[1] It is an episode in Act 3 of Giacomo Meyerbeer's grand opera, Robert le diable.

[2] The short ballet tells of deceased nuns rising from their tombs in a ruined cloister.

Their aim is to seduce the knight, Robert le Diable, into accepting a talisman to win him a princess.

The ballet was created (in part) to demonstrate the building's newly installed gas lighting.

Although opening night was marred with a few mishaps, Taglioni made her indelible mark on the ballet world in the role.

[3] The ballet opens with Bertram, Robert le Diable's father, entering the ruined cloister of Sainte-Rosalie.

Trapdoors, gas lighting, and other elements that became associated with the romantic ballet had been used in the popular theaters on the Paris boulevards for some time.

Such elements would gain official sanction and prestige at the Paris Opéra in the middle decades of the 19th century.

[3] A ballet on a Robert le Diable theme was danced in Paris before Her Highness Mlle de Longueville in 1652.

The scene is night rather than day, and Gothic Europe rather than the classical world of Greece and Rome.

After almost 100 years of rational thought, audiences were clamoring for the mysterious, the supernatural, the vague, and the doomed.

The story of the ballet is about a knight who slips into a cloister at midnight to steal a talisman from a dead saint's hand that will allow him to win a princess.

A reviewer for the Revue des Deux-Mondes wrote:A crowd of mute shades glides though the arches.

All these women cast off their nuns' costume, they shake off the cold powder of the grave; suddenly they throw themselves into the delights of their past life; they dance like bacchantes, they play like lords, they drink like sappers.

[1] French Impressionist painter Edgar Degas painted the ballet scene several times between 1871 and 1876.

[12] Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's future wife Fanny Appleton wrote, "The diabolical music and the dead rising from their tombs and the terrible darkness and the strange dance unite to form a stage effect almost unrivaled.

The famous witches' (nuns) dance in the freezing moonlight in the ruined abbey, was as impressive as expected ...

They drop in like flakes of snow and are certainly very charming witches with their jaunty Parisian figures and most refined pirouettes.