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Although the quaint spelling of the old French may offer a passing difficulty to some readers, I have felt it advisable to give the address as it stands, for it presents several points of extraordinary interest.

First and foremost is the fact that it claims Beaujoyeux’s ballet to be the first ever printed!

His description of a ballet as “meslanges geometriques de plusieurs personnes dansans ensemble” is extremely interesting. Pylades the Latin dancer-mime declared that no man could become a perfect mime who did not understand music, painting, sculpture and geometry! And in recent years a well-known Italian maître with whom I was discussing Ballet remarked, as he held up a case of drawing instruments, “Here is the whole art of choreography,” or ballet-composition. This may seem a somewhat exaggerated assertion, but it is a fact that without some knowledge of geometry it would be difficult for a composer of Ballet to tell the effect that would be produced by lines and groups of dancers in the sight of a huge audience all looking at the stage from different angles.