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Updated: June 26, 2025
Madame de Warens tried to have him taught both dancing and fencing; he could never achieve a minuet, and after three months of instruction he was as clumsy and helpless with his foil as he had been on the first day. He resolved to become a master at the chessboard; he shut himself up in his room, and worked night and day over the books with indescribable efforts which covered many weeks.
Being one evening at the ball which is always given at the time of the races, Peregrine was struck with admiration at the beauty of a young lady, who seemed to be of his own age. He begged she would do him the honour to walk a minuet with him, and she frankly complied with his request.
One might have thought he had engaged to dance the minuet. Colonel Stuart met him in a spick-and-span uniform of His Majesty's Foot, cross-belts pipe-clayed white as snow, boots polished until they shone. Such gentlemen were punctilious in war two hundred years ago. "Your solid shot will not pound him much at this range, my good sir," said the lieutenant.
She said this, not precisely as an excuse, but with something of the sort in her tone. 'Very beautiful! How stately she did look that night, to be sure! I can see her now, my dear, as she stood up for a minuet with him. We wore hoops, then; and she had a white brocade petticoat, embroidered with pink rosebuds, and a train and bodice of pea-green satin, and green satin shoes with pink heels.
Upon my word, yes, our intimacy was like a minuet, simply because on every possible occasion and in every possible circumstance we knew where to go, where to sit, which table we unanimously should choose; and we could rise and go, all four together, without a signal from any one of us, always to the music of the Kur orchestra, always in the temperate sunshine, or, if it rained, in discreet shelters.
After the exciting arrival of Cinderella, Nora played a minuet on the mandolin, the tinkling music of which seemed best suited to the doll drama, and the prince and Cinderella executed a dance of such intricate steps and low bows that the audience was convulsed with laughter. There were even suppressed titters from behind the scenes.
At last she lifted her arms to make the curtsy at the end of the minuet, I went up instinctively as if I were about to dance with her; she looked me in the face, and fled. I constrained myself; but now that there could be no doubt my shuddering fit returned, and I made haste to sit down. A cold sweat bedewed my face and my whole body.
When the minuet was over, she asked Sir Andrew to take her into the next room. "I have promised to go down to supper with His Royal Highness," she said, "but before we part, tell me . . . am I forgiven?" "Forgiven?" "Yes!
Something of our contemporary impatience with fixed stanzaic forms is due perhaps to the failure to recognize that the greater poets succeed in making over every kind of poetic pattern in the act of employing it, just as a Chopin minuet differs from a Liszt minuet, although both composers are using the same fundamental form of dance music.
We sat down on a bench. It was the month of May. An odor of flowers floated in the neat paths; a hot sun glided its rays between the branches and covered us with patches of light. The black dress of La Castris seemed to be saturated with sunlight. The garden was empty. We heard the rattling of vehicles in the distance. "Tell me," I said to the old dancer, "what was the minuet?" He gave a start.
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