On Tuesday, at the cocktail hour, Pierre Lacotte pointed first to his head and then to his heart. “Time passes,” he said, “but you keep things here and here.” A French choreographer who built his early career on crossover collaborations with the greats of jazz and the music hall, Mr. Lacotte has made his reputation with stylish revivals of ballet classics from the 19th century. This weekend, the Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow brings down the curtain on its brief residency at the Metropolitan Opera House with his full-length curio “La Fille du Pharaon” (“The Pharaoh’s Daughter”).

The tour has three stops to go (Philadelphia, Wolf Trap, and Costa Mesa), but New Yorkers will be the only ones treated to the American premiere of “The Pharaoh’s Daughter.” Harmonia Mundi’s concurrent release of Bel Air’s DVD of the show, recorded in Moscow in October 2003, makes the show available to viewers everywhere. On the disc and in selected Met performances, Princess Aspiccia, the pharaoh’s daughter, is danced by the ravishing Svetlana Zakharova.

The synopsis of “La Fille du Pharaon” reads like a pastiche by the author and illustrator Edward Gorey, balletomane and eccentric: “The Mummy” meets “La Bayadere.” Lord Wilson, a British aristocrat first seen in khakis and pith helmet, is puffing opium out by the pyramids when a sandstorm forces him to take shelter in a crypt. Dreams (and a quick change into regulation kilt and halter) transform him into Ta-Hor, a dashing Egyptian, who saves Aspiccia’s life as she saves his. He wins her heart, but loses her hand: Just as the pharaoh is about to bless their union, the young time-traveler awakens to Victorian reality.

Hours after landing at Kennedy, en route to the Met for the Bolshoi’s “Bright Stream,” Mr. Lacotte, 73, took time out at the Hudson Hotel to talk about his love affair with the ballets of yesteryear. He caught the bug from the emigre ballerina Lyubov Egorova, whom he met when he was a boy of 9. In St. Petersburg, Egorova had been favorably compared to Anna Pavlova; now, responding to a child’s curiosity, she taught him all she knew.

She passed on the stylistic refinements – “the perfume” – of the romantic paragons Marie Taglioni and Carlotta Grisi (their last partner, Christian Johansson, had been her last teacher). She showed him the original “Giselle,” (“A to Zed”), which the French no longer remembered. She illustrated how to dazzle with combinations at lightning speed, how to spin out whole stories in adagio. And years later, when he was shaking up the dance world with his cool innovations, she summoned him to dinner and bound him to an oath.

“You have to face reality,” Egorova told Mr. Lacotte. “You were a very good classical dancer. You have a great memory. Everyone changes everything. You know all about the great traditions. You know the style. No one else remembers. You must keep it alive. You must swear.” Prince Siegfried’s moment of destiny in “Swan Lake” is something like this.

“And so, I swore,” said Mr. Lacotte. “When I was young, I wanted to be a modern choreographer. I left the Paris Opera Ballet to study in New York with Martha Graham and Peter Gennaro, who did great shows for Broadway. In the 1950s, I made ballets with Sydney Bechet and Charles Aznavour. Every young person wants to live with his generation. But Egorova was right. So now I am known as the man who stages revivals.”

“The Pharaoh’s Daughter” retains its place of honor in the history books as Marius Petipa’s first dance extravaganza. The ballet held the stage for several decades after it was originally mounted in 1862, but then lay abandoned for roughly a century. For a while, the coveted title role was the exclusive property of Mathilde Kschessinska, mistress of the ill-starred Tsar Nicholas II in his carefree bachelor days. Her Aspiccia appeared in a king’s ransom of jewelry, all her own.

Documentation of Petipa’s choreography is on deposit at the Harvard Theatre Collection; antique souvenir postcards are out there, too. For Mr. Lacotte, who had undertaken meticulous reconstructions of “La Sylphide,” “Coppelia,” and several lesser-known pieces, the prospect of bringing the Egyptian beauty back from the dead seemed perfectly viable when the Bolshoi approached him back in the 1990s.

He was soon to discover, however, that the archival material was sketchy to the point of uselessness. And his high hopes of a long-retired, 93-year-old Russian ballerina who had danced Aspiccia once or twice at age 18 were likewise quickly dashed; not every dancer has Egorova’s or Lacotte’s total recall for whole evenings’ worth of dancing. In the end, no more than a few “authentic” snippets could be restored.

One is the grand waltz in the second act, which is in textbook Petipa style. Another is a striking episode involving the slave girl Ramze, who taps the tip of her toe shoe to the floor with a spicy delicacy no choreographer emulating contemporary notions of classically classical ballets would dare to make up. “For the rest,” Mr. Lacotte said, “I had to do it all myself.”

Happily, he had the expertise. To some, the legacy handed down by Egorova would be an excuse for pedantries and literalism. Mr. Lacotte takes it as his license to create. He is critical of colleagues who restore historic but outmoded material just because they can. “It’s not necessary,” he said “We have to be contemporary. The work must be clean. I tried my best to keep the style. Sometimes, you must make hard choices – but always with knowledge, admiration, and respect. To please the public and the dancers, you must look at the past and live in this century.”

In addition to his choreographic duties, Mr. Lacotte also took full responsibility for the production’s design. Research in Russia turned up scenery and costumes in abundance, in a yard-sale mishmash of clashing styles. Editing ruthlessly, he retained a distinctive tutu for Aspiccia’s adagio. The incongruous Greco-Roman god of the Nile, who might as well be Neptune, turns out to be authentic, too (in the tsars’ St. Petersburg, “underwater” sequences were all the rage). And filling in the huge choreographic blanks, he restored a whole wealth of steps and sleek inflections contemporary dancers are no longer taught.

“We have to keep the past,” Mr. Lacotte said. “People are wrong if they say ballet is finished. You ask what I am proud of in ‘The Pharaoh’s Daughter.’ I cannot say that I am proud. But I am happy to have brought back to life a wonderful ballet which had disappeared. And I feel very lucky to have found such interpreters – strong technicians who are also great artists. When I started work at the Bolshoi, the dancers were afraid. The steps were too fast, too difficult. Now, if I want to change anything, they say, ‘No! Don’t touch!'”

“The Pharaoh’s Daughter” will be performed again Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. (Lincoln Center 212-501-3410).