Camargo
(From the painting by Lancret in the Wallace Collection).
Her style was noted by contemporaries as combining quickness with grace to a degree not previously achieved, and she won special credit for her invention of new steps. Her improvisation of new dances was remarkable, and it is important to note that she was the first to perform an entrechat, which, only for the benefit of non-dancing readers, may be described as the step in which a dancer actually crosses her feet rapidly while in mid-air. This historic innovation took place in 1730, and she could make four crossings; while eight are said to be as many as any dancer has since performed.
Another interesting point to note is that until the advent of Camargo the ballet skirts reached nearly, or quite, to the ankles. She was the first to shorten it, not, of course, to the brevity one can only regret has been too often seen since, but to such degree as to enable the steps to be better seen and the dancer to have greater freedom of movement. Her favourite dances were the Tambourin, Gavotte, and Rigaudon, or Rigadoon, as it is known in English. But for all the shortening of the skirt and the rapidity of her steps, Marie-Anne was never accused from departing from modesty, grace, and refinement of deportment.
A curious personal characteristic was, that while on the stage she was the incarnation of gaiety, yet in private life she was for the most part strangely grave, and even sad; though, with all the advantages of talent, position, and wealth of which she was possessed, it might have been expected she should be quite otherwise. No one ever discovered the reason. One imagines it to have been that modern disease, “the artistic temperament,” and a steady perception of the pitiful fact that all stage triumphs are but transient; and that, popular as she might be, and was, on her retirement in 1751, her fame would not long endure after her death, which actually occurred in 1770. Yet to-day she lives for us in Lancret’s exquisite picture, for all to see who visit Hertford House.
CAMARGO SPEAKS
“Talk to me not of poor Prévôt,
With all her peevish airs and graces;
Her day is past! ’Tis sad, I know,
But then—we cannot all be aces!