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More "Ballet" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Miss Thackthwaite came on to dance the favourite double hornpipe, and Foker abandoned himself to the delights of this ballet, just as he had to the tears of the tragedy, a few minutes before. Pen did not care for it, or indeed think about the dance, except to remember that that woman was acting with her in the scene where ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... crime, that people make a holiday of a killing-day, and leave their homes and occupations, to flock and witness the cutting off of a head. Do we crowd to see Mr. Macready in the new tragedy, or Mademoiselle Ellssler in her last new ballet and flesh-colored stockinnet pantaloons, out of a pure love of abstract poetry and beauty; or from a strong notion that we shall be excited, in different ways, by the actor and the dancer? And so, as we go to have a meal of fictitious ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "The love of ballet-girls!" cried the Countess in horror. "Such flames cannot last, and must soon leave nothing but ashes and cinders, regret or despair. A wife ought, in my opinion, to bring ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... old boon companions. How can a man who has been behind the curtain, and who has seen la premiere danseuse of the Empire practising her steps before the manager Strachey, in familiar chaff and talk with the Council ballet, while the little scene-painter and Press Commissioner stood aside with cocked ears, and the privileged violoncellist made his careless jests—how, I say, can one who has thus been above the clouds on ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... influenza, or of the desperate situation of a people thus visited and unable to procure from abroad the simplest drugs which they cannot manufacture at home or even the anaesthetics necessary for their wounded on every frontier of their country. I forgot to describe the ballet which I saw a few days before leaving. I have said nothing of the talk I had with Eliava concerning the Russian plans for the future of Turkestan. I could think of a score of other omissions. Judging from what I have read since my return from Russia, I imagine people will find my book very poor ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... smart daughter of an alcoholic gentleman artist and of his lady of the French ballet, inherited the perfect non-moral morality of the artist blood that sang mercurially through her veins. How could she, therefore, how could she, being non-moral, be immoral? It is clear nonsense. But ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... up simply because all the people about you think that way—if one can call the process thinking? You don't think, do you, that it is a sign of superiority to be narrow, to be ignorant, to be out of touch with the great masses of one's fellow-beings, to play the part of a harlequin or a ballet-girl on the stage of life? I understand how a stupid ass can fritter away his one chance to live in saying and hearing and doing silly things. But ought not an intelligent person try to enjoy life, try to ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... to the Russian Ballet and was bored. He had been excited about Cleopatra the first time he had seen it; he now decided that it was a great mistake to try ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... 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 elements and ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... forth fumes of Bichara's Scheherazade. From the window frames, stifling the light, depend flame-coloured brocaded curtains embroidered in Egyptian enamelled beads. It is a triumph, this chamber, of style Ballet Russe. Diana is banished ... and shrinking Mildred, returning from school, finds her demure soul ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... does—though she flies as the Scotchman admitted he joked—"wi' deefeeculty." She spreads her light, gauzy, grey, and shockingly inadequate, skirts, and romps and rollicks away, giving one a fleeting impression of a bold and most disorderly ballet girl. "She" is quite the proper mode of address, for there can be no mistake ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... bark belt and the 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
... what Mr Holmes tells us on good authority, that the vice of ebriety was not among Mozart's failings. "He drank to the point of exhilaration, but not beyond." His fondness for ballet-dancing may seem strange to us, who have almost a Roman repugnance to such exhibitions in men of good station. But it is possible that in some minds the love of graceful motion may be a refined passion and an exalted art; and it is singular that Mozart's wife told of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... Squire Lavingtons around him. At heart, however, Mammoth-blinded, he was kindly and upright. A man of a stately presence; a broad, honest north-country face; a high square forehead, bland and unwrinkled. I sketch him here once for all, because I have no part for him after this scene in my corps de ballet. ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... makes play with the 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 ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the women in their supple glidings and bendings, doublings and swayings. Concha danced with Ignacio Sal, Rafaella with William Sturgis; their pliant grace, as facile as grain rippling before the wind, would have put the best ballet in Europe to the blush. Concha's skirts swept Rezanov's feet, her little slippers twinkled before his admiring eyes, and he lost no sinuous turn or undulation of her beautiful figure; but she never vouchsafed him ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... consisted in a surreptitious cigarette and glass of beer, neither of which he enjoyed, but both of which he pretended to revel in for the sake of being "mannish,"—will talk knowingly of "the latest soubrette," "a jolly little ballet-dancer," "the wicked ways of this world," and "the dens of iniquity in our large cities." Dickens tells us that "when Mr. Feeder spoke of the dark mysteries of London, and told Mr. Toots that he ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... ought to be—quasi tesserata emblemate—as if he had studied them a week beforehand, and had read them instead of speaking them. His harvest at the Opera House is likely to be very successful, for his Saturdays and Tuesdays are so full, that he is going even to attempt the Thursdays. Vestris' Ballet people think too long. "It is impossible that an English audience should be satisfied. They don't know when they have got a good spectacle, and think that finding fault is the only way to pass for judges." Such are the words of ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... 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 early spring of this year, in those ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... in itself, one which would have wholly become Hortense; but for poor Kitty it didn't do at all. Yes, she was a well folded English umbrella, only the umbrella had for its handle the head of a bulldog or the leg of a ballet-dancer. And these were the Replacers whom Beverly's clear-sighted eyes saw swarming round the temple of his civilization, pushing down the aisles, climbing over the backs of the benches, walking over each other's bodies, and seizing those front seats which his family had sat in since New ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... lived in Julia's mind with particular vividness for years to come, and yet one which she always found it difficult to piece together in her thoughts. They went to one of the less fashionable music halls, where the turns were frequent and there was no ballet. Aaron was very soon able to re-establish his temporarily lost capacity for enjoyment. Maraton, leaning back in his place with a cigar in his mouth, appreciated everything and applauded constantly. It was Julia who found the new atmosphere most difficult. ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... violins and bass; N.A. Strungk's sonatas published at Dresden in 1691; and more especially Agostino Steffani's "Sonate da Camera" for two violins, alto, and bass, published in 1683. An opera by the last-named, which appeared at Hanover in 1699, has an "Air de Ballet," which contains the first notes of "Let the bright Seraphim"; besides, it is known that Handel culled ideas and "conveyed" notes from works of other composers; also, that he turned ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... Poland, then a young man, came back from a journey, the whole Lescinskian House gathered together at Lissa to receive him. The schoolmaster, Jablowsky, prepared a festival in commemoration of the event, and had it end with a ballet performed by thirteen students, dressed as cavaliers. Each had a shield, upon which one of the letters of the words "Domus Lescinia" (The Lescinskian House) was written in gold. After the first dance, they stood in such a manner that their shields read "Domus ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... that perfect ass! And in the taxi: "Fancy me seeing home this dancing-mistress!" Eliza lived at Brook Green. She was very elegant, and quite unexceptionable until she opened her mouth. She related to him how her mother, who had once been a premier sujet in the Covent Garden ballet, was helpless from sciatica. But she related this picturesque and pride-causing detail in a manner very insipid, naive, and even vulgar, (After all there was a difference between First Division and Second Division in the Civil Service!) She was boring him terribly before they reached Brook ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... engaged as a servant in the Caliph's household. Dane was thus not unfamiliar with the methods of unexpected evening visits; and it was fortunate for him that he was so. The little children whom he had picked up, explained to him, by pantomime which would have made the fortune of a ballet-girl, that they were much more comfortable in their new home than they had been in any other, and that they had no wish to leave it. But by various temptations addressed to them, in the form of barley horses and dogs, and ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... "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 ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... the battery for lighting small electric lamps. Skrivanoff has modified the De la Rue cell by substituting a solution of caustic potash for the ammonium chloride, and his battery has been used for "star" lights, that is to say, the tiny electric lamps of the ballet. The Schanschieff battery, consisting of zinc and carbon plates in a solution of basic sulphate of mercury, is suitable for reading, mining, and ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... has been chosen as the most natural translation of orchaesis, which in this dialogue has reference for the most part to the ballet-dancer (pantomimus) of imperial times. On the other hand, Lycinus, in order to establish the antiquity and the universality of an art that for all practical purposes dates only from the Augustan era, and (despite the Greek artists) is Roman in origin, avails himself of the ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... above her head like a ballet-dancer's, pirouetted, curtsied very low so that the skirt spread all about her on the floor, like ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... Alhambra is a genuine "Ballet Extravaganza," the story being told in pantomimic action, illustrated by M. JACOBI'S sympathetic music. Aladdin was an excellent subject for Mr. JOHN HOLLINGSHEAD to take, though I venture to think that our old friend Blue Beard would be a still better one. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 14, 1893 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... nor entreaties can win a soft answer, Nor the violet pale of my love-ravaged cheek, To your husband's intrigue with a Greek ballet-dancer, Though you still are blind, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... wearing the white-feather symbol on their overcoats, advanced toward Winfree. Together, like partners in a ballet, they bent to build snowballs, then stood and let fly. Winfree ducked, found one of the dress sabers ignominiously sheathed in snow, and drew it out. He retreated toward the automobile, the saber raised to ...
— The Great Potlatch Riots • Allen Kim Lang
... performance there were five persons in our box—the beautiful Miranda, and her husband, a celebrated English man of letters; a German professor of biology; a young Milanese gentleman, whom we called Edoardo; and myself. Edoardo and the professor had joined us just before the ballet. I had occupied a seat behind Miranda and my friend the critic from the commencement. We had indeed dined together first at their hotel, the Rebecchino; and they now proposed that we should all adjourn together there on foot for supper. From the Scala Theatre to the Rebecchino is a ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... woman is the only soaring part of them. Sublimated spiritual bodies may look naturally supernatural with wings attached to the breastbone or between the shoulders behind, but the fairest, most spiritual, woman would appear a trifle ludicrous with them anywhere else unless she should be dancing a ballet with no skirts on worth mentioning. Selah achieved a sort of glorified presence very grateful to the eyes of the farmers' wives and daughters, who did not understand how much of it was due to the wings ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... by bathing it in blood, afterward to wither back into stained and stiffened apathy; and then that whole vast false heaven of sensual passion, full of nymphs, satyrs, graces, goddesses, and I know not what, from its high seventh circle in Correggio's Antiope, down to the Grecized ballet-dancers and smirking Cupids of the Parisian upholsterer. Sweep away all this, remorselessly, and see how much art we ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... corns to crime, is now traced to the pernicious activity of some microbian. Even our currency system is blasted by goldbugs, and Prohibition milk- sickness is being treated with vermifuge. A Kansas M.D. has succeeded in hiving the old-age microbe, and is now treating the ballet girls whom Weis & Greenwall and Rigsby & Walker will bring South next winter, while a New York empiric has discovered the insanity insect and is fumigating the brain of the Rev. Mr. Parkhurst. Thus does medical ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... filled, and when she gave me the four tickets, presented them to the maid who was dressing her and was prettier than the mistress, and so left the room without uttering a single word. She called me back; I pretended not to hear her, and took a ticket for the pit. After the first ballet, finding the whole performance very poor, I was thinking of going away, when, happening to look towards the chief box, I saw to my astonishment that it was tenanted by the Venetian Manzoni and the celebrated Juliette. The reader will doubtless remember the ball she gave at my ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... went on, "I blundered into a luncheon party Jane was giving. You never saw—you never dreamed of such style—such dresses and dishes and flowers and hats! And I was sitting there with them, enjoying it all as if it were a circus or a ballet, when—Oh, Victor, what a silly, what a pitiful waste of time and money! So much to do in the world—so much that is thrillingly interesting and useful—and those intelligent young people dawdling there at nonsense a child would weary of! I had to run away. If I had stayed ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... third represents the sleep of Faust. This is a trick common to the new school. Wagner uses it in 'Siegfried,' in the close of the Tarnhelm motive, to illustrate the vanishing properties of the cap. In measure fifty-seven of the Ballet you will find a chord of the augmented five-six, a harmony built on the first inversion of the diminished seventh of the key of the dominant, with lowered bass tone, and which in this instance resolves into the dominant triad. ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... he will geue them: and sometimes he offreth them an horse to ride vpon.'[361] Boguet's experience (1598) is more dramatic than that of Danaeus: 'Les autres y vont, tantost sur vn Bouc, tantost sur vn cheual, & tantost sur vn ballet, ou ramasse, sortans ces derniers de leurs maisons le plus souuent par la cheminee.... Les vns encor se frottent auparauant de certaine graisse, & oignement: les autres ne se frottent en aucune facon.'[362] He also ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray
... transfer the moving scenes before him to canvas; but people moved too quickly for him, so he methodically set about learning how to do with a few strokes what he would otherwise have laboured over. So he reduced his sketching to such a science that he became able to sketch a ballet in full movement; and it is remarked that this practice trained him for presenting the tremulousness of leaves of trees, ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... Meyerbeer, after de Lenz played it. "Three- four," answered Chopin, flushing angrily. "Let me have it for a ballet in my new opera and I'll show you," retorted Meyerbeer. "It's three-four," scolded Chopin, and played it himself. De Lenz says they parted coolly, each holding to his opinion. Later, in St. Petersburg, Meyerbeer met this ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... group of four women promenading a San Francisco street on a pleasant morning is to be reminded of that ballet representing the Four Seasons, which we used to see in the second act of every well-regulated extravaganza. The woman nearest the walls has on her furs—it is always cool in the shade; the one next to her is wearing the very latest wrinkles ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... (life), "Il Mondo" (the world), etc. The orchestra consisted of one lira doppia, one clavicembalo, one chitarrone and two flutes. No part is written for violin. At one part of the performance there was a ballet. The whole was performed in church, as already noticed, as a part of ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... 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 priest of ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... was not worth what she cost, even if you got her for nothing. He was supposed to be so entirely blase, that he no longer paid two thousand francs a month for the pleasure of being deceived. His eyes looked coldly down from his opera box on the corps de ballet; never a glance was shot at the capitalist by any one of that formidable swarm of old young girls, and young old women, the ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... to chapel, not at all to the chase, never to the opera. Incorruptible by sacristans, by whippers-in, by ballet-dancers; this made a part of his bourgeois popularity. He had no heart. He went out with his umbrella under his arm, and this umbrella long formed a part of his aureole. He was a bit of a mason, a bit of a gardener, something of a doctor; he bled a postilion who had tumbled from his horse; Louis ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... 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 ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... done so. The reason we are going to Munich is we can't get a sleeper yet, everything is so crowded. Isn't it disgusting. This last opera is rather too noisy at times, and awfully long—longer than the others. But there's a men's ballet in it that is rather nice; not dancing, you know, but singing and posing and walking about, with imitation bare legs, most of them. But I think the best thing about the opera is it leaves you in such an exalted mood. I know I won't be able to think of small ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... 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 ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... very low, with straps over the shoulders, quite like the modern evening gown; very full tarleton skirts of different shades of pink and cerise, reaching to the knees; ruffled bloomers of apple-green tarleton, the ruffles showing below the skirts; black silk stockings and black ballet slippers, laced with green. Hat of lavender crepe paper, with streamers of gay colors—including, however, no clear red or blue. Hat should be small and very smart—not a shepherdess hat. Columbine ...
— Aria da Capo • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... more correctly, had got round him. She'd a precious sight more gumption than he had ever possessed, and if he had listened to her instead of insisting upon her listening to him it would have been better for him. But there are some men who think that if you have a taste for champagne and the ballet that proves you are intended by nature for a nob, and he was one of them; and any common-sense suggestion of hers only convinced him of her natural unfitness for ...
— The Observations of Henry • Jerome K. Jerome
... to entertain—the fiction that is to serious fiction as the opera-bouffe, the ballet, and the pantomime are to the true drama—need not feel the burden of this obligation so deeply; but even such fiction will not be gay or trivial to any reader's hurt, and criticism should hold it to account if it passes ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... The Dancing Girl at the Haymarket—of course people will talk—why she's nothing to the girls who dance to M. JACOBI's inimitable ballet-music at the Alhambra. Here they have a magic show, which "puzzles the Quaker;" and I don't mind admitting that I was the quaker when I saw a fair and comely young lady up in the air standing still and dancing on nothing at all! Certainly "Aerolithe" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... paying them a visit. I saw your fair young cousin Miss Newcome in the lobby with her grandmamma Lady Kew. Mr. Bayham with great eloquence pointed out to the Scotch ladies the various distinguished characters in the house. The opera delighted them, but they were astounded at the ballet, from which mother and daughter retreated in the midst of a fire of pleasantries of Captain Goby. I can fancy that officer at mess, and how brilliant his anecdotes must be when the company of ladies does not restrain his ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... you understand it? I—take good care not to understand it.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} That it is possible to draw yet other lessons from the works above mentioned,—I am much more ready to prove than to dispute. That one may be driven by a Wagnerian ballet to desperation—and to virtue! (once again the case in "Tannhauser"). That not going to bed at the right time may be followed by the worst consequences (once again the case of "Lohengrin").—That one ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... 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; it is very elegant. ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... eight-fifty. "Why wait?" says the fair Elsie. "It will never kill him." So we try another hall—and find a lady with a face like a tomato singing a song about the derby, to an American tune that was stale in 1907. Yet another, and we are in the midst of a tedious ballet founded upon "Carmen," with the music reduced to jigtime and a flute playing out of tune. A fourth—and we suffer a pair of comedians who impersonate Americans by saying "Naow" and "Amurican." When they break into "My Cousin Carus'" we depart ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... Bonaparte; there was also the whole crowd of French singers, actors, and adventurers who had flocked to the Congress of Rastadt for the purpose of amusing the distinguished noblemen and delegates by their vaudevilles, comedies, and gay operas. Finally, there were also the French actresses and ballet-girls, who, dressed in the highest style of fashion, were occupying on one side of the road a long row of splendid carriages. Many of these carriages were decorated on their doors with large coats-of-arms, and a person well versed in heraldry ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... the lottery-contractor, the Russian attaches, two from the English embassy, my Lords Deuceace and Punter, who play a jeu d'enfer, and a few more. The same set meet every night at supper: there are seldom any ladies; those who come are chiefly French ladies, members of the corps de ballet. He wins often, but not always. Lord Deuceace is a very fine player. The Chevalier Elliot, the English Minister, sometimes comes, on which occasion the secretaries do not play. Monsieur de Balibari ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... went to the 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 of one mask that is not ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... old fury, to prove the truth of her words, danced a kind of war dance in front of Mr. Calton, snapping her fingers and yelling out curses, as an accompaniment to her ballet. Her luxurious white hair streamed out during her gyrations, and with her grotesque appearance and the faint light of the candle, she presented ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume
... legislative 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 ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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 we have read once more romance, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... morrow of the invasion I found in my study eight of my nocturnal visitors. They were perched, motionless, upon the cross-mouldings of the second window, which had remained closed. The others, having concluded their ballet by about ten o'clock at night, had left as they had entered, by the other window, which was left open night and day. These eight persevering lovers were just what I required ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... occasion the tragedy of "Venice Preserved" was being performed. Edmund Kean was Jaffier and Miss O'Neil Belvidera. They were playing to a greatly excited house, as may well be supposed when two such artists were upon the stage. Mr. St. A—-, who was then ballet-master at the theatre, and who, by the way, was a most graceful dancer, seeing Mrs. Banks, went up to her to exchange compliments. Having done so, Mr. St. A—- remarked how seldom they had the pleasure of seeing Mrs. ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... visible, and 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 burning wagon-covers and ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... sufferer should have been rejoiced to see them, "Here we all are—here we all are!" The visionary, if I recollect right, was so much shocked at their appearance, that he retired abroad, in despair that any part of Britain could shelter him from the daily persecution of this domestic ballet. ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... holding out her arms to balance herself. A pretty picture she made,—lithe and slender as a reed, her fair face all aglow with life and merriment, and the sunshine all round her. "See!" she cried, "I am Taglioni, the queen of the ballet. I had—a—oh! I nearly went over that time—I had a paper-doll once, named Taglioni. She was truly—lovely! You stood her on a piece of wood—just like this; only there was a crack which held her toes, and this has ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... see by the Paris papers, has also discovered a comedie-ballet by Moliere, written in 1654, and never included in any edition of his works. It is entitled Le Ballet des incompatibies, and appears to have been written by order of the Prince de Conti, and acted before him by Moliere himself and other persons of the Prince's circle. That it remained so long unknown is ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... of no principle, who six years earlier had kept a ballet-girl, and who now, thanks to his position, made himself a seraglio with the pretty wives of the under-clerks, and lived in the world of journalists and actresses, became devotedly attentive all the evening to Celestine, and was the last to leave ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... to be misleading; and since popular chorus is one of the most effective elements of the opera, we can hardly object to lyric rustics in elegant laced boddices and picturesque motley, unless we are prepared to advocate a chorus of colliers in their pit costume, or a ballet of charwomen and stocking-weavers. But our social novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of their representations is a grave evil. The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... to be out-done in the attempt at display, the natives gave a concert, and then a dance, executed by twenty women crowned with China roses. This magnificent ballet was followed by another performance by fifteen men. But we shall never end, if we attempt to give an account of the wonders of this enthusiastic reception. It justly gained for the Tonga archipelago the name ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... appears to me purely musical—it is of a sonorous design. The symphony in D major (the second) suggests to me visual-motor images—I set a ballet to the first part and keep track altogether of the ballet that I picture. The Heroic Symphony (aside from the funeral march, the meaning of which is indicated in the title) suggests to me images of a military character, ever since ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... she conceded, slowly. "That in itself would have been a miracle—one I'd never believe if I hadn't seen it with these eyes. But everything disproves the theory. Do you think she could have trained those children to advance and retreat like a Casino ballet? On the contrary, it's evident that they literally live on him. They've worn the creases off his trousers! Didn't you notice where the creases left off and the sliding-place ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... 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
... extraordinary attempt was a BALLET of proverbs. Before the opera was established in France, the ancient ballets formed the chief amusement of the court, and Louis the Fourteenth himself joined with the performers. The singular attempt ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... saw her once. I went to the Alhambra to see a ballet that was admired very much, and I recognised Rosie on the stage in spite of her paint and ballet dress. I couldn't stay another moment after that. I should have left the theatre if—if—well, never mind. Don't speak again, Fan, we must go ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... 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 not possibly travel upon a brick pavement, ...
— A Boy I Knew and Four Dogs • Laurence Hutton
... came into the box, the orchestra played the 'Star-Spangled Banner,' and all the people in the house arose; whereupon I was very much embarrassed. After I had been an hour at the play, the manager came around and asked me to go underneath the stage, as they were putting on a ballet of 300 girls, the finest ballet in Europe. It seems there is a little hole on the stage with a hood over it, in which the prompter sits when opera is given. In this instance it was not occupied, and I was given the position in the prompter's seat, and saw ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... 'Charite' has become, in the modern mind, a gift, whether from God or man, only to the wretched, never to the happy: and lastly, 'Grace' in its physical sense has been perverted, by their social vulgarity, into an idea, whether with respect to form or motion, commending itself rather to the ballet-master than either to ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... 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 the rosy youth she comes forward to the footlights, and they perform on each ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... breakfasting—accompanied with one English friend, he impatiently awaited what reinforcements the bride should bring to grace the ceremony. A rich muster she had made. They came in six coaches—the whole corps du ballet—French, Italian, men and women. Monsieur de B., the famous pirouetter of the day, led his fair spouse, but craggy, from the banks of the Seine. The Prima Donna had sent her excuse. But the first and second Buffa were there; and Signor Sc——, and Signora Ch——, and Madame ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... at our engagements, dear boy. We will try to arrange it. I can tell you at the ballet," and the Princess smiled encouragingly up at him. "My godchild has not seen our national dancing yet, so we go to-night with Prince ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... their 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 time; ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... charity 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 ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... me 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
... As for the ballet-girl, she was everywhere, with her sisters, the model and the grisette. And the artistic ability shown in the treatment of her had nowhere been hampered by any Philistine scruple in ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... room in the Chinese style, popularized by the craze for barbaric decoration introduced by Bakst and the Russian Ballet into England. The walls were enameled the same brilliant glossy red as the door and hung at intervals with panels of magnificent black and gold lacquer work. The table which ran down the centre of the room was of scarlet and gold lacquer like the fantastically ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... millions of bulls, at length far away there appeared something terrible. I can only describe its appearance as that of an attenuated mountain on fire. When it drew nearer I perceived that it was more like a ballet-dancer whirling round and round upon her toes, or rather all the ballet-dancers in the world rolled into one and then multiplied a million times in size. No, it was like a mushroom with two stalks, one above and one below, or a huge top with a point on which it spun, a swelling belly and ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard
... called to her from her pillow, when she appeared, "you find me flat enough, this morning. If there was anything wrong about going to the opera last night, I was properly punished for it. Such wretched stuff as I never heard! And instead of the new ballet that they promised, they gave an old thing that I had seen till I was sick of it. You didn't miss much, I can tell you. How fresh and bright you do look, Lydia!" she sighed. "Did you sleep well? Were you lonesome while we were gone? Veronica says you ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... attract me," he admitted; "or, rather, she raises a great many questions, natural in a person named Cytherea. The pair of castanets on a nail—Claire used them in an Andalusian dance—might almost be an offering, like the crutches of Lourdes, left before her by a grateful child of the ballet." ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... dance, n. ballet, cotillion, quadrille, waltz, reel, fandango, polka, two-step, polonaise, mazurka, schottische, allemande cancan, minuet, courant, bolero, gavot. Associated Words: ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... just (to use one of their own expressions) "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
... as if it might be some old lady demanding of him pink tights and a place in the front row of the ballet. However, he checked the exclamation that rose to his lips. But for a moment he did not know what to say. Uncle Buzz—wanting to go to work at Bromley's!—An ancient and ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... library, filling a wall amply, crept a chill and insolent pencil of sunlight touching with frigid disapproval Therese of France and Ann the Superwoman, Jenny of the Orient Ballet and Zuleika the Conjurer—and Hoosier Cora—then down a shelf and into the years, resting pityingly on the over-invoked shades of ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... mulberry-tree as his badge. These devices in their turn supplied the poets and painters of his court with themes on which they were never tired of exercising their wit and ingenuity. Moors and Moorish costumes were introduced in every masquerade and ballet, a Moorish page was represented brushing the robes of Italy in a fresco of the Castello of Milan, while mulberry colour became fashionable among the ladies of the Moro's court, and was commonly worn by the servants and pages in the palace. Lodovico early gave signs of the love of literature ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... premiere danseuse of the ballet, And she tripped the light fantastic like a fay; She was so sweet and cunning, And withal so very stunning, That I was bound to meet ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... they hadn't a bean. Many might have been somewhat hazy as to antecedents, but all were well-provided with a certain stock-in-trade—personal charm. There were young men who composed music, others who designed everything from a lampshade to the decors of a ballet, young women who sang or danced, actresses who had not got on because managers would make love to them—or wouldn't, as the case might be. All types and many classes were represented, but a common object bound them together, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... 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 those of ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... to go with me. It was the first time in twenty years, since her farewell performance, that she had entered the Opera. It made a great impression on her. During the ballet especially, she trembled, she beamed, all her former triumphs sparkled in her eyes. How fortunate one is to have such emotions. A perfect type of his class, that Nabob. You must bring him to see me. It would amuse ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... itself! My gracious! how we laughed at it! There were Epping Forest verderers, and beef-eaters from the Tower, and pipers of the Scots Guards, and ladies of the ballet shivering on shaky stools and pretending to be 'Freedom' and 'Commerce,' and last of all the City King himself, smiling and bowing to all his subjects, and with his liegemen behind him in yellow coats and red ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... extravagant 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"; or from legends, peculiar to Siam, of gods, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... told you so,' replied he with a melancholy smile, and he hastened to speak of a ballet that he had seen the evening before at the opera, and with which ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... spot, where it alights upon its feet, nor is it ever known to miss, although the point may be so small as to admit its four feet only by their being closely pressed together. The manner in which it balances itself after such leaps is also admirable: our ballet-dancers would consider it a model of a perfect a plomb. The monster of the antediluvian world, the mammoth, must have been an inhabitant of this country, since many of its bones ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... of a new piece, with its dirty-booted actors, its cloaked and hooded actresses en papillote, bears about the same relation to the gala, wax-lit, and bespangled ballet, as the raw young gentleman of yesterday to the epauletted, belted, and sabretasched dragoon, whose transformation is due to a few hours of head-quarters, and a ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... a "Ballet of the Nations." The "nations," of course, represented the Allies. We had the delectable vision of the Russian ballerina dancing with arms entwined about several maids of Japan. The Scotch lassies ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... suggested the expression the "poetry of motion"? It should have been made for her. Her dancing is like nothing but poetic inspiration, and seems as if she was composing while she executed it. I wonder if it is the ballet-master who devises all the steps of these great dancers,—of course, not the national dances, but the inconceivably lovely things that Taglioni does, or whether she orders her own steps, and (given a certain dramatic ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... opera is a very abrupt transition; nevertheless, both have a share in this story. A company of French dancers appeared in Mexico, a twentieth-rate ballet, and the chief danseuse was a little French damsel, remarkable for the shortness of her robes, her coquetry, and her astonishing pirouettes. On the night of a favourite ballet, Mademoiselle Pauline made her entree in ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... struck, and that amidst painted trees and houses! This effect, except to the most literal and prosaic minds, is revolting and discordant. But this the modern drama is strenuously endeavoring to produce. 'In opera, ballet, and spectacle, scenery and illustrations must be effective, because they form elements of the piece. In the drama, where the source of entertainment is intellectual, they are merely accessories, and should be used in such wise as to keep up the harmony of effect, but never so as to ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... touch whose white hand would have been joy, to kiss whose red lips would have been to foretaste Heaven. I heard only the other day that the son of an old friend of mine had secretly married a lady from the front row of the ballet, and involuntarily I exclaimed, "Poor devil!" There was a time when my first thought would have been, "Lucky beggar! is he worthy of her?" For then the ladies of the ballet were angels. How could one gaze at them—from the shilling pit—and doubt it? ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... 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
... since the days when she tottered her first steps for her mother's and Bubru Singh's delight. Long before an American converted the Russian Royal Ballet, and the Russian Royal Ballet in return took all the theatre-going West by storm—scandalizing, then amazing, then educating bit by bit—Yasmini had developed her own ideas and brought them by arduous practise ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... no talent, the other saw that she had something else. This was a pair of shapely legs, which, as a ballet-dancer, could yet twinkle in front of ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... the most artistic skirts—always ball-room back and ballet front. Her grandchild was sitting on the floor yesterday, reading the Bible, when suddenly she looked up and said: "Grandma, there's a grammatical error in this Bible," and my landlady said: "Well, kill it, child, kill it!" She spends whole hours each day talking to her birds, which, she ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... this is a corruption of the pious in the Quarto, is made clearer from the 1st Quarto: 'the first verse of the godly Ballet wil tel ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... British Committee made this appeal she induced Russia to send a ballet for a single performance; and she also persuaded the manager of the Opera House to open it for a gala performance for another organization. There is a romantic flavor about all the countess's work, and just how practical ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... 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 ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... as an improvvisatrice. She composed, when only ten years of age, some really excellent canzone and, more than this, she set them to her own tunes for the lute and pipe, and arranged a very graceful ballet. ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... 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?' ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... 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 of a coachman in the service ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... deficit. Nor was he benefited by the performances of his "Tannhaeuser," which were given at the grand opera in March, 1861, by order of Napoleon, at the request of the influential Princess Metternich. He had refused to interpolate a vulgar ballet in the second act for the benefit of the members of the aristocratic Jockey Club, who dined late and insisted on having a ballet on entering the opera-house. They took their revenge by creating such a disturbance every evening ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... allows himself to be dragged to the floor where the couple dance en deux. The dance includes a great deal of entreaty, aversion, hope, and despair, all in dumb show, and ends by the lady being led to a seat. I saw this dance introduced in a ballet at the Grand Theatre in Moscow, and wondered why it never appeared on the ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... secret to the king. Louis was resolved on the downfall of his minister. The fete took place upon a scale of almost unparalleled splendor. Le Brun painted the scenes, La Fontaine wrote verses for it, and Moliere prepared a ballet for the occasion. The king concealed his wrath at this display of wealth, and very much enjoyed Moliere's amusements; and suggested a new comedy to the comedian, while talking with him at ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... have done with this solemn letter. I can see you sitting at a window that looks out on the bay of Naples, and Vesuvius with a faint smoke in the distance: a half-naked man under you cutting up watermelons, etc. Haven't I seen it all in Annuals, and in the Ballet of ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... 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
... university and German law were failures; German society, in an American sense, did not exist, or if it existed, never showed itself to an American; the German theatre, on the other hand, was excellent, and German opera, with the ballet, was almost worth a journey to Berlin; but the curious and perplexing result of the total failure of German education was that the student's only clear gain — his single step to a higher life — came from time wasted; studies neglected; vices indulged; education reversed; — it came from the despised ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... only in his excesses. He was very rich, so that he could give the rein to almost all his whims. Indeed, reports of a rather fantastic kind, somewhat recalling Duke Charles of Brunswick, were current about him, the most extravagant being of a ballet he had had performed for him by fifty naked dancing girls. There was a certain amount of exaggeration about this, perhaps. In any case he troubled himself no longer ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... different tale. We have our balls regularly, for instance; and there are artists on board this ship, who, though they cannot, perhaps, make as accurate a right angle with their legs as the first dancer of a leaping ballet, can go through their figures in a gale of wind; which is more than can be said of the highest jumper of them ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... courtiers as a star whose light might some day become the focus of all favor and power. And yet Louis XIV., a few years previously, had not even condescended to offer his hand to that "ugly girl" for a ballet; and Buckingham had worshipped this coquette "on both knees." De Guiche had once looked upon this divinity as a mere woman; and the courtiers had not dared to extol this star in her upward progress, fearful to disgust the monarch whom such a ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... unreasonable desire to fly in the face of Doctor Levillier's advice, and of his own secondary antagonistic desire, and to sit again with Julian. Everything in which he sought to find distraction, lacked savour. As he sat watching a ballet that glittered with electricity, and was one twinkle of coloured movement, he found himself longing for the silence, the gloom, the live expectation of the tentroom, night, and Julian. At White's the conversation of the men struck him as even more scrappy, more desultorily scandalous, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Lancers with Anton, and Anton, whose dancing puts that of the Russian Ballet into the shade, continually apologized for not being able to do it well enough. Ponting gave a great lecture with slides which he had made since we arrived, many of which Meares had coloured. When ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... where hope is reduced to speculate for the meanest stakes. Mme. Vauquer alone can breathe that tainted air without being disheartened by it. Her face is as fresh as a frosty morning in autumn; there are wrinkles about the eyes that vary in their expression from the set smile of a ballet-dancer to the dark, suspicious scowl of a discounter of bills; in short, she is at once the embodiment and interpretation of her lodging-house, as surely as her lodging-house implies the existence of its mistress. You can no more imagine the one ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... the Creole a great lover of good light music, but the whole region for blocks about the Opera House is populated by old musicians from the opera's orchestra, and women, some middle aged, some old, who used to be in the ballet or the chorus, and who not only keep alive the musical tradition of the district, but pass it on to the younger generation. Indeed there are almost as many places in the French quarter where music may be heard, as ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... interest upon a human association. Not one of them professes any concern with the sea or ships for their own sake. The sea is a sad, solemn reality, the theatre upon which the seaman acts his life's tragedy. It has no more of enchantment to him than the "magic fairy palace" of the ballet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... the ballet at the Kalbsbraten theatre in my time was Springbock, from Vienna. He had been a regular zephyr once, 'twas said, in his younger days; and though he is now fifteen stone weight, I can, helas! recommend him conscientiously as a master; and I determined ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... continued the Court Painter. "He knows all languages perfectly: sings deliciously: plays every instrument: composes operas which have been acted a thousand nights running at the Imperial Theatre of Crim Tartary, and danced in a ballet there before the King and Queen; in which he looked so beautiful, that his cousin, the lovely daughter of the King of Circassia, died for love ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... these people chance to have a taste for intoxication, tobacco, hard hats, false hair, the nude ballet, ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... its base narrow, her natural movement in a costume which does not conceal the action of the hip and knee-joints is unavoidably awkward, though none the less attractive to the eye of the other sex. [Footnote: For instance, the movements of ballet-dancers, except the very artificial ones of the feet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... head, which so dazed and surprised the little man that he staggered and fell down on his back, upsetting a decanter and several glasses. They raised him up, gave him some brandy to drink, thumped him on the back. The old man smiled and hiccoughed. 'To-morrow,' said Ferdinando, 'we'll have a concerted ballet of the whole household.' 'With father Hercules wearing his club and lion-skin,' added one of his companions, and all three ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... effrontery of 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, it certainly "followed hard upon." But the reformation of the stage had already been contemplated ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... should have said) was strengthened by one or two women. They were all soloists, did not very often join in the performance, but stood disengaged at the back part of the stage, and looked (in ridi, necklace, and dressed hair) for all the world like European ballet-dancers. When the song was anyway broad these ladies came particularly to the front; and it was singular to see that, after each entry, the premiere danseuse pretended to be overcome by shame, as though led on beyond what she had meant, and her male assistants made a feint of driving her ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the bark belt and the 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 the Ambrymese ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... a foreign type, Miss Harrison. Last year, in a London ballet, I saw a blonde Spanish girl who ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... 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, ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... he met Dallas, 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 ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... an important place in the annals of Terpsichore. Without great personal charm, her success was due to her wonderful skill, which was the result of the mercilessly severe training that she had received from her father, Filippo Taglioni, who was a ballet master of some repute. Born at Stockholm, where her father was employed at the Royal Opera, she made her debut at Vienna, where she created an immediate sensation. Hitherto ballet dancing had been somewhat ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... beautiful, and radiant with eternal youth, yet with a 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 ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... about music, having studied the art with considerable diligence for a number of years. Impossible to enumerate all the composers and executants on various instruments, the conductors and opera-singers and ballet-girls with whom I was on terms of familiarity during that incarnation. Perhaps I am the only person now alive who has shaken hands with a man (Lachner) who shook hands with Beethoven and heard his voice; all of which may appear when ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... the people conveniently flock in; ambassadors come from all corners of the earth to acknowledge Rienzi; Adriano warns him that mischief is breeding, and Rienzi calmly smiles; there is a most elaborate ballet, occupying many pages of the score and full of trumpery tunes; Orsini stabs Rienzi, and all the patricians are seized by the guards; Rienzi shows himself unhurt, being protected by a breastplate; the conspirators are condemned to die and are ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... refined sensibilities, so the next morning while she was yet beating the hay, I packed my little suitcase and took it on the run away from there, leaving her, you might say, on the pan. I went into the pony ballet of a La Salle Theatre show—can you see me as a pony?—and I heard that she was advancing Art with a stock burlesque in South Chicago. That evening she was among those present at the aforementioned social function. And while we kissed and embraced ...
— The Sorrows of a Show Girl • Kenneth McGaffey
... almost done the like. His tears flowed abundantly. The Princes and Princesses were overcome with sorrow. At last, Gotter judged it time to put an end to this tragic scene. He entered the Hall, almost like Boreas in the Ballet of THE ROSE; that is to say, with a crash. He made one or two whirlwinds; clove the press, and snatched away the Princess from the arms of the Queen-Mother, took her in his own, and whisked her out of the Hall. All the world followed; ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to which she attached no importance. I discovered presently that a peculiar story was circulating among her friends. They said that Charles Strickland had become infatuated with a French dancer, whom he had first seen in the ballet at the Empire, and had accompanied her to Paris. I could not find out how this had arisen, but, singularly enough, it created much sympathy for Mrs. Strickland, and at the same time gave her not a little prestige. This was not without its use in the calling which she had decided ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... 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 Princess's romantic interest in him—that Princess ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... hard chase for Van and his tired horse if I did not head off that heifer; I felt I owed him that much. I had seen the cowboys do that very thing a hundred times that morning, but you cannot stand on your toe by watching a ballet dancer do it. However, I started on a gallop, slanting diagonally towards the creature, swinging one arm frantically (I really could not let go with both) and yelling "Hi, hi!" I wondered what would ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... at 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... request Margaret Craven 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
... actor, "what a splendid scene it would make for a ballet, Caroline! That mosque, with a garden alongside, and that other one ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... of The Dancing Girl at the Haymarket—of course people will talk—why she's nothing to the girls who dance to M. JACOBI's inimitable ballet-music at the Alhambra. Here they have a magic show, which "puzzles the Quaker;" and I don't mind admitting that I was the quaker when I saw a fair and comely young lady up in the air standing still and dancing on ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... visit, Adams left his office a little earlier than usual, for he had promised Connie that he would take her to see a new ballet at her favourite music hall. When he reached his house she was already dressed, and while he changed his clothes in his dressing-room, she fluttered restlessly about the upper floor, looking remarkably ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... suggested convention, at home in any company and showing absolutely no preference. He would be found joking with the stokers in the engine room when he might be walking with the Admiral on the quarter-deck, flirting with a deaf old Duchess when he might be supping with the leader of the ballet. With a sense of humour that would have made his fortune on the stage, he spoke half-a-dozen languages and a dozen dialects. He could imitate the Kaiser or give a Yiddish dialect to a Chinaman. Light-hearted to a fault, he would make a joke at anyone's expense, preferably his own. An entertaining ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... excesses. He was very rich, so that he could give the rein to almost all his whims. Indeed, reports of a rather fantastic kind, somewhat recalling Duke Charles of Brunswick, were current about him, the most extravagant being of a ballet he had had performed for him by fifty naked dancing girls. There was a certain amount of exaggeration about this, perhaps. In any case he troubled himself no ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... the maddened music was at its height, And the waltz was wildest—behold, a sight! The stilts began to hop and twirl Like the saucy feet of a ballet-girl. And their haughty owner, through the air, Was spin, spin, spinning everywhere. Everybody got out of the way To give the dangerous stilts fair play. In every corner, at every door, With faces looking like unfilled blanks, They watched the stilts at their ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... fluttered skirts and lifted rapiers. Men and women, the guests of Gonzague, flooded from the supper-room into the great hall, and under the gaze of the Three Louis, Oriol with his fancy, Navailles with Cidalise, Taranne, Noce, and the others, each with his raddled Egeria of the opera-house and the ballet. As they fluttered and flirted and laughed and chattered into the great hall, Gonzague held up his hand for a moment, as one that calls for silence, and in a ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... lighting small electric lamps. Skrivanoff has modified the De la Rue cell by substituting a solution of caustic potash for the ammonium chloride, and his battery has been used for "star" lights, that is to say, the tiny electric lamps of the ballet. The Schanschieff battery, consisting of zinc and carbon plates in a solution of basic sulphate of mercury, is suitable for reading, mining, and other ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... lived in a set of chambers up town, and dined at his club, where he usually passed the evenings at chess with some brother antediluvian. A visit to the theatre, when some old English comedy or some new English ballet happened to be on the boards, was the periphery of his dissipation. What is called society saw nothing of him. He was a rough, breezy, thickset old gentleman, betrothed from his birth to apoplexy, enjoying ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... 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 ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... The answer to which, was, 'Yes—when Judith bore the head of Holofernes.' It was singular that such a question could have been agitated, when the legends of the saints contained the story of the bearded saintess of the Tyrol—a converted ballet-dancer, who was thus rendered hideous in accordance with her prayer, that she might be made so repulsive as to frighten away all lovers. And yet Mr. Barnum's Bearded ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... them. Half-a-dozen other men found seats somewhere, 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 Campagna ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... the theatres were going every night, including Sundays. Karsavina appeared in a new Ballet at the Marinsky, all dance-loving Russia coming to see her. Shaliapin was singing. At the Alexandrinsky they were reviving Meyerhold's production of Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan the Terrible"; and at that performance I remember noticing a student of the Imperial ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... too frank an idealization to be misleading; and since popular chorus is one of the most effective elements of the opera, we can hardly object to lyric rustics in elegant laced boddices and picturesque motley, unless we are prepared to advocate a chorus of colliers in their pit costume, or a ballet of charwomen and stocking-weavers. But our social novels profess to represent the people as they are, and the unreality of their representations is a grave evil. The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... associations with which the name of our floating vehicle was generally connected; yet, suggestive fancy could readily supply their place with kindred ideas culled from our more prosaic surroundings. We had, it is true, no crimson-sashed, ragged, ballet-costumed gondolier to "ply the measured oar;" because, in the first instance, we did not row up at all. We were a trifle too wise in our generation to pull up the river in a lumbering barge under a broiling sun, and fancy we were amusing ourselves! No, we had a horse and ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... household. Dane was thus not unfamiliar with the methods of unexpected evening visits; and it was fortunate for him that he was so. The little children whom he had picked up, explained to him, by pantomime which would have made the fortune of a ballet-girl, that they were much more comfortable in their new home than they had been in any other, and that they had no wish to leave it. But by various temptations addressed to them, in the form of barley horses and dogs, and sticks of barber's candy, Dane, who was of a ...
— The Brick Moon, et. al. • Edward Everett Hale
... who lodged in the second floor back next to Mr Holt. Her story was quite different from that of Mrs Jupp the landlady. She would doubtless be only too glad to receive Ernest's ministrations or those of any other gentleman, but she was no governess, she was in the ballet at Drury Lane, and besides this, she was a very bad young woman, and if Mrs Baxter was landlady would not be allowed to stay in the house a single hour, not ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... noble lady on her death-bed entrusted him with the charge of her two sons, giving him a pension of two hundred livres, on the condition that he should never leave them. Soon after her death he was ordered to write some verses for a ballet produced at Court; this led him to acquire a taste for the theatre, and he produced in 1700 an opera entitled Hsione, which met with a great success. The relations of his pupils were aroused. It was scandalous that a teacher of youths should write plays. All the ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... habits and the common opinion of the society of his day. If we had a censor who started a lofty code of morality and propriety all his own, public opinion would not stand him and his code. Suppose we had a censor who considered "Othello" shocking, and an ordinary decolletee dress or an ordinary ballet costume indecent, an outcry would soon be raised against him which would compel him to resign his purposes or his office. All he can do is to endeavor to order things so that nothing is said or exhibited which ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... as your hand, with horns or 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 ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... painful. Nobody dances so 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 spoiled? They will have to plunge into the world full soon enough; ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... 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 and Apollo for the Muses stand. Then noble Chaucer, in those former times, ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... adrift without rudder or ballast, and with nothing but vapid sweets and faded flowers on board." "The effect of the whole," says one of his biographers, speaking of Lalla Rookh, "is much the same as that of a magnificent ballet, on which all the resources of the theatre have been lavished, and no expense spared in golden clouds, ethereal light, gauze-clad sylphs, ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... little offence is that the acts it mimics have no art it can murder. Mrs. Budd sets out her one little "high geraingia" in the middle of her tiny grass-plat (probably trimming it to look like a ballet-dancer on one leg). Whereupon Mrs. Mudd, the situation of whose house and grounds is not in the least like her neighbor's, plants and trims hers the same way and feels sure it has the same effect, for—why ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... items on the programme— "Shtchedryk." Again, as Mr. SMILLIE must have bitterly reflected, how can we possibly render justice to the cause of Bolshevism so long as we are unable to pronounce the names of its leaders correctly? The same remark applies to the Russian Ballet; the Yugo-Slav handbell-ringers; the vegetarian Indian-club swingers from the Karakoram Himalayas; the polyphonic gong-players from North Borneo; the synthetic quarter-tone quartette from San Domingo; the anthropophagous ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... in blood, afterward to wither back into stained and stiffened apathy; and then that whole vast false heaven of sensual passion, full of nymphs, satyrs, graces, goddesses, and I know not what, from its high seventh circle in Correggio's Antiope, down to the Grecized ballet-dancers and smirking Cupids of the Parisian upholsterer. Sweep away all this, remorselessly, and see how much art we ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... contained books on the Arts. Extracting a huge tome in which some by no means reticent mythological illustrations were contained, he set himself to examine these pictures. They were of the kind which pleases mostly middle-aged bachelors and old men who are accustomed to seek in the ballet and similar frivolities a further spur to their waning passions. Having concluded his examination, Chichikov had just extracted another volume of the same species when Colonel Koshkarev returned with a document of some sort and a ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... round, and are not the men most in demand described as 'all-round men'? Nor are all-round women without their admirers. Events, we know, move in a circle, as time moves in cycles—though, alas! not on them. The ballet and the bicycle are popular forms of the circle, and it is the charm of the essay ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... banks on which they invited you to repose; tracts which rouged poor Christianity on the cheeks, clapped a crown of innocent daffodillies on her head, and set her to dancing a pas de zephyr in the pastoral ballet in which Saint-Simon pipes to the flock he shears; or having first laid it down as a ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Ardayre, all had been much easier, because they were seldom alone—and at last Amaryllis had grown to accept the situation, and try not to speculate about it. She danced every night at balls and continued the usual round, but often at the Opera, or the Russian ballet, or driving back through the park in the dawn, some wild longing for romance would stir in her, and she would nestle close to John. And John would perhaps kiss her quietly and speak of ordinary things. ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... he cried, and drawing from his pocket two little wisps of reddish hair, he held them to his cheeks like side-whiskers and danced about the studio with the filmy graces of a ballet-girl. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 signe of ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... 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 ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... feeble efforts to perfect himself 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 ...
— A Good-For-Nothing - 1876 • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Baltazarini, a native of Piedmont, who went to 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 ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee
... said Simon Verstage, interrupting the singer, "We all of us know that there ballet, pretty well. It's vastly long, if I remembers aright, something like fourteen verses; and I think we can do very well wi'out it to-night. I fancy your ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... 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 Howard ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... 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"; or from ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... and then came a flash of cockney humour, now and then some old lady, a character such as Charles Dickens might have drawn, would amuse them by her garrulous oddities. Once a woman came who was a member of the ballet at a famous music-hall. She looked fifty, but gave her age as twenty-eight. She was outrageously painted and ogled the students impudently with large black eyes; her smiles were grossly alluring. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... right back with me to early days, Sweet Lady," he said, "to a palace in a gloomy city and to an artiste—a ballet-dancer—but at the same time a great musicienne and a good and beautiful woman, a woman with red, splendid hair, like my niece. There she lived in a palace in this city, away from the world with her two children; an Emperor was her lover and her children's father; and they all four were ...
— The Reason Why • Elinor Glyn
... would have loaded it with bead trimming and cut-steel ornaments. At first she even wanted it cut "minaret" fashion, which would have, in the end, made the poor lady look a good deal like an overgrown ballet dancer! ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... former wearing every strange variety of beard and blouse; the latter in pretty light-colored muslins and bewitching little caps, with the exception of two who wore flowers in their hair, and belonged to the opera ballet. They were in the midst of a tremendous galop when we arrived; so we stood at the door and looked on, and Dalrymple flirted with Mademoiselle Annette. As soon as the galop was over, two of our hosts came forward ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... his few possessions carefully and then, on a very hard bed, dreaming of bombs, of Mrs. Brockett dressed as a ballet dancer, of Mr. Zanti digging for treasure beneath the grey flags of Bennett Square, of Clare Elizabeth Rossiter riding down Oxford Street amidst the shouts of the populace, of the world as a coloured globe on which he, Peter Westcott, the author of that masterpiece, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... Prince de Metternich, then Austrian ambassador at the court of the Tuileries, and an amateur musician of no mean order, he had written the libretto of a ballet called "Le Roi d'Yvetot." This was given on the professional stage, but met with little success, if exception is made of the "first night," when again "all Paris" turned out to see the prince lead ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... catastrophe. Little Tilly, the gardener's pretty child, had strayed in from among the servants peeping at a long window in the rear, and established herself near the wedding group, looking like a small ballet girl in her full white frock and wreath pushed rakishly askew on her curly pate. As she stood regarding the scene with dignified amazement, her eye met Sylvia's. In spite of the unusual costume, the ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... the evening was the ballet, already well-known, of the Polovtsy warriors, executed with the extreme of fanatic fervour and frenzy. The art of M. MICHEL FOKINE can turn his Russians into Tartars without a scratch of the skin. BORODINE'S music, taking on a more barbaric quality as the action travelled further East, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... drama, stage play, piece[Fr], five-act play, tragedy, comedy, opera, vaudeville, comedietta[obs3], lever de rideau[Fr], interlude, afterpiece[obs3], exode[obs3], farce, divertissement, extravaganza, burletta[obs3], harlequinade[obs3], pantomime, burlesque, opera bouffe[Fr], ballet, spectacle, masque, drame comedie drame[Fr]; melodrama, melodrame[obs3]; comidie larmoyante[Fr], sensation drama; tragicomedy, farcical-comedy; monodrame monologue[obs3];duologue trilogy; charade, proverbs; mystery, miracle play; musical, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... ran a burlesque on the Lyceum "Faust," called "Faust-and-Loose." Henry did not care for burlesques as a rule. He thought Fred Leslie's exact imitation of him, face, spectacles, voice—everything was like Henry except the ballet-skirt—in the worst taste. But everything that Toole did was to him adorable. Marie Linden gave a really clever imitation of me as Marguerite. She and her sister Laura both had the trick of taking me off. I recognized the truth of Laura's caricature ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... the new ballet," the youth exhorted him earnestly; not that he cared whether the hairdresser went or not, but because he wanted to talk about the ballet ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... there several times, as well when there was a tragedy as when there was a ballet; for the pieces in which there were the greatest number of characters on the stage were the most interesting to see from the flies. One sat pretty much in the dark up there, and most people took their supper up with them. Once three apples and a great ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... the name and nature of "Our Father," Munganngaur. That a Totemistic dance, or medicine-dance of Emu hunting, is also displayed(3) at certain Mysteries of a given tribe, and that Baiame is spoken of as the hero of this ballet, no more deprives the Australian moral and religious teaching (at the Mysteries) of sacred value, than the stupid indecency whereby Baubo made Demeter laugh destroys the sacredness of the Eleusinia, on which Pindar, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... ca's hersel' Mrs. Gordon, but I dinna believe she's a wife at a'. She's in the ballet ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... divided into several great series: the race-courses, the ballet-dancers, and the women bathing count among the most important. The race-courses have inspired Degas with numerous pictures. He shows in them a surprising knowledge of the horse. He is one of the most perfect painters ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... certainly a remarkable performance. The shadows took the forms of rabbits, swans, foxes, elephants, fairies, sailors with wooden legs, old women who smoked pipes, ballet-girls who pirouetted, anglers who bobbed for fish, twirling harlequins, and the profiles of eminent statesmen—all made with two hands and, at the most, the help of a tiny stick or piece of string. They danced and capered, grew large and then small, with such profusion of odd turns and changes that ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... performance, leaping and whirling very rapidly. The exhibition concluded with a round dance, which was thought to be very pretty, perhaps because it was exceedingly lively. Mrs. Belgrave and Mrs. Blossom had never been to a theatre in their lives, never saw a ballet, and were not capable of appreciating the posturing, though the animated dance pleased them. The Nautch girls retired, and the "Nautch," as such an ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... its plucking from a bush, and its arrival in the laboratory. He represents the actual pouring of the poison in his ear. He hints too (by suggesting the action of the bell-ringer) that he was never really mourned, and concludes a most spirited Ballet d'Action by a rapid sketch of the paling of the ineffectual fires of the glow-worm. As he leaves to the music of "Then you'll Remember Me," HAMLET imitates cockcrow, which brings the entertainment to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... book, L'Art de la Lingerie, published in 1771, women's drawers are not even mentioned, and Mercier (Tableau de Paris, 1783, vol. vii, p. 54) says that, except actresses, Parisian women do not wear drawers. Even by ballet dancers and actresses on the stage, they were not invariably worn. Camargo, the famous dancer, who first shortened the skirt in dancing, early in the eighteenth century, always observed great decorum, never showing the leg ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... once more to send me a copy of the ballet of Gluck's "Don Juan" and of the "Dictionary of Music" which you have just published,—I have already asked Belloni for them, but he is a little subject to distractions in these matters,—and accept, my dear sir, together ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 1, "From Paris to Rome: - Years of Travel as a Virtuoso" • Franz Liszt; Letters assembled by La Mara and translated
... separate and carefully labeled corner. Then Schnitzler begins to scrape off 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 ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... Austin directed that the ball should commence. I requested the honour of Miss Eurydice's hand in a cotillon, which was to open the ball. At this moment stepped forth the premier violin, master of the ceremonies and ballet-master, Massa Johnson, really a very smart man, who gave lessons in dancing to all the "'Badian ladies." He was a dark quadroon, his hair slightly powdered, dressed in a light blue coat thrown well back, to show his lily-white ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... keep down the qualms of the animal may tell a different tale. We have our balls regularly, for instance; and there are artists on board this ship, who, though they cannot, perhaps, make as accurate a right angle with their legs as the first dancer of a leaping ballet, can go through their figures in a gale of wind; which is more than can be said of the highest jumper ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... of a Pole, the genesis of his literary debut of 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 we have read once more romance, in whose ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... joined us, dancing across the wide red floor with the skirts of his gown outspread like a ballet dancer's—ridiculous and ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... confounded cross-examination I was under, and was glad to end it by any coup d'etat. One wretch was persecuting me about green crops, and another about the feeding of bullocks; about either of which I knew as much as a bear does of a ballet." ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... point of destination. Instead he walked over to a variety theatre that was then in operation on Twenty-third street, and after spending a short time in the auditorium guided the young man into the "wineroom." Here the ladies of the ballet were in the habit of going when off the stage, for the sake of entertaining the patrons with their light and frivolous conversation, and inducing them if possible, to invest in champagne ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... negotiation in abundance; for we carried on the whole diplomacy of the opera-house in London, engaged primo tenores, and settled the rival claims of prima donnas; gave our critical opinions on the merits of dancers worthy of appearing before the British cognoscenti; and dispatched poets, ballet-masters, and scene-painters, to our managers, with an activity worthy of the purest patriotism. What ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... summers, Stout but sportive) treads a measure, Grinning, in herself a ballet, Fixed ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... of the city, and the despair and envy of her own sex. She was a 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 adulation until she regarded it as her right, and resented passionately ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... movements of their vengeance; and the next hour you'd hear 'em singing 'The Spotted Cow' together as peaceable as two holy twins; yes—and very good voices they had, and would strike in like professional ballet-singers to one another's support ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... of 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, it certainly "followed hard upon." But the reformation of ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... such a decent old street-lamp, that had done its duty for many, many years, but now it was to be condemned. It was the last evening,—it sat there on the post and lighted the street; and it was in just such a humor as an old figurante in a ballet, who dances for the last evening, and knows that she is to be put on the shelf to-morrow. The lamp had such a fear of the coming day, for it knew that it should then be carried to the town-hall for the first time, and examined by the authorities of the city, who should ...
— A Christmas Greeting • Hans Christian Andersen
... cries the author to the critic of the rehearsal, "is the sentiment of a great man." The Great Man was a phrase, to use Pope's words, "by common use appropriated to the first minister"—that is, to Walpole. In the next scene the effrontery of the piece culminates in a ballet where the Prime Minister appears, leading a chorus of false patriots, who, to use Fielding's own words, are set in the 'odious and contemptible light' of a set of "cunning self-interested fellows who for a little ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... for examples. This Empire State, with its magnificent resources and proudly developing energies, should be the last to unite in adjudging its judicial officers to the labors of galley slaves, and to then pay them by the year less than a ballet-dancer receives by the month in all its principal cities. Two thousand five hundred dollars per year is the astounding sum which this same Empire State pays to its highest judicial officers. If we reverse the saying of Walpole, and read ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... a corruption of the pious in the Quarto, is made clearer from the 1st Quarto: 'the first verse of the godly Ballet wil tel ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... expenses of a concert devoted entirely to the master's compositions. 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 Third ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... enough. Here I did 'ce que je voudrais avec' her most freely, and it having cost 2s. in wine and cake upon her, I away sick of her impudence, and by coach to my Lord Brunker's, by appointment, in the Piazza, in Covent-Guarding; where I occasioned much mirth with a ballet I brought with me, made from the seamen at sea to their ladies in town; saying Sir W. Pen, Sir G. Ascue, and Sir J. Lawson made them. Here a most noble French dinner and banquet, the best I have seen this many a day and good discourse. Thence ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... their joyous peals. At 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, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... to Madame Perrier she says, "My dear—London's awful"; and "Ludgate Circus—I ask you!" But still, despite her dislike of the city itself, she stayed for eight years, her whole being warmed by the love and adulation of the populace. She appeared in the ballet after the opera. "Her dancing," writes Follygob, "is unbelievable, incredible; she takes one completely by surprise—her butterfly dance was a revelation." This from Follygob. Then Henry Pidd wrote of her, "She is a woman." This ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... 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 lightly approached ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... of the term "Art" is becoming narrowed; "work of Art" to most people means a picture, a statue, or a piece of bijouterie; by way of compensation "artist" has included in its wide embrace cooks and ballet girls, no less ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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 early spring of ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... visited Niblo's in New York during the ballet season. When the short-skirted, gossamer clad nymphs made their appearance on the stage ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... 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 (consul in 621) should catch the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... 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 music, ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... ridiculous imitations of fashionable dress, and made ludicrous 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 a comical crowd. But ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... operation of making sail had been completed—"By the powers, but that dhrag of mine is a wondherful invention entirely! Do ye notice, Harry, me bhoy, how it's modherated the little huzzy's paces? Bedad, she's goin' along as sober as a Quaker girl to meetin' instead of waltzin' away like a ballet-dancer! But wait until one of those light-heeled picaroons comes along, and then won't we surprise thim above a bit! If it's not blowing too hard when ye come on deck in the middle watch ye may give her the stunsails; it'll look more ship-shape, and as if we were in a hurry ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... multiplying. The morality of the time can be judged from the fact that the "immaculate" Marcus Cato separated from his wife that a friend might marry her; and when the friend died, married her himself again. Scandals and love intrigues were common in the highest circles; noble ladies, and not ballet-dancers[86] merely, thought it of little account to have their names besmirched. Everything in society was splendid, polished, decorous, cultivated without; but within, hollow ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... dictum of Simon, what a horse does under compulsion he does blindly, and his performance is no more beautiful than would be that of a ballet-dancer taught by whip and goad. The performances of horse or man so treated would seem to be displays of clumsy gestures rather than of grace and beauty. What we need is that the horse should of his own accord exhibit his finest airs and paces at set signals. (6) Supposing, ...
— On Horsemanship • Xenophon
... to be—quasi tesserata emblemate—as if he had studied them a week beforehand, and had read them instead of speaking them. His harvest at the Opera House is likely to be very successful, for his Saturdays and Tuesdays are so full, that he is going even to attempt the Thursdays. Vestris' Ballet people think too long. "It is impossible that an English audience should be satisfied. They don't know when they have got a good spectacle, and think that finding fault is the only way to pass for judges." ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... a costume which does not conceal the action of the hip and knee-joints is unavoidably awkward, though none the less attractive to the eye of the other sex. [Footnote: For instance, the movements of ballet-dancers, except the very artificial ones of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... her posterity, gazing fondly back at her. She is 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
... Edmund Kean was Jaffier and Miss O'Neil Belvidera. They were playing to a greatly excited house, as may well be supposed when two such artists were upon the stage. Mr. St. A—-, who was then ballet-master at the theatre, and who, by the way, was a most graceful dancer, seeing Mrs. Banks, went up to her to exchange compliments. Having done so, Mr. St. A—- remarked how seldom they had the pleasure of seeing Mrs. Banks. "Oh," replied she, "I never come to the theatre—not ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... admirably illustrated by an anecdote I have heard my mother tell. One evening, when she had gone to the Grand Opera with M. Jouy, the wise and witty Hermite de la Chaussee d'Antin, talking with him of the career and circumstances of the young ballet women (she had herself, when very young, been a dancer on the English stage), she wound up her various questions with this: "Et y en a-t-il qui sont filles de bonne conduite? qui sont sages?" "Ma foi!" replied the Hermite, shrugging his shoulders, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... this long expected first volume of collected prose, Divagations, in which we find the prose poems of early date; medallion or full-length portraits of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Poe, Whistler, and others; the marvellous, the unique, studies in the symbolism of the ballet and the theatrical spectacle, comparatively early in date; Richard Wagner: reverie d'un Poete francais, Le Mystere dans les Lettres; and, under various titles, the surprising Variations sur un Sujet. The hesitation of a lifetime having been, it ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Byron's 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 not dance it at all. ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... another dance, the pirouette and other figures dear to the bald-headed beaux of the modern play-house, were practiced in the familiar way. Four thousand years ago, the senses of the young ancient Egyptian—wild, heady lad!—were kicked into confusion by the dark-skinned belle of the ballet, while senility, with dimmed eyes, rubbed its dry hands in feverish approval at the self-same feat. Dear, dear, but it was a bad world four ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... see my way to receiving ballet girls, or chorus girls, or actresses, or so-called painters, poets, musicians, and others—in order ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... [Footnote: 'Pantomime' has been chosen as the most natural translation of orchaesis, which in this dialogue has reference for the most part to the ballet-dancer (pantomimus) of imperial times. On the other hand, Lycinus, in order to establish the antiquity and the universality of an art that for all practical purposes dates only from the Augustan era, and (despite ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... and clapping. Ramos whistled piercingly, with two fingers. The huge Kuzak twins, Art and Joe—both had football scholarships at Tech—gave Indian yells. Eileen Sands clasped her hands over her head and went up on her toes like the ballet dancer she had once meant to be. Old Paul, in his chair, chortled, and slapped his arm. Even little David Lester said "Bravo!" after he had gulped. The applause ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... a pistol and the whistle of a ballet close past them interrupted the man's speech; and, looking down, they saw Potter standing aft near the lashed wheel with a smoking revolver in his hand, which he still pointed threateningly ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... this, that my Jemmy, who had shown such a horror at the bally, as they call it, should ever grow accustomed to it; but she liked to hear her name shouted out in the crush-room, and so would stop till the end of everything; and, law bless you! in three weeks from that time, she could look at the ballet as she would at a dancing-dog in the streets, and would bring her double-barrelled opera-glass up to her eyes as coolly as if she had been a born duchess. As for me, I did at Rome as Rome does; and precious fun it ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... clean-cut delicacy of her features and the ivory clearness of her olive skin. She was a very merry Alice to-night, for her long engagement at the Bouffes Parisiennes was at an end. And she had been making the best of her freedom by keeping Tanrade hard at work over the score of his new ballet. They are more in love with each other than ever—so much so that they insist on my dining with them, and so these little dinners of three at "Les Rois" have become almost nightly occurrences. It is often so with those in love to be generous to an old friend—even ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... of day, The ballet danced in twilight glade, The canzonet and roundelay Sung in the silent greenwood shade: These simple joys, that never fail, Shall bind me ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... 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 ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... 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 ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... our engagements, dear boy. We will try to arrange it. I can tell you at the ballet," and the Princess smiled encouragingly up at him. "My godchild has not seen our national dancing yet, so we go to-night with ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... returns and invested her with a white night gown, which detracted very much from history. The "soldiers" were picked up among the La Crosse boys, and they got tangled up, and couldn't form a line to save themselves, and when they stood against the wall it was a melancholy fact that they tickled the ballet girls in the ribs as they passed by. This was highly wrong. It takes the romance out of the affair to gaze upon an Assyrian soldier, covered with armor, and carrying a cover to a wash boiler in his hand, ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... 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
... QUESTION.—The general idea of the forthcoming new Opera at the Savoy appears to be "all Dance to SOLOMON's music." Is it to be a pantomime-drama, like L'Enfant Prodigue, or simply a ballet? If neither, where do song-words and dialogue ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 2, 1891 • Various
... other reasons, to have a very pleasant stay. The mother was impatient to know what the duke would think of her daughter, for she had destined her from her childhood to serve the pleasures of this voluptuous prince, who, though he had a titular mistress, was fond of experimenting with all the ballet-girls who ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... arms to balance herself. A pretty picture she made,—lithe and slender as a reed, her fair face all aglow with life and merriment, and the sunshine all round her. "See!" she cried, "I am Taglioni, the queen of the ballet. I had—a—oh! I nearly went over that time—I had a paper-doll once, named Taglioni. She was truly—lovely! You stood her on a piece of wood—just like this; only there was a crack which held her toes, and this has no crack. Now I will perform the Grand Pas de Fee! ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... flocked to the Congress of Rastadt for the purpose of amusing the distinguished noblemen and delegates by their vaudevilles, comedies, and gay operas. Finally, there were also the French actresses and ballet-girls, who, dressed in the highest style of fashion, were occupying on one side of the road a long row of splendid carriages. Many of these carriages were decorated on their doors with large coats-of-arms, and a person ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... with him as a composer. He was now thirty, and was beginning to show of what stuff he was made. These two years saw the production of some of the imperishable works of the master, namely: the First Symphony, the Oratorio Christus am Oelberg, and the Prometheus Ballet Music. It is probable that he had given earnest thought to these works for some years previously, and had had them in hand for two years or more before their appearance. The First Symphony calls for special mention as in it the future Symphonist is already ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... St Vincent on the 8th October; and in our passage to the coast of Brazil some new disputes arose among the men. After various consultations, it was determined that one Page, second mate of the Duchess, should be removed into the Duke, whence Mr Ballet was to remove into the Duchess. Captain Cooke was sent to execute this order, which Page refused to obey, but was brought away by force. Being accused of mutiny, he requested leave to go to the head before entering on his defence, which was permitted, when he jumped overboard, meaning ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... green aisle of the Champs-Elysee to the Arc de Triomphe, dimly visible in the moonlight. The Baron entered for one last glance over the preparations for his petit souper for Rosa and her sister of the ballet at the Opera. ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... four women promenading a San Francisco street on a pleasant morning is to be reminded of that ballet representing the Four Seasons, which we used to see in the second act of every well-regulated extravaganza. The woman nearest the walls has on her furs—it is always cool in the shade; the one next to her is wearing the very latest wrinkles in spring ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... disapproved of many things; 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 ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... M. de La Popeliniere, at Passy, was noted for its unique entertainment; there the celebrated Gossec and Gaiffre conducted the concerts, Deshayes, master of the ballet at the Comedie-Italienne, managed the amusements. It was a house like a theatre and with all the requisites of the latter; there artists and men of letters, virtuosos and danseuses, ate, slept, and lodged as in a hotel. With Mme. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... in love with Julia, then in the height of her beauty, and had cruelly deceived her. To appease the indignation of the younger sister he had got her an introduction to the manager of the Rockingham Theatre, who was about to put on a new Egyptian ballet, and from that time onwards it had been plain sailing for Ada. Later on came a meeting with Leroy, planned by Jasper's connivance; and Adrien, attracted by the woman's ripe beauty, had been blind, so far, to the deficiencies ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... into society in the evening in a low dress, with her breasts plainly visible to anyone standing by her when she is seated. The same lady would probably be furious at the suggestion that she should show herself to men in the dress of a ballet-dancer, but with a high corsage. And yet, experience shows that in other circumstances the short skirt is quite acceptable, inasmuch as when bicycling first obtained a vogue among the upper classes, ladies of high standing were to be ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... Against that space within us, as against the space that appalled the savage from without, we erect always more hard and logical images.... All brute material, animate and inanimate, of earth, becomes an organism to confront the soul. Formerly the soul as a simple figure, like a ballet, faced the environing vagueness. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... 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
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