Choreography, as we sometimes sadly find, undergoes a stylistic mutation when it leaves its native soil. New York’s Balanchine is very different from London’s; Frankfurt’s Forsythe is far less elegant than St Petersburg’s. And, while the Royal Ballet knows the ins and outs of the Ashton repertory, foreign troupes can trip and fall on niceties of manner that are part of our own dancers’ very identities. So what would the Paris Opéra make of Ashton’s Fille mal gardée as it entered the Palais Garnier repertory last week?

Fille is intensely English in its view of French 18th-century pastoral life, loving in its portrayal of every quaintness. But not French! The Ur-text for Fille is a ballet first given in Bordeaux on the very brink of the revolution in 1789. Its plot and manner proved so attractive that throughout the succeeding century it was staged, altered, re-staged, from Paris to Philadelphia, and Ashton’s version (dating from 1960) incorporates a mime sequence that was known in Petersburg nearly a century before. It is a ballet that, I think, captures the essence of Ashton as poet and dance-maker, as elegant stylist, man of sentiment, lover of the countryside.

And this Paris production, which I saw on Tuesday night? It is clear, honest, even though the exultant one-handed lift at the end of the cornfield duet, when Colas holds Lise aloft, his unoccupied hand grandly stretched to the side, has been changed, and not for the better. The orchestral playing was superb (much better than chez nous) under Barry Wordsworth’s baton. The sets are right, as too are most of the costumes (how clearly they are imprinted on memory). And the performances, by and large, understand what Ashton demands, though there is a sincerity, a sentiment without sentimentality, that warms Royal Ballet performance (and also Moscow Bolshoi performance in this ballet) and that the Paris cast does not fully provide as yet.

I saw Dorothée Gilbert as a quick- footed, quick-witted Lise, spinning though the dances with happiest bravura, playing with charm, and happily matched with Nicolas Le Riche’s Colas. This most intelligent of danseurs places his every action, his every step, within a wholly understood dramatic scheme, natural, easy, ever-convincing. A recent cropping of his hair gives this Colas a slightly-too-mature look, but in everything else here is an interpretation to honour and love for its warmth and dash, as we do our own best artists.

I thought Simon Valastro played Alain with great success against his own bright and vividly-muscled type, while Michael Denard’s Simone was a merry old body, more worldly than most we have seen, but good-natured in all things – save the clog-dance which, alas, went for nothing, with no wood-soled tricks and slides. For the rest the ensemble danced with verve, and Ashton was Ashton still.

In repertory until July 15, tel +33 1-72 29 35 35

• On a sad note I record the death last Sunday of Nina Vyrubova in her 86th year. An étoile of the Opéra and of the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas, she was a ballerina of phenomenal gifts, noble in style, very beautiful, poetic in manner, a marvel in such varied roles as Balanchine’s Night Shadow, as La Sylphide and Giselle, in roles that Lifar and Roland Petit bestowed on her. Like every ballet-goer of her time, I revered her every performance and it is good to recall that the distinguished film-maker Dominique Delouche made two documentaries that preserve something of her genius for posterity. She was a balletic divinity.