Chapter Two: The Dancing King (and Why France Needs to Calm Down) 🌞👑

Okay so remember I promised you a fourteen-year-old boy in a sunbeam costume? Buckle up, because he was real, his name was Louis, and he was the King of France. Not a prince. Not a duke. The actual KING, running an entire country, at an age where my mommy will probably still not even allow me to take the bus by myself. 🚌

The year is 1653. Louis XIV — that’s “the fourteenth,” they had completely run out of fresh names for kings LOL — is fourteen years old and already on the throne. And on the 23rd of February, in front of the entire glittering royal court, he steps out in a costume dripping in gold, wearing a headdress of golden sun rays, and dances the role of Apollo, the Greek god of the sun. 🌞

The show was called “Le Ballet Royal de la Nuit” — the Royal Ballet of the Night — and it went on for about THIRTEEN hours (I know, I know), telling the story of one long scary night that finally ends when the sun, aka Louis, rises and saves everybody. Subtle he was not. And it worked so well that people literally started calling him the Sun King. That became his whole brand for the rest of his life. He danced one really good solo at fourteen and got a nickname that stuck for seventy years. If only my double pirouette worked like that… (well, in case it does, I’m going for “the Gigi Rocket” — spread the word). 💫

Now here’s the bit that made me sit up. This wasn’t just a boy showing off (although, obviously, it was ALSO that). Louis had figured out something genuinely clever. If you’re the king, and you get all your powerful, scheming, backstabby friends (a.k.a the nobles) to spend months rehearsing a ballet in which YOU are literally the sun and everyone else just orbits around you… they are far too busy learning their steps to plot against you. Ballet was basically the world’s most beautiful power move. He danced his enemies into submission. Respect. 😌

Louis loved it so much that in 1661 he did something that changed everything: he founded the Académie Royale de Danse — the Royal Academy of Dance. The first proper ballet school. EVER. He got a brilliant dancer called Pierre Beauchamp to run the technical side, and Beauchamp did something that sounds mind-numbingly boring but is secretly the reason my entire life – and yours, most likely - looks the way it does. He sat down and worked out the five positions of the feet. 🦶

Yes. THE five positions. First, second, third, fourth, fifth. The ones I have done approximately nine hundred million times at the barre. The ones your teacher makes you do before you’re allowed to do literally anything fun. A French man in the 1600s invented them, wrote them down, and now every single ballet dancer on planet Earth, in every country, starts in the exact same five positions. That is genuinely bananas when you think about it. We are all still doing the homework of a guy from 1661.

And THIS, my friends, is why ballet is in French. Plié, tendu, jeté, pirouette, grand battement — all French. When my teacher screams “and… PLIÉ,” she is screaming in the language of a sun-obsessed teenage king’s dance school. Every ballet class in Tokyo, in Moscow, in New York, in Sydney, counts and names its steps in French. Because of this exact era. France got there first and stamped its language onto the whole art form forever. Fine. FINE. Credit given. 🍪

Here’s a fact that genuinely made me gasp, though. For the first almost-thirty years, there were basically NO women. 😳 At court and in these early ballets, the female roles were danced by… men. In wigs. In dresses. Because it wasn’t considered proper for women to perform in public. So all those delicate princesses and floaty goddesses? Blokes. It wasn’t until 1681 — nearly thirty years after Louis’s big sun moment — that professional women were finally allowed onto the stage at the Paris Opera, in a ballet called Le Triomphe de l’Amour. The very first professional ballerina in history was a woman known as Mademoiselle de La Fontaine. She is basically the great-great-great-(add about fifty more greats)-grandmother of every ballerina alive, and almost nobody knows her name. Criminal offensive side eye to history for that one. 😑

So that’s what France gave us, and I’m not going to pretend it’s nothing: the school, the five positions, the French words, and the whole enormous idea that dance could be a serious, trained, professional ART — and not just posh people mucking about at a party. That’s massive. Genuinely. Merci, France. 🇫🇷

BUT. (You knew there was a but 🐷) Here’s my slightly spicy opinion, and it is my book so I’m allowed. The French, having invented all of this, then got a teeny bit… obsessed with the rules. With the correct positions and the correct angles and the correct posh manners, performed correctly in front of rich people who’d just had a big dinner. And somewhere in all that correctness, it kind of forgot to have big feelings. It was elegant. It was impressive. But it was a little bit like a very expensive, very tidy museum where you’re not allowed to touch anything or laugh too loud. A bit so cringe, if I’m honest. 🥱

It needed someone to come along, crack it wide open, and pour actual emotion into it — love and heartbreak and ghosts and swans and tragedy so enormous you cry in the dark. And, spoiler for the next few chapters: that someone was not going to be France. 👀

But before we get to that, we have to talk about the moment ballerinas did something so extra, so painful, and so utterly unhinged that we are STILL doing it today — and it involves standing on the actual tips of your actual toes. Turn the page. My feet get blisters just thinking about it. 🩰😭