Kit violin or Pochette

‘Will it be pretty?’ asks the Bourgeois gentilhomme. His dancing master reassures him and, to make him rehearse the minuet, takes out of his embroidered costume a ‘pochette’, a tiny violin, easy to carry from palace to palace, from lesson to lesson. 

Un chapeau, Monsieur, s’il vous plaît. La, la, ...

En cadence, s’il vous plaît. La, la, ...

La jambe droite. La, la, ..

Ne remuez point tant les épaules. La, la, ...

Vos deux bras sont estropiés. La, la, ...

Haussez la tête. Tournez la pointe du pied en dehors. La, ...

Dressez votre corps.

J.-B. Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Acte II, escena primera.

The pochette was the working instrument of the dancing masters, who carried it in a quiver or, as its name suggests, in their pockets. Its period of glory culminated in the reign of Louis XIV, and Lully was the only one to compose an aria exclusively for it. The Revolution brought the profession to an end. The pochette is sometimes found in folk dances, in Ireland for example, or in the hands of a beggar in genre paintings. By uniting two arts, music and dance, it often appears in the ‘Vanitas’, paintings in which a cross-boned skull and crossbones appear alongside futile worldly pleasures.

This peculiar instrument of Italian origin, created around 1700, is made of a single piece of wood, the back, the hoops and the head.

At a time when dance was of great social importance, dance masters travelled with this instrument and used it in the dance classes they gave in the homes of their clients. 

These small-sized instruments allowed them to be carried and used while performing the steps of the dances.