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 reign France was the only continental country of the first importance with which she maintained constant diplomatic relations. Nor is enough known of the development of the French mask in the middle of the sixteenth century to make it possible to say how far, if at all, that country then gave the lead to England. Brantôme reports how Catherine de Médicis would amuse herself by inventing 'quelques nouvelles danses ou quelques beaux ballets, quand il faisoit mauvais temps', and the writings of Clément Marot and Mellin de Saint-Gelais and of the Pléiade contain several sets of verses composed for the purposes of 'mommeries' and 'mascarades'. I should suppose that the distinction drawn by M. de Beaumont in 1603 between a 'mascarade' and a 'ballet' corresponds pretty closely with that made above between the mask simple and the mask spectacular. The history of the 'ballet' proper in France seems to begin under Italian influences during the last quarter of the century. Its pioneer was one Baldassarino da Belgiojoso, a groom of the chamber to Catherine de Médicis and to her son Henri III, who came to France about 1555 and gallicized his name as Baltasar de Beaujoyeulx. When Henri, not yet King of France, left Paris to receive the crown of Poland in 1573, Baldassarino arranged the spectacle for his farewell. Sixteen nymphs issued from a movable rock, offered gifts, and danced in the hall. A printed description by Jean Dorat contains engravings of the rock and the dances, and verses in Latin and French, to which Ronsard and Amadis de Jamyn contributed. This appears to have been a mask on lines already familiar in both France and England. But eight years later Baldassarino got an opportunity for a far more elaborate undertaking. His Balet Comique de la Royne was devised for the wedding of the Queen's sister, Mlle de Vaudemont, to the Duc de Joyeuse on 15 October 1581. His own share seems to have lain in the invention of the general scheme of the enter-*