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The same sort of ballet continued through the reign of Louis
XIII, but many more machines were added, making a much more
brilliant spectacle. In 1617, a new ballet, La Delivrance de Renaud,
was presented. It was of the lineage of the Circe of 1581, having a
continuous plot allying the dances and songs. With this ballet begins
a genre which Pruni&res calls the "ballet melodramatique" (PruniSres,
Ballet, p. 119). Presented through pantomine and sung r^cits, it had
a unified plot which served as a sort of pretext for a certain number of
entrees, or ballet numbers. The word entree was to become impor-
tant to every lyric genre of the seventeenth century, and was usually
a little ballet, often with its own plot within the central action, either
serious (usually about love) or comic. Each of the ballets melodrama-
tiques ended with a grand ballet, usually a spectacular ending to the
piece. Thus, says Pruni&res, a real, well-defined dramatic genre had
developed by 1620: "Intermediaire entre l'opera et le ballet-mascarade,
il repond a l'amour des francais pour la danse expressive et pour le
the&tre. II est rationnel, voluptueux, et magnifique; il seduit les yeux,
les oreilles et les esprits". (PruniSres, Ballet, p. 120).
However, this unified form of ballet was not to last, and it
soon degenerated into a broken pastiche, sometimes unified not by a
central action, but by a theme. Some representative titles such as
Les Quolibets, Le Lundi Foire de Saint Denis, Le Balet des gueux,