About the work
Opéra comique by Léo Delibes to a libretto by Edmond Gondinet, premiered on 24 May 1873 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris under the baton of Adolphe Deloffre.
Plot
The Marquis de Moncontour passes off the peasant boy Benoît as his own son at the court of Louis XIV to fulfil his promise of presenting a male heir. A prank to help his supposed sisters escape a convent lands Benoît in a duel, after which he is declared dead; while the king consoles the seemingly grieving marquis by raising him to princely rank, the still very much alive Benoît is married off to the maid Javotte.
Cultural significance
The work quickly spread beyond Paris, with German-language premieres in Vienna (1874) and Berlin (1877), and was reworked by Philippe Gille into a two-act version in 1898 – evidence of its lasting popularity in the late nineteenth century. In 1886 Marius Petipa choreographed a ballet based on it, L'ordre du roi, for the Imperial Ballet in Saint Petersburg.