of the Bourrée necessitated the wearing of a shorter skirt than the mode of her day permitted for ordinary use. It never was a rigorously formulated composition, perhaps because it never became very popular at court. It contributed to the ballet the latter’s useful pas de bourrée, and continues as a diversion of the peasants of Auvergne, where it originated.
The Passepied was one of a family known as les branles, whose family characteristics are ill defined, despite the frequency with which the term is used by seventeenth-century writers. In England the word became “brawl.” It was the Branle du Haut Barrois in which gentry costumed themselves as the shepherds and shepherdesses perpetuated by Watteau. Another, the Branle des Lavandières, was based on pantomime of the operations of the laundress. In the Branle des Ermites, monk’s dress was worn. In that of the Flambeaux, torches were passed to newly selected partners, as in a present-day cotillion figure; it was a fashionable figure at wedding celebrations.
Tabourot’s amiable hints for the elegant execution of branles probably are not directed at the court. But they are illuminating. “Talk gracefully, and be clean and well shod; be sure that the hose is straight, and that the slipper is clean ... do not use your handkerchief more than is necessary, but if you use it, be sure it is very clean.” There is more; but, after all, why violate illusions?