Mademoiselle Parisot

Mademoiselle Parisot
Mademoiselle Parisot in a 1799 mezzotint by Charles Turner after John James Masquerier
Born	c. 1775–1777
Occupation	Opera, Ballet dancer
Years active	1789–1807

Mademoiselle Parisot (c. 1775 – after 1837) was a French opera singer and ballet dancer in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Her provocative costumes and dances caused an uproar in London and led to the imposition of restrictions on performances.

Parisot's given name has been cited as Rose and as Céline, but during her career she was commonly referred to simply as "Mademoiselle" or "Madame" Parisot. She debuted at the Théâtre de Monsieur in Paris at age 14 in a 20 December 1789 production of l'Infante de Zamora. Parisot was trained by Jean-Antoine Favre Guiardele, the ballet-master of the French Opera. The Victoria & Albert Museum identifies Parisot's father as the journalist Pierre-Germain Pariseau who was mistaken for a royalist and subsequently guillotined in 1794; however, in Louis Péricaud's chronicle of the Théâtre de Monsieur, Parisot's first name was Eugénie and her father was a sculptor. Her father allegedly told her:

My daughter was raised between a linnet and a lark, but it was a nightingale which taught her to sing.

After the death of her father, Parisot moved to London where she made her stage debut at the King's Theatre on 9 February 1796 in a production of Piramo e Tisbe. The Morning Chronicle spoke of the 19-year-old's performance favorably and described her balance "as positively magical, for her person was almost horizontal while turning as a pivot on her toe." Parisot frequently wore costumes that accentuated her legs as she danced, leading the Monthly Mirror to remark on her degree of flexibility in a 1796 performance in the ballet le Triomphe de l'Amour as creating "a stir by raising her legs far higher than was customary for dancers", while Leigh Hunt reported that she was "very thin and always smiling". Parisot's salary for the 1795–1796 season was £600 and she earned £577 in 1799–1800 and £840 during the 1803–1804 season.

In the late 1790s, Parisot often danced with Rose and Charles Didelot, a husband and wife ballet pair that were trained in Paris and were later influential in developing Russian ballet. In 1798 The Hon. Shute Barrington, Bishop of Durham, denounced a dress she had worn while dancing at the Opera as "indecent". The risqué dance moves of Parisot and the Didelots and Parisot's use of sheer, neoclassical costumes that often exposed one breast led the same bishop to denounce the "immoral" antics of the French ballet dancers. The church's response attracted much ridicule and was parodied by many British caricaturists, including James Gilray, Isaac Cruikshank and Robert Newton, who produced multiple caricatures of the Bishop and the Duke of Queensberry looking under Parisot's skirt. In a 2 March 1798 address to the House of Lords, the Bishop declared that the French "female dancers, who, by the allurement of the most indecent attitudes and most wanton theatrical exhibitions succeeded but too effectually in loosening and corrupting the moral feelings of the people." In response to the outcry, the colour of dancer's costumes was changed from light pink, flesh-toned pieces to a less provocative white and the performances were not to extend past midnight.