ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on two events in Paris: the Carrousel on the Place Royale performed in public and the Ballet de Madame danced semi-privately in the Salle de Bourbon of the Louvre palace. It explores the forms and traditions from which they came and indicate the reverberations which lingered on in writing for the court. In 1612, the heroine of the fête was the Queen Regent, Marie de Médicis, who against all the odds had engineered the marriage of her children to the royal offspring of Philip III of Spain; in 1615, the centrepiece was the future queen of Spain, princess Elizabeth. The triumphal forms of the Carrousel are found again in the novel, which is illustrated with 26 designs, many composed by Daniel Rabel and engraved by C. David, Lochun and others. The chivalric tradition decreed that knights present their challenges publicly in the form of cartels in prose or in verse.
