Les Fêtes Chinoises

J. des Boulmiers, an eyewitness to a performance of Les Fêtes Chinoises wrote:[...] a public square decorated for a festival with, in the background, an amphitheatre on which are seated sixteen Chinese [and] thirty-two are seen on the gradins (stepped tiers) going through a pantomime.

It ends in a contredanse of thirty-two persons whose movements trace a prodigious number of new and perfectly designed attitudes, which form and dissolve with the greatest of ease.

However, Lincoln Kirstein adds that it "consisted of dance pictures with little plot, incorporating elements of the real and ideal, including the exotic China of travelers and explorers and the fantastic Cathay of Rococo chinoiserie designers.

In a grudging journal entry the dramatist Charles Collé remarked in July 1754: "This month, all Paris has flocked to a Chinese ballet, given at the Opéra Comique.

"[13] On 1 July 1754, the Mercure de France observed that the ballet was mounted with extraordinary luxury and in August reported that "the multitude flocked to see it with unprecedented furore.