Then the fiddles struck up the air of ‘Sur le pont d’Avignon,’ and the whole company formed up into circles for the opening Branle.
There was her father, grimacing and leaping like a baboon in a nightmare, grave magistrates capering like foals, and giving smacking kisses to their youthful partners, young burghers shouting the words at the top of their voices. The whole scene seemed to Madeleine to grow every minute more unreal.
Then the fiddles stopped and the circles broke up into laughing, breathless groups. A young bourgeois, beplumed and beribboned, and wearing absurd thick shoes, came up to her, and taking off his great hat by the crown, instead of, in the manner of ‘les honnêtes gens,’ by the brim, made her a clumsy bow. He began to ‘galantise’ her. Madeleine wondered if he had learned the art from the elephant at a fair. She fixed him with her great, still eyes. Then she found herself forced to lead him out to dance a Pavane. The fiddles were playing a faint, lonely tune, full of the sadness of light things bound to a ponderous earth, for these were the days before Lulli had made dance tunes gay. The beautiful pageant had begun—the Pavane, proud and preposterous as a peacock or a Spaniard. Then some old ladies sitting round the room began in thin, cracked voices to sing according to a bygone fashion, the words of the dance:—
‘Approche donc, ma belle,
Approche-toi, mon bien;
Ne me sois plus rebelle,
Puisque mon cœur est tien;
Pour mon âme apaiser,
Donne mois un baiser.’
They beat time with their fans, and their eyes filled with tears. Gradually the song was taken up by the whole room, the words rising up strong and triumphant:—