In Le Ballet de Monsieur de Vandosme, twelve knights are changed into twelve nymphs, and indicate their transformation to the audience by spelling out their enchantress's name, Alcine. "[They] formed this first pattern, A: they held it for a beat, half facing front, half facing back, and from this first one they moved into a second one, L..."(Marko,1993,p.17).
Symbolic messages were sometimes encoded in the geometric shapes of the court ballets. These could be read as spontaneous hieroglyphs that continually formed and dissolved as the dancers moved out of one pattern and into another. Members of the audience were able to derive the meaning of the shapes by reading a libretto, passed out prior to the performance (Marko,p.18).
The circular, square, diagonal and meandering paths of the knights in the final grand ballet of Le Ballet de Monsieur de Vendosme were supposedly derived from an ancient Druid alphabet , and were thought to share structural features with the moral virtues. The final twelve figures, "following the alphabet of the ancient druids (found years ago in an old monument)", are illustrated in the libretto for this ballet along with an explanation of each letter's meaning (Marko,p.18).
The twelve figures included illustrations of amour puissant, ambitieux desire, vertuex dessein, renom immortal, grandeur de courage, peine agreable, constance esprouvée, verité cogneue, heureux destin, aimé de tous, couronne de gloire, and pouvoir supresme.
Aimé de tousAmbitieux desire (ambitious or driving desire) is represented as a quarter circular path continuing into a vertical zigzag path and ending with a mirror image of the first quarter circle.
Pouvoir supresme (supreme power) is of particular interest in relation to the Platonic-Pythagorean model of the universe, based on proportion, number and primary geometric shapes. It is depicted as four isosceles triangles inscribed within a square, which fits inside a large circle.