Louis XIV (1638-1715), a patron of the dance as well as an accomplished dancer from his youth, acquired his epithet "le Roi Soleil" ("the Sun King'') from his role as the personification of the Sun in the Ballet de la Nuit, a lavish court entertainment given in 1653. The cultured monarch founded in 1661 the Académie Royale de Danse, and in the closing years of his reign he established, in 1713, a school of dance which continues today as the Paris Opéra Ecole de Danse, the oldest school of its kind.
Through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the Paris Opéra occupied a succession of buildings, including the Première Salle du Palais Royale, from 1673; Salle des Machines du Palais des Tuileries, from 1764; Deuxième Salle du Palais Royale, inaugurated in 1770; Salle de la Porte Saint-Martin, from 1781; Théâtre des Arts, from 1791; and the Salle Le Peletier, constructed from 1820-21 on rue Le Peletier. The Salle Le Peletier was destroyed by fire in 1873.[2]