The Ballet comique de la reine, presented on October 15, 1581 at the French court of Catherine de Médicis by the Queen, her ladies, and the nobles of the court to celebrate the betrothal of her sister, Marguerite de Lorraine, to the Duke de Joyeuse, fuses the elements of music, dance, plot (the escape of Ulysses from Circe), and design into a dramatic whole.

Because it fuses the elements of music, dance, plot, and design into a dramatic whole, it is considered the first ballet.

A five-and-a-half-hour spectacle costing three million six hundred thousand gold francs is also the first ballet of which there is a printed account (libretto); it is published in 1582 as the Balet comique de la royne by Balthazar de Beaujoyeulx, the Italian choreographer and composer who had conceived and staged the ballet as Catherine's director of court festivals.

The Ballet comique is a brilliant success, and Beaujoyeulx's volume circulates to the courts of Europe, influencing the development of the extravagant entertainment form known as ballet de cour (court ballet) in France and the masque in England.

The Catholic League, led by the ultra-Roman Catholic Henri I de Lorraine, third duc de Guise, forces the moderate but devious King Henry III to ban Protestantism and attempts to exclude from the succession his brother-in-law, the Huguenot leader Henry of Bourbon, king of Navarre and heir presumptive to the French throne.

The result is the War of the Three Henrys.

Anne, the eldest son of Guillaume, Viscount de Joyeuse, when very young had been admitted to the royal court, where he had carried the title of Marquis d'Arques (after one of his father's lands).

King Henry III, having just lost his former favorites, had taken a great liking to Anne and in 1581 had created him Duke de Joyeuse with precedence over all other peers of the realm except for princes of the blood and certain sovereign families.

Henry had also made Anne admiral of France in 1582 and governor of Normandy in 1586 and married him to Marguerite de Lorraine-Vaudémont, younger sister of the queen.

A champion of Roman Catholic reaction against Henri I de Montmorency's tolerant policy toward the Huguenots in Languedoc, Anne leads an army against the Huguenots in Guyenne and ...

...massacres some of them at Mont-Saint-Éloi.

Duke Anne is recalled to court at this inopportune moment because of the intrigues of jealous rivals, and, when he marches a second time against Henry of Navarre, he is captured and killed on October 20 at the Battle of Coutras, which Henry, with English financial aid, wins.