Mais que Sallé, grand dieux! est ravissante!
Que vos pas sont légers, et que les siens sont doux!
Elle est inimitable, et vous êtes nouvelle;
Les nymphes sautent comme vous
Et les Grâces dansent comme elle.”
It is all safe praise of course, but when we separate the qualities one finds that he is only versifying the current opinion—Camargo is “brillante,” her steps are “légers,” and the “nouvelle” refers less to her than to the novelty of her steps, with the clever invention of which she delighted her audience; and the nymphs, you observe, “sautent comme vous,” an appropriate phrase for one whose entrechats amazed a generation to which such things were new. On the other hand, Sallé was “ravissante,” her steps were “doux”; she was “inimitable,” and “les Grâces dansent comme elle,” a point of special significance when we recall the historic distinction between the words sauter and danser.
Voltaire’s admiration was not exactly fevered—could the icy “intellectual” ever have been that? Not so the rest of Paris. Rumour soon gave her countless lovers—as it will a pretty actress to-day?—but history does not record that she succumbed to their protestations. Certainly duels were fought on her behalf; but probably she was unaware that she was the cause; and certainly she did not provoke them. Was she a pretty actress? Setting aside the opinion of her feminine contemporaries, unbiased colleagues thought not. Yet painters such as Lancret, Vanloo, and Pater sought for the honour of depicting her graceful figure and—was it her face? Well, as to actual features perhaps she was not faultlessly beautiful, but with that mingled Italian and Spanish blood, even if she were swarthy as some said, she must have been striking, temperamental, full of fire and “interesting” as we might say to-day. Much of her fascination must have been in expression, and one feels that she had that quality which often makes a dancer—sheer joy in dancing.
M. Ballon and Mlle. Prévôt
(After an engraving [reversed] in the Bibliothèque de l’Opéra).
