried to follow Wagner's instructions to the letter, they proceeded so clumsily and timidly that they were not incapable of representing the midnight riot in the second act of the Meistersingers by a group of ballet-dancers. They seemed to do all this, however, in perfectly good faith—without the smallest evil intention. Wagner's devoted efforts to show, by means of his own example, the correct and complete way of performing his works, and his attempts at training ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Court there were the "masks" or "ballets" in which the great took part, wrapped in starry draperies, disguised with gold beards, dressed in skins or feathers, as were at Paris King Charles VI. and his friends on the 29th of January, 1392, in the famous Ballet of Wild Men, since called, from the catastrophe which happened, "Ballet des Ardents" (of men in fire). The taste for ballets and Masks was one of long duration; the Tudors and Stuarts were as fond of them as the Plantagenets, so much so that a branch apart in dramatic literature was created ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... known as Egalite, was one of the most interesting figures among the old nobility. The great-great-great-grandson of Louis XIII, he was a distant cousin of Louis XVI, and ranked as the first noble of France beyond the royal family. His education had been unfortunate. His father lived with a ballet-dancer, while his mother, the Princess Henriette de Bourbon-Conti, scandalized a society which was not easily shocked. During the Terror the sans culottes everywhere averred that the Duke was the son ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... is considered "light work." Thirty pounds of the clean cotton is considered a good day's work. It is pretty severe for the knees. Women gin with the men. The movement of "jump and change feet" when one knee gets tired should be introduced into the ballet; ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... a letter of four whole pages, and expects that I should read it, and, what is more, answer it also; I, who have to go to parade, then dine, then attend the rehearsal of an opera, and the ballet which the cadets will dance at. I will tell her plainly that I have not time, and, if she is vexed, I will quarrel with her ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... king, who was a hundred paces behind the storming party, ahead of his regiment of guards. "'Sir,' said he, 'the company is ready, the violins have come in,'and the masks are at the door; when your Majesty pleases, we will commence the ballet.' 'The king came up to me, and said to me angrily, "Do you know, pray, that we have but five hundred pounds of lead in the park of artillery?" 'I said to him, 'It is a pretty time to think of that. Must the ballet not dance, for lack ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... you live? How nicely you have arranged the room. I never saw a room like this before. How different from the convent! What would the nuns think if they saw me here? What strange pictures!—those ballet-girls; they remind me of the pantomime. Did you buy ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... visited Niblo's in New York during the ballet season. When the short-skirted, gossamer clad nymphs made their appearance on the stage they ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... no ballet! And there used always to be a ballet! You remember," the reader said, "how beatific it always was to have the minor coryphees subside in nebulous ranks on either side of the stage, and have the ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... born sovereign of men, and she felt it. It was her divine right to be preferred. She trod the earth with dainty feet, and a step aspiring as that of the fair Louise de La Valliere when she danced in the royal ballet in the forest of Fontainebleau and stole a king's heart by the flashes of her pretty feet. Angelique had been indulged by her father in every caprice, and in the gay world inhaled the incense of ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... was the name of the Bacchanal Queen—"My sister!"—and with one bound, light as a ballet-dancer, she sprang from her movable throne (which fortunately just happened to be stopping), and, rushing up to the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... in mathematics, in which he suspected he was somewhat deficient. But when the same officious friend laughed at him, and called him "green," he determined to trust to fortune, and henceforth devoted himself the more assiduously to the French ballet, where he had already made ...
— A Good-For-Nothing - 1876 • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... few days in any place or in any occupation. He commands his armies in person. He has won distinction as a writer and a public speaker. He is an excellent shot. He has composed music, written verses, superintended the production of a ballet, painted a picture; the beautiful Byzantine chapel in the Castle of Posen shows his genius for architecture; and, clothed in a clergyman's surplice, he has preached a sermon in Jerusalem. What ruler in all history has exhibited such ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... simulated attitude of simplicity—all now struck him as perfectly comprehensible. He recalled the actress's inimitable touch in certain picturesque realistic details in the dairy—which she had not spared him; he recognized it now even in their bowered confidences (how like a pretty ballet scene their whole interview on the rustic bench was!), and it breathed through their entire conversation—to their theatrical parting at the close! And the whole story of the photograph was, no doubt, as pure a dramatic invention as the rest! The ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... first, as if it had been a ballet-girl of San Carlo whose picture he was making out; but his old hearty warmth declared itself by degrees; and his admiration and his tenderness gave such warm color to his language as it might have shown if her little gloved hand had been shivering even then in his own passionate clasp. And ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... accession to the number of her passengers; for the most part of trim, close-shaved, well-dressed gentlemen, of sober aspect and not many words; though here and there comes some whiskered and moustached personage, with a shirt displaying a pattern of ballet-dancers, a shooting coat of countless pockets, and trousers of that style which, in our college days, we used to call loud. A shrewd bank-manager told us that he always made a mental memorandum of such individuals, in case they should ever come to him ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... relucent, armour-like scales. Upon her curly, light hair was perched, at a rollicking angle, a shining tin helmet. The costume was to be instantly recognized as one of those amazing conceptions to which competition has harried the inventors of the spectacular ballet. One of the officers bore a long cloak upon his arm, which, doubtless, had been intended to veil the I candid attractions of their effulgent prisoner, but, for some reason, it had not been called into use, to the vociferous delight of the ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... Another novelty was a dancing-school, such as Scipio Aemilianus full of indignation describes in one of his speeches, in which upwards of five hundred boys and girls—the dregs of the people and the children of magistrates and of dignitaries mixed up together—received instruction from a ballet-master in far from decorous castanet-dances, in corresponding songs, and in the use of the proscribed Greek stringed instruments. It was a novelty too— not so much that a consular and -pontifex maximus- like Publius Scaevola ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the dancing. Every body knows that at the great theatres of Italy the fashionable part of the audience pay very little attention to the music, unless it be a new opera, but make compensation by listening devoutly to the ballet. The Pergola is the great resort of fashion. A box at the Pergola, and a carriage for the banks of the Arno, are the indispensables, we are told, at Florence. Who has these, may eat his macaroni where he pleases—may dine ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... materialised in the form of Mephistopheles, a proceeding which is both meaningless and inartistic, though perhaps dramatically unavoidable. In the,' last act, after a short scene on the Brocken and a conventional ballet, which are rarely performed in England, we are taken to the prison where Margaret lies condemned to death for the murder of her child. Faust is introduced by the aid of Mephistopheles, and tries to persuade her to fly with him. Weak and wandering though she is, she refuses, and dies to the ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... flaxen hair, next to the dark man on your right, was a ballet girl before she married Sir Frederick Thurston. Everybody prophesied that her high kick would lift her into the aristocracy when she first gained favour. Her name was Poppy Poppleton, and people think she poisoned her husband and let another ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... directors. He frivolously asked them whether they ever went to the theatre, to which they replied very coldly that they went to their boxes when the piece was not on the Index and when there was no ballet. Orsino understood why he never saw them at the opera, and relapsed into silence. The butler, a son of the legendary Pasquale of earlier days, did his best to cheer the youngest of his masters with a great variety of wines; but Orsino would not be comforted either ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... I was some fussed for awhile too, and I expect I does the dummy act, sittin' there gazin' into the limousine mirror where she's reflected vivid. I was tryin' to size her up and decide whether she really was one of the chicken ballet, or only a high school imitation. I'm so busy at it that I overlooks the fact that she has the same chance ...
— On With Torchy • Sewell Ford
... kind of attractions that the Russian ballet offers in so many of its themes could have easily guessed, without previous enlightenment, what episode in the life of Joseph had been selected for illustration last week at Drury Lane. But they could never have guessed that Herr Tiessen, author of a shilling guide to the intentions of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, July 1, 1914 • Various
... fine dining-hall, as used in the supper scene in Macbeth, and equipped with convenient Banquo sliding-panel to kitchen. The latter apartment deserves the epithet Baronial, being transported direct from the successful pantomime, Puss-in-Boots, and capable of accommodating a ballet of two hundred cooks. The elegantly proportioned drawing-room (to which a fourth wall has been since added) was the subject of special mention in several leading newspapers after the production of Epigrams at the Niobe Theatre; while each of the twelve ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... much of his fame to poor Emma Harte—the unfortunate Lady Hamilton, who, after having conferred the most serious benefits upon England, was permitted to starve, with her daughter, in a garret somewhere in or near Calais; while some of the spurious offspring of orange and ballet girls filled many of the highest offices in the land ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... considerable physical power were necessary for its completion. "It would be a deal too stagey for my girls," said Mrs. Conway Smith, whose "girls" had, during the last ten years, gone through every phase of flirtation invented in these latter times. Perhaps it did savour a little too much of ballet practice; perhaps it was true that with less care there might have been inconveniences. Faster it grew and faster; but still they had all done it before, and done it with absolute accuracy. It was now near the end. Each lady had ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... But somehow the benefit must redound to society and to practical knowledge, or these abstracted hermits will seem at first useless and at last mad. The logic of nonsense has a subtle charm only because it can so easily be turned into the logic of common sense. Empty dialectic is, as it were, the ballet of science: it runs most neatly after nothing ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... a splendid scene it would make for a ballet, Caroline! That mosque, with a garden alongside, and that other ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... played. The piano was old and needed attention, but he thought that he had never heard finer playing. First she gave him some modern things—some Debussy, Les Miroires of Ravel, some of the Russian ballet music of Cleopatre. These she flung at him, fiercely, aggressively, playing them as though she would wring cries of protest from ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... fondness for the drama, and for poetry of every kind. In all the lyric form predominates, and their compositions are commonly adapted for instrumental accompaniment. Their dramatic entertainments are mainly musical, combining rudely the opera with the ballet,—monotonous singing, and listless, mechanical dancing. Dialogue is occasionally introduced, the favorite subjects being passages from the Hindoo Avatars, the epic "Ramayana," and the "Mahabharata"; ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... "Poor Gentleman," before a great many audiences,—more, I trust, than I shall ever face again. I did not wear a stage-costume, nor a wig, nor moustaches of burnt cork; but I was placarded and announced as a public performer, and at the proper hour I came forward with the ballet-dancer's smile upon my countenance, and made my bow and acted my part. I have seen my name stuck up in letters so big that I was ashamed to show myself in the place by daylight. I have gone to a town with a sober literary ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... which Chiquita took the leading part, and in which, at her request, she was permitted to introduce a dance of her own creation. Among the many guests that had been invited to attend the closing ceremonies was one Signor Tosti, a ballet-master, who at the time was visiting the Capitol with an Italian opera company. A friend whose daughter took part in the exercises had persuaded him, much against his will, to attend; for what possible interest could a veteran of the ballet take ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... and well gifted in orchestral composition, is Clement Philibert Leo Delibes (1848- ). After his education at the Conservatory, and his service as accompanist at the Grand Opera, he received, in 1866, a commission to compose a ballet, "La Source," in which he displayed such a wealth of melody and such fortunate rhythm that his talent was henceforth unmistakable. He has since composed a large number of ballets, many of which are known in all parts of the world, such as ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... The ballet-dancer covered her face, with a low, despairing cry. The dying mother, with a painful effort, lifted her own skeleton hand and removed ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... becomes less and less possible to rely on the army for the pacification of riots, and more and more evident, consequently, that generals, and officers, and soldiers are only figures in solemn processions—objects of amusement for governments—a sort of immense—and far too expensive—CORPS DE BALLET. ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... panaceas, and here the peripatetic Cheap-Jack holding aloft his quack cures for human ills. Here the sleek capitalist and there the sinewy laborer; here the man of science and here the shoe-back; here the poet and here the water-rate collector; here the cabinet minister and there the ballet-dancer. Here a red-nosed publican shouting the praises of his vats and there a temperance lecturer at 50 pounds a night; here a judge and there a swindler; here a priest and there a gambler. Here a jeweled duchess, smiling and gracious; ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... maintained at the government expense is the ballet. We went several times, and it was very gorgeous. It is all pantomime—not a word is spoken—but so well done that one does not ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... round of dissipated amusement which carries foreigners and even young Frenchmen off their feet like a cyclone, depositing them afterwards in strange places and in a damaged condition. It was long since he had dined 'in joyous company,' frequented the lobby of the ballet or found himself at dawn among the survivors of an indiscriminate orgy. Men who know Paris well may not have improved upon their original selves as to moral character, but they have almost always acquired the priceless ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... to the Boss. "They'll think we've pinched her out of a Kiralfy ballet. Hadn't we better send ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... Herold, son of a good musician, made ballet-music artistic while he paced the dance of death with consumption, and died in his forty-second year, a month after his masterpiece, "Le Pre aux Clercs," had been produced and had wrung from him the wail: "I am going too soon; I was just beginning to understand the stage." ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... of Joe Atlee, aetatis four years, with a villainous squint, and something that looks like a plug in the left jaw. A Skye terrier, painted, it is supposed, by himself; not to recite unframed prints of various celebrities of the ballet, in accustomed attitudes, with the Reverend Paul Bloxham blessing some children—though from the gesture and the expression of the juveniles it might seem cuffing them—on the inauguration of the ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... perceptive than her sister, had seized upon Carmen with avidity bred of hope long deferred. The scourge of years of fruitless social striving had rendered her desperate, and she would have staged a ballet on her dining table, with her own ample self as premiere danseuse, did the attraction but promise recognition from the blase members of fashionable New York's ultra-conservative set. From childhood she had looked eagerly forward ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... from behind the bar," Mary answered, "and that's not much better. And the Duchess of C—-, I have heard, was a ballet girl, but nobody seems to remember it. I don't think the people whose opinion is worth having will object to me for very long." The girl was beginning rather ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... wish to do a little investigating of their own in the field of modern music will find interesting examples of 5/4 and 7/4 metres in Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe, in d'Indy's Sonata for Violin and Pianoforte and in the Ballet music ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... that kiss which brings oblivion—that kiss which even the lowliest man and woman receive once in their lives as a benediction from Heaven. So many people imagine that they have found the Ideal Friend when they meet someone with an equal admiration for the poems of Robert Browning; or the Russian Ballet, or one who places the music of Debussy above the music of Wagner. But, I fear, they are often disappointed. For the longer I live, the more convinced I become that Love and Friendship are but "day dreams" of the "soul,"—that all we can ever possess in Life is the second-best ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... with sicknesse, or with hunger, my Lord, not with loue: proue that euer I loose more blood with loue, then I will get againe with drinking, picke out mine eyes with a Ballet-makers penne, and hang me vp at the doore of a brothel-house for ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... These works were given—conducted by Pasdeloup: Symphonic Poem—"Le Chasseur Maudit," Symphonic Variations, piano and orchestra, Second Part of "Ruth." Part II was conducted by the composer and consisted of March and Air de Ballet, with chorus, from "Hulda" and ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... idea entered their heads. I imagine such an indication of civilization would have been at variance with their republican notions of liberty; and the fair ones had no alternative but to pull their garments up to the altitude of those of a ballet-dancer, and to bury their neat feet and well-turned ankles deep, deep, deep in the filthy mire. But what made this conduct irresistibly ludicrous—though painful to any gentleman to witness—was the mockery ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... France in 1577 to superintend the music of Catharine de Medici. In 1581 he composed the music for the nuptials of the Duke de Joyeuse with Mlle. de Vaudemont, sister of the queen, and this is said to have been the origin of the heroic and historical ballet in France. ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... harping a my daughter! well my Lord, If you call me Iepha, I hane a daughter that I loue passing well. Ham. Nay that followes not. Cor. What followes then my Lord? Ham. Why by lot, or God wot, or as it came to passe, And so it was, the first verse of the godly Ballet Wil tel you all: for look you where my abridgement comes: Welcome maisters, welcome all, Enter players. What my olde friend, thy face is vallanced Since I saw thee last, com'st thou to beard me in Denmarke? ...
— The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke - The First ('Bad') Quarto • William Shakespeare
... while giving the mind only triviality to rest upon; and the mind goes to sleep or chafes to move away. We cannot live intellectually and morally in presence of the idea, say, of a jockey of Degas or one of his ballet girls in contemplation of her shoe, as long as we can live aesthetically in the arrangement of lines and masses and dabs of colour and interlacings of light and shade which translate themselves into this idea of jockey or ballet girl; we are therefore bored, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... meeting fairies with their skirts out ready for the dance - a veritable fairy ballet. Nothing could be more lovely than this remarkably treated tree. The rich yellow fluff that will soon appear, lasting for some four to six weeks, will be one note of the yellow chord to be struck in this court-pansy, daffodil, albizzia, the orange and the yellow background ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... you know what the nightly exhibitions in these garlanded temples of whorish incentive are. There is the variety theatre, with its disgusting ballet dancing, and its shamelessly indecent photographs exhibited in every direction. What a clear gain to morality it would be if the accursed houses were burnt down, and forbidden by law ever to be re-built or re-opened; the whole ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... Too't hard went I, when shortly he began, And first read to me honest Mantuan, Then Virgils Eglogues, being entred thus, Me thought I straight had mounted Pegasus, And in his full Careere could make him stop, And bound vpon Parnassus' by-clift top. 40 I scornd your ballet then though it were done And had for Finis, William Elderton. But soft, in sporting with this childish iest, I from my subiect haue too long digrest, Then to the matter that we tooke in hand, Ioue ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... laisser aller of the whole menage, seemed, on the whole, to have offered ample advantages enough; for, at the time I write of, two daughters were already established in marriage, and a third engaged, while my youngest was busy, as yet, in performing that little domestic ballet of the cat with the mouse, in the case of a most ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... campaign interposes in theatrical matters. Whether far away in Prussia or at home in France, he leads tragic authors by the hand, Raynouard, Legouve, Luce de Lancival; he listens to the first reading of the "Mort d'Henri IV." and the "Etats de Blois." He gives to Gardel, a ballet-composer, "a fine theme in the Return of Ulysses." He explains to authors how dramatic effect should, in their hands, become a political lesson; for lack of anything better, and waiting for these to comprehend it, he uses the theatre the same as a tribune ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... there, faster and faster, but all in perfect time and all in perfect order—now flying in long drawn out lines, now in battalions; bowing here, bowing there; now they would "right about turn" and curtsey to the sun. A thousand trained ballet dancer; could not have been in better time. It was as if all joined hands, dressed in green and white; for at every turn a thousand white breasts gleamed in the purple sunset. The restless call of the birds added a peculiar charm to the ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... know that when King Louis wears A Roman kilt and casque His smile hides many secret tears In ballet and in masque, Since to outshine my pomp appears So desperate a task, And royal robes look ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 24, 1917 • Various
... from temple to temple. When the libertine hero carries off the beauty in the play, and the dotard is laughed to scorn for having the young wife: in the ballad, when the poet bid his mistress to gather roses while she may, and warns her that old Time is still a-flying: in the ballet, when honest Corydon courts Phillis under the treillage of the pasteboard cottage, and leers at her over the head of grandpapa in red stockings, who is opportunely asleep; and when seduced by the invitations of ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Cleopatra and to receive my guests in the drawing-room. At the sound of a fanfare of trumpets I was to go into the theatre preceded by a line of pages, and accompanied by my husband. After we had taken our places in a private box a great ballet, brought specially from a London music-hall, was to give a performance lasting until midnight. Then there was to be a cotillon, led by Alma herself with my husband, and after supper the dancing was to be resumed and kept up until sunrise, when a basketful of butterflies and ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... we spent at the Scala. The opera was stupid, and Madame Bellochi, who is the present primadonna, appeared to me harsh and ungraceful, when compared to Fodor. The new ballet however, amply indemnified us for the disappointment. Our Italian friends condoled with us on being a few days too late to see La Vestale, which had been performed for sixty nights, and is one of Vigano's ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... tango, the sensational revue, for the Russian ballet, was at its height when Madame Vatrotski's name first appeared on the ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... Kitchell bunked on one side, Charlie on the other. A hacked deal table, covered with oilcloth and ironed to the floor, a swinging-lamp, two chairs, a rack of books, a chest or two, and a flaring picture cut from the advertisement of a ballet, was the room's inventory in the ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... correlated revival of sensori-motor images. Although the sensori-motor images of speech can be revived, it is almost impossible without moving the hand to revive kinaesthetic impressions concerned in writing a word. Both Ballet and Stricker admit this fact, and it tends to prove that the sense of hearing is the primary incitation ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... of Western Guiana we fell in with a pack of these splendid birds, which gave me the opportunity of being an eye witness of their dancing, an accomplishment which I had hitherto regarded as a fable. We cautiously approached their ballet ground and place of meeting, which lay some little distance from the road. The stage, if we may so call it, measured from four to five feet in diameter; every blade of grass had been removed and the ground was as smooth as if leveled by human hands. On this space we saw one of the birds dance ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [January, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... was drowned in the ballet from Coppelia. "I don't allow any man to worry me!" said Helen ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... popularity; their partisans fought with their opponents for every inch of ground, even though discovery was mining them. And some fragments found their way in a fashion to the stage. But a little while ago there was living a ballet-master, who owed his baptismal name to parental success in the grand ballet of 'Oscar and Malvina, or the Cave of Fingal!' But this must have been produced years after Runciman. The poems had merit, and that floated them for a long ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... the wit, and silenced him for the rest of the night—a circumstance which made the party go off much more pleasantly. After dinner, the conversation, quite that of single men, easy and debonnair, glanced from the turf, and the ballet, and the last scandal, towards politics; for the times were such that politics were discussed everywhere, and three of the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... Almayer's Folly, his first novel, and in a quite casual fashion throws fresh light on that somewhat enigmatic character—reminding me in the juxtaposition of his newer psychologic procedure and the simple old tale, of Wagner's Venusberg ballet, scored after he had composed Tristan und Isolde. But, like certain other great Slavic writers, Conrad has only given us a tantalising peep into his mental workshop. We rise after finishing the Reminiscences realising that ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Messrs. Hodgson the auctioneers discovered a thin folio consisting of an illustrated title-page and eight lithographed plates depicting scenes in the life of a ballet-girl, among a portfolio of engravings which had been sent to them for disposal. There was no letterpress, but the title ran 'Flore et Zephyr, Ballet Mythologique par Theophile Wagstaffe,' and it was published in London and Paris, 1836. The owner thought it unworthy ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... from some Oriental bazaar were scattered upon the floor. Pictures and prints which even my unpractised eyes could recognize as being of great price and rarity hung thick upon the walls. Sketches of boxers, of ballet-girls, and of racehorses alternated with a sensuous Fragonard, a martial Girardet, and a dreamy Turner. But amid these varied ornaments there were scattered the trophies which brought back strongly ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with their toes turned out—at right angles, in a splay-footed way; now they would walk with their feet crossed, after the manner of the hands of very fancy, old-fashioned piano-players, skipping from base to treble—over cracks. The whole performance would have driven a sensitive drill-sergeant or ballet-master to distraction. And when they came to a brick sidewalk they would go all around the block to avoid it. They could cross Hudson Street on the cobblestones with great effort, and in great danger of being run over; but they could ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... glory of being its defender; the former was satisfied in acting for his party, the latter discontented if he did not stand at its head. No one was more fit to lead off the dance in a rebellion, but it could hardly have a worse ballet-master. Contemptible as his threatened designs really were, the illusion of the multitude might have imparted to them weight and terror if it had occurred to them to set up a pretender in his person. His claim to the possessions of his ancestors was an empty name; but even a name was ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... just leaving a rehearsal at the Opera-house, is going home to eat a miserable dinner, and will return about three o'clock to dress, if she dances in the ballet this evening—as she will, to-day being Monday. This rat is already an old rat for she is thirteen years of age. Two years from now that creature may be worth sixty thousand francs; she will be all or ...
— Unconscious Comedians • Honore de Balzac
... real English rustic perform a solo dance? Perhaps you have only seen a ballet rustic, smiling like a merry countryman in crockery, with graceful turns of the haunch and insinuating movements of the head. That is as much like the real thing as the "Bird Waltz" is like the song of birds. Wiry Ben never smiled: ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... I a red thic ballet o' yourn called Fanny Fear, an, zim ta I, there's naw moril to it. Nif zaw be you da thenk zo ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings
... over Europe; every one told me she was a marvel. The director of the opera in Paris saw her dance at a child's party at Spa, and offered me an enormous sum if I would give her up to him and let him have her educated for the ballet. I said, 'No, I thank you, sir; she is meant to be something finer than a princesse de theatre.' I had a passionate belief that she might marry absolutely whom she chose, that she might be a princess out and out. It has never left me till this hour, and I can assure you that it has ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... am glad of it with all my heart: I had rather be a kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same metre ballet-mongers; I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn'd, Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree; And that would set my teeth nothing on edge, Nothing so much as mincing poetry: 'Tis like the forced gait of ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... man named Louvel, Feb. 13, 1820, as he was handing his wife into her carriage at the door of the French Opera House. They carried him back into the theatre, and there, in a side room, with the music of the opera going on upon the stage, the plaudits of the audience ringing in his ears, and ballet-girls flitting in and out in their stage dresses, the heir of France gave up his life, with kindly words upon his dying lips, reminding us of Charles ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... spread about town became lost in a maze of uncertainty. It was said that some foolish young prince, name unknown, had suddenly come into possession of a gigantic fortune, and had married a French ballet dancer. This was contradicted, and the rumour circulated that it was a young merchant who had come into the enormous fortune and married the great ballet dancer, and that at the wedding the drunken young fool had burned seventy thousand roubles at a ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... he might one day cease to be the anvil and become the hammer. But there was no thought for the common weal; each order wrangled for its own privileges, and their meeting-place was closed on the pretext that the hall was wanted for a royal ballet. No protest was raised, and the States-General never met again until the fateful meeting at Versailles, in 1789, when a similar pretext was tried, with very different consequences. Among the clergy, however, sat a young ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... (forty summers, Stout but sportive) treads a measure, Grinning, in herself a ballet, Fixed ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... doubtless," said the advocate; "for, old as Cagliari is, he still turns night into day and burns the candle at both ends. When he married Countess Blanka he was very intimate with the Marchioness Caldariva, formerly known to lovers of the ballet as 'the beautiful Cyrene.' She practised the terpsichorean art with such success that one day she danced into favour with an Italian marquis who honoured her with the gift of his name and rank, after which he shot himself. The marchioness now owns a splendid palace in Vienna, ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... drink and embrace, like the chorus of an opera comique. Let us stretch our calves, and turn on our toes like ballet-dancers. Let us at last rejoice: the Figaro, without getting the credit of it, has overcome the ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... were they talking? Ostend. The ballet-dancers. The races in May. The shooting at Monte Carlo. Gaming-tables, empty purses. ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... white, pinched little face pays you for such extravagances in silliness, then you are a ninny. Wear the fluffy things if you will, but put on the warm ones, too. In making a choice between the raiments of a ballet dancer and those of an Eskimo lady, I'd point the finger of approval toward the latter—at least at those times when the thermometer is lounging around ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... been highly successful in compositions in dance form, managing these without a suggestion of the trivial. Thus her "Air de Ballet," Op. 30, No. 1, is full of brilliancy and nervous energy without ever degenerating into vulgar noisiness. Another "Air de Ballet" by her from the ballet "Callirhoe," to which her widely known "Scarf Dance" also belongs, is crisp, bright and dainty. "Callirhoe" ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... Rienzi now began to assume greater importance. The composition of its second act was finished before we started, and into this I wove a heroic ballet of extravagant dimensions. It was now imperative that I should speedily acquire a knowledge of French, a language which, during my classical studies at the Grammar School, I had contemptuously laid aside. As there ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... She walked through it—the dumb but irresistible model of a French atelier, who made fools of all her lovers, cheated them, sucked them dry and tossed them off with a merry cynicism. When the mood took her she danced and her victims danced behind her, a grotesque ballet, laughing and clapping their hands, as though their cruel sufferings were, after all, a good joke. Neither they nor the audience seemed to be aware that she could not dance at all, and that she was ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... dance, to which everybody carried jack-o'- lanterns, and the rest celebrated the holiday in other characteristic and amusing ways. The campus resembled a cross between the midway at a World's Fair and the grand finale of a comic opera; for ghosts consorted there with ballet dancers and Egyptian princesses, spooks and goblins linked arms with pirates in top-boots and rosy farmers' daughters in calico, and nuns and Puritan maidens chatted familiarly with villainous and fascinating gentlemen, who twirled ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... nearest onlookers stood a respectful yard back and when unbalanced by the push of those behind went through such antics to avoid treading on it, while at the same time preserving the convention of innocence of any taboo that they frequently pivoted and pirouetted on one foot in an awkward ballet. The very hiding of their inhibition emphasized the new awesomeness of the grass; it was no longer to be ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... pink tissue paper, which he wore with a somewhat confusing obstinacy, pinned firmly to his chest. Miss Honey assisted his wavering footsteps rather sulkily; she longed for the white and lacy draperies in front of her and regarded her ballet skirts of stitched newspaper with bare tolerance. It is true she wore a crown of tinfoil and carried a wand made of half a brass curtain rod; but her laced tan boots, stubbed and stained, showed with disgusting plainness, and nobody would ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... callida nupta viro? Nubilis haec virgo, matronaque, virque, puerque Spectat, et ex magna parte Senatus adest. Nec satis incestis temerari vocibus aures; Assuescunt oculi multa pudenda pati ... Quo mimis prodest, scaena est lucrosa poetae, &c. The laxity of the modern ballet is a faint shadow of the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... feathers on their heads, their bodies painted white, and their faces black as devils. Others were daubed with red, black, and white. In short, every one decked himself as extravagantly as he could, to dance in this ballet, and contribute something towards the health of the sick man." [ Relation des Hurons, 1636, 116. ] This remedy also failing, a crowning effort of the medical art was essayed. Brbeuf does not describe it, for fear, as he says, of ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... a good deal of comment upon this subject, and Miss Deemas animadverted very strongly upon actors in general and clowns in particular. As to ballet-girls, she could not find words to express her contempt for them; but in reference to this Miss Tippet ventured to rebuke her friend, and to say that although she could not and would not defend the position of these unfortunates, yet she felt that they were very much to be pitied, seeing that ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... and home of the Ballet. In other lands it is an exotic, here a natural outgrowth and expression of the National mind. Of the spirit which conceived it, here is the abode and the Opera Francais the temple; and here it has exerted its natural and unobstructed influence ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... nambas, which they buy on Malekula; the dress of the women is the same as that worn in central Malekula, and consists of an apron of pandanus or some similar fibre, wound several times round the waist; this forms a thick roll, not unlike ballet skirts, but more graceful. It is a pretty dress, though somewhat scanty, and the "skirts" flap up and down coquettishly when the wearer walks. The other parts of the body are covered with a thick layer of soot, filth, oil, fat and smoke, for ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... staring at the landscape you can watch a fat beetle crawling on a blade of grass, or an ant fussing about. It's really much nicer. But you've taken up a pseudo-classical pose, for all the world like a ballet-dancer, when she reclines upon a rock of paste-board. You should remember you have a perfect right to take a rest now. It's no joking matter to come out third! Take your ease, sir; give up all exertion, and rest ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev |
