Louis XIV. enjoyed performing various characters in the ballet, a recreation he pursued till he became too corpulent, when he abandoned it for fear of making himself an object of ridicule. Some idea of the importance of dancing at the Court of Louis XIV. can be gained from Molière, who goes so far as to say in the _Bourgeois Gentilhomme_ “that the destiny of nations depends on the art of dancing.” Monsieur de Lauzun, the favourite of Louis XIV., owed his fortune to his grace in dancing in the King’s quadrille. And, as Dumas writes, “many more than one nobleman owed the favour he enjoyed at Court to the way he pointed his toe, or moved his leg.” Indeed, Louis XIV. not only busied himself with the composition of ballets, but danced in them, and took dancing lessons from Beauchamps for twenty years.[52] Until he was thirty-two he danced with professional ballet-dancers, a fad which, it has been said, suggested itself to him from some lines in Racine’s _Britannicus_, wherein Nero’s dramatic proclivities are ridiculed. His last appearance was on February 13, 1669, in the Ballet of Flora. Indeed, so devoted was Louis to the pastime, that in one ballet he actually played no less than five successive characters, those of Apollo, Mars, a Fury, a Dryad, and a Courtier; and actually submitted to the fatigue of assuming the several costumes, frequently as often as three times during the week.[53] Benserade had the exclusive privilege of composing the _libretti_ of these ballets, which, it is said, “were one continued ovation to the young monarch, who was not in his own person exempted from the delivery of the most exaggerated and fulsome self-praise.” But such was the taste of the time. The Allemande Française--a mediæval German dance introduced into France about the year 1600--was a favourite of Louis XIV. and of Napoleon. Louis XIV. was also specially fond of the courante, which he is said to have performed better than any one else. And it may be added that on the 21st of January 1681, when the then Dauphiness, the Princess de Conti, and some other ladies of the first distinction in the Court of Louis XIV., performed a ballet with the opera, called _Le Triomphe de l’Amour_, it was received with so much applause, that on the 16th of the following May, when the same opera was acted in Paris, at the Theatre of the Palais Royal, it was thought indispensable for the success of this kind of entertainment to introduce female dancers, who have ever since been a support of the opera.