The due understanding of old French clavier-music then, must start from the knowledge of the dance. Almost all its pieces are dances, whether they declare themselves as such or not. They take up the numerous existing dance-forms and develop them in the ways already described. But in addition to this formal principle we must notice a second, the symbolic. The pieces _mean_ something, and mean more and more the further the century advances. As if to console themselves for the want of content which belongs to the dance in itself, composers are fond of indicating in their titles and dedications all kinds of relations which give to their pieces a more marked physiognomy or a more comprehensible expressiveness. For this purpose they had not only at their disposal the old song-names which clung to the dances, but a hundred other associations. They loved the dance, but they loved associations also. Nicknames and allusions flew from the smiling lips, and men had the fairest inducements to take the abstract in a concrete sense. The chief inducement was the stage with its representative music, the stage, so passionately loved by the French in the middle ages that even from the thirteenth century we have dramatic lyrical plays with the most delicate songs by the trouvère Adam de la Hale. These stand like flowers in the midst of their time, and penetrated so deeply into the life of the people that the little song of Marion “Robin m’aime” is still, they say, sung in the Hennegau. The fairies, which had already played their part in the works of this mediæval opera-composer and writer, had in the later French opera their rich harvest of beings of symbolic meaning. In Lully’s works there is quite a swarm of abstract figures, gods, demi-gods, personifications, which in small scenes or great airs bring out this characterising function of music to the utmost degree possible. But what such things as the good and bad Dreams, or the nymphs and Corybantes in the “Atys,” entering as chorus, performed in characteristic music was as nothing to what was done by the great ballets which drew heaven and hell into the circle of their representations. “Le Triomphe des Sens,” “Les Voyages d’Amour,” “Les Génies,” “Le Triomphe de l’Harmonie,” “L’Ecole des Amants”--all these are titles of operas and ballets of those times which had as their aim to represent musical things as symbols of sensuous incidents. From the lists of ballets and operas performed from Lully’s time right into the eighteenth century the application of fêtes, rococo-amusements, love-pictures by Watteau, or idyllic porcelain-ornamentation, to stage purposes, speaks with no uncertain sound. In such an environment, recollecting the renowned fantastic art of the contemporary Callot, we are led to understand the unusual preference for the direct association of clavier-pieces with particular persons or things. But here we must speak specially of programme-music.