Jean-Gaspard Deburau
Encyclopedia
Jean-Gaspard Deburau, sometimes Debureau (July 31, 1796 – June 17, 1846)—born Jan Kašpar Dvořák—was a celebrated Bohemian-French mime. He performed from around 1819 to the year of his death at the Théâtre des Funambules
, which was immortalized in Marcel Carné
's poetic-realist
film Children of Paradise
(1945), where he appears (under his stage-name, "Baptiste") as a major character. His most famous pantomimic creation was Pierrot
—a character that served as the godfather of all the Pierrots of Romantic
, Decadent
, Symbolist
, and early Modernist
theater and art.
, Bohemia
(now Czech Republic
), Deburau was the son of a former soldier, a native of Amiens
. Some time before 1814, when he appeared in Paris, the soldier had turned showman, and had begun performing at the head of a nomadic troupe probably made up, at least in part, of his own children. When the company was hired, in 1816, by the manager of the Funambules for mimed and acrobatic acts, the young Deburau was included in the transaction.
He probably began his professional life there as a stagehand. Historians of both the mime and the Funambules agree that his debut as Pierrot came no earlier than 1819, perhaps as late as 1825. His "discovery" by the theater-savvy public did not take place, at any rate, until 1828, when the influential writer Charles Nodier
wrote a panegyric on his art for La Pandore. Nodier persuaded his friends, fellow men-of-letters, to visit the theater; the journalist Jules Janin
published a book of effusive praise, entitled Deburau, histoire du Théâtre à Quatre Sous, in 1832; and by the middle of the 1830s Deburau was known to "tout Paris". Théophile Gautier
wrote of his talent with enthusiasm ("the most perfect actor who ever lived"); Théodore de Banville
dedicated poems and sketches to his Pierrot; Charles Baudelaire
alluded to his style of acting as a way of understanding "The Essence of Laughter" (1855). He seems to have been almost universally loved by his public, which included the high and the low, both the Romantic poets of the day and the working-class "children of paradise", who installed themselves regularly in the cheapest seats of the house.
But some of that public confused his creation with his character, and one day in 1836, as he was out strolling with his family, he was taunted as a "Pierrot" by a street-boy, with ugly consequences: the boy died from one blow of his heavy cane. Deburau's biographer, Tristan Rémy, contends that the incident throws into relief the darker side of his art. "The bottle", Rémy writes, "whose label 'Laudanum' he smilingly revealed after Cassander had drained it, the back of the razor he passed over the old man's neck, were toys which he could not be allowed to take seriously and thus put to the test his patience, his reserve, his sang-froid." And Rémy concludes: "When he powdered his face, his nature, in fact, took the upper hand. He stood then at the measure of his life—bitter, vindictive, and unhappy."
In court, he was acquitted of murder. Carné remarked, "There ensued a trial which le tout Paris crowded into, in order to get to hear the voice of the famed Debureau." The composer Michel Chion
named this curiosity about a voice the Debureau effect. The idea of a Deburau effect has been extended to any drawing of the listener's attention to an inaudible sound—which, once heard, loses its interest.
When he died, his son Jean-Charles
(1829–1873) took over his role and later founded a "school" of pantomime, which flourished in the south of France, then, at the end of the century, in the capital. A line can be drawn from that school to the Bip of Marcel Marceau
.
Jean-Gaspard Deburau is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery
in Paris.
of the previous century—had been quite different from the character that Deburau eventually devised. He had been at once more aggressive in his acrobatics (his "superabundance", in Louis Péricaud's words, "of gestures, of leaps") than Baptiste's "placid" creation, and much less aggressive in his audacity and daring. The Pierrot of Saphir the Enchanter, Pantomime in 3 Parts (1817) is a typical pre-Deburau type. Lazy and sexless, he much prefers stuffing his gut to the amorous pastimes of Harlequin
and Claudine. And when Harlequin's heroics seem on the point of bringing the machinations of the Enchanter to an end, Pierrot's stupid bungling nearly precipitates disaster. Even when he summons up the pluck and resourcefulness to initiate actions of his own, as he does in The Rose Genie and the Blue Genie, or The Old Women Rejuvenated (1817), he shows—in the Rose Genie's words at the end of the piece—"only the signs of an unjust and wicked heart", and so is buried in a cage in the bowels of the earth.
The mature Pierrot of Deburau never brooked such degradation. The poet Gautier, though a great admirer of the mime, reproached him after his death for having "denaturalized" the character: "he gave kicks and no longer received them; Harlequin now scarcely dared brush his shoulders with his bat; Cassander would think twice before boxing his ears." Deburau restored to Pierrot some of the force and energy of the earlier Italian type Pedrolino (though he probably never heard of that predecessor). Part of this may have been due to what Rémy calls the vindictiveness of Deburau's own personality; but what seems more likely is that, with the assurance that comes with great talent, Deburau instinctively forged a role with a commanding stage presence.
He also changed the costume. His overlarge cotton blouse and trousers freed him from the constraints of the woolen dress of his predecessors, and his abandoning the frilled collaret and hat gave prominence to his expressive face. A black skullcap was his only stark adornment.
But his real innovations came in the pantomime itself. His biographers, as well as the chroniclers of the Funambules, contend that his pantomimes were all alike. The "naive scenarios" that "limited" his acting, according to his Czech biographer, Jaroslav Švehla, "did little more than group together and repeat traditional, threadbare, primitive, and in many cases absurd situations and mimic gags (cascades), insulting to even a slightly refined taste." And Adriane Despot, author of "Jean-Gaspard Deburau and the Pantomime at the Théâtre des Funambules", agrees: "most of the pantomimes are essentially the same; they share the atmosphere of light, small-scale, nonsensical adventures enlivened with comic dances, ridiculous battles, and confrontations placed in a domestic or otherwise commonplace setting." But Despot was familiar only with a handful of the scenarios, those few in print; by far the greater number, fifty-six in all, are in manuscript in the Archives Nationales de France. And Švehla is proceeding along misguided lines by assuming that Deburau "longed to represent a better character" than Pierrot: Deburau was apparently proud of his work at the Funambules, characterizing it to George Sand
as an "art" (see next section below). "He loved it passionately", Sand wrote, "and spoke of it as a grave thing."
The fact is that four distinct kinds of pantomime held the stage at the Funambules, and for each Deburau created a now subtly, now dramatically different Pierrot.
, he emerges, on-stage and off-, as an exemplar of the common people, a tragic long-suffering lover, a friend of the pure and lonely and distant moon. Neither Deburau nor his Pierrot was such a figure. (That figure is much closer to the Pierrot of his successor, Paul Legrand
.) But the myth sprang into being very early, simultaneous with the emergence of Deburau's celebrity. It was the product of clever journalism and idealizing romance: Janin's Deburau first set things in motion. Deburau, he wrote, "is the people's actor, the people's friend, a windbag, a glutton, a loafer, a rascal, a poker-face, a revolutionary, like the people." Théodore de Banville followed suit: "both mute, attentive, always understanding each other, feeling and dreaming and responding together, Pierrot and the People, united like two twin souls, mingled their ideas, their hopes, their banter, their ideal and subtle gaiety, like two Lyres playing in unison, or like two Rhymes savoring the delight of being similar sounds and of exhaling the same melodious and sonorous voice." Indeed, George Sand noted, after Deburau's death, that the "titis", the street boys, of the Funambules seemed to regard his Pierrot as their "model"; but, earlier, when she had asked Deburau himself what he thought of Janin's conclusions, he had had this to say: "the effect is of service to my reputation, but all that is not the art, it's not the idea I have of it. It is not true, and the Deburau of M. Janin is not me: he has not understood me."
What he is remembering is a scene from Pierrot Everywhere: Pierrot has just stolen Columbine from Harlequin, and he, Cassander, and Leander, along with the fiancées of the latter two, have stumbled upon an oven with magical powers. The fiancées have been aged and wizened by Harlequin's magic bat, and the men hope that the oven can restore their youth.
Deburau neither idealized nor sentimentalized his Pierrot. His creation was “poor Pierrot”, yes, but not because he was unfairly victimized: his ineptitude tended to baffle his malice, though it never routed it completely. And if Deburau was, in Švehla’s phrase, an actor of “refined taste”, he was also a gleeful inventor, like Mozart
(that artist of ultimate refinement), of sexual and scatological fun. Of his pantomimes in general, George Sand wrote that “the poem is buffoonish, the role cavalier, and the situations scabrous.” And Paul de Saint-Victor echoed her words several weeks after Deburau’s death: “Indeed, in plenty of places, the poem of his roles was free, scabrous, almost obscene.” Unfortunately, Banville’s sanitized—even sanctified—Deburau survives, while the scenario of Pierrot Everywhere, like the more overtly scabrous of the Funambules “poems”, lies yellowing in the files of the Archives Nationales de France.
’s films.) It was also an anomaly for which his Romantic admirers were responsible. This pantomime had been invented by Théophile Gautier in a “review” that he had published in the Revue de Paris. He conceived it in the “realistic” vein described above: Pierrot, having fallen in love with a duchess, kills an old-clothes man to secure the garments with which to court her. At the wedding, however, à la the Commander of Don Juan
, the ghost of the peddler—the murdering sword protruding from his chest—rises up to dance with the bridegroom. And Pierrot is fatally impaled.
Claiming that he had seen the pantomime at the Funambules, Gautier proceeded to analyze the action in familiarly idealizing terms. “Pierrot,” he wrote, “walking the street in his white blouse, his white trousers, his floured face, preoccupied with vague desires—is he not the symbol of the human heart still white and innocent, tormented by infinite aspirations toward the higher spheres?” And this dreaming creature of vague desires is essentially innocent of criminal intent: “When Pierrot took the sword, he had no other idea than of pulling a little prank!”
The temptation to use such material, devised by such an illustrious poet, was irresistible to the managers of the Funambules, and the “review” was immediately turned into a pantomime (probably by the administrator of the theater, Cot d'Ordan). It was not a success: it had a seven-night run, a poor showing for one of Baptiste’s productions. If he indeed appeared in the piece—the matter is under dispute—he did so very reluctantly; it was decidedly not his kind of play. It was never revived at the Funambules, and it should have survived as merely a footnote in Deburau's career.
But like Banville’s deathless prose, it was Gautier’s “review” that survived—and prospered. Gautier’s son-in-law, Catulle Mendès
, refashioned it into a pantomime in 1896, and when Sacha Guitry
wrote his play Deburau (1918) he included it as the only specimen of the mime’s art. Carné did the same (if we may exempt Baptiste’s street-corner extemporizing). It stands today, for the nonscholarly public, as the supreme (and sole) exemplar of Deburau’s pantomime.
, it finds, at the end of its action, Harlequin, Pierrot, and Leander all trapped underneath the earth. When the good fairy appears, she announces that her powers are now useless in the terrestrial realm:
In the other fifty-nine scenarios that are extant, there is no mention of the moon.
But Deburau’s Romantic admirers often made the association. Banville’s poem "Pierrot" (1842) concludes with these lines: “The white Moon with its horns like a bull/Peeps behind the scenes/At its friend Jean Gaspard Deburau.” And as the century progressed, the association—rendered inevitable by the universal familiarity of “Au clair de la lune”—became ever more strong. With the advent of the Symbolist poets, and their intoxication with everything white (and pure: swans, lilies, snow, moons, Pierrots), the legendary star of the Funambules and what Jules Laforgue
called Our Lady the Moon became inseparable. Albert Giraud
's Pierrot lunaire
(1884) marked a watershed in the moon-maddening of Pierrot, as did the song-cycle that Arnold Schoenberg
derived from it (1912). If Carné’s hero had not been moonstruck, his audiences would still be wondering why.
Théâtre des Funambules
The Théâtre des Funambules was a former theater located on the boulevard du Temple in Paris, sometimes called the Boulevard du Crime. It was located between the prominent Théâtre de la Gaîté, and the much smaller Théâtre des Délassements-Comiques.Originally an informal venue for acrobatics and...
, which was immortalized in Marcel Carné
Marcel Carné
-Biography:Born in Paris, France, the son of a cabinet maker whose wife died when their son was five, Carné began his career as a film critic, becoming editor of the weekly publication, Hebdo-Films, and working for Cinémagazine and Cinémonde between 1929 and 1933. In the same period he worked in...
's poetic-realist
Poetic realism
Poetic realism was a film movement in France of the 1930s and through the war years. More a tendency than a movement, Poetic Realism is not strongly unified like Soviet Montage or French Impressionism. Its leading filmmakers were Jean Renoir, Pierre Chenal, Jean Vigo, Julien Duvivier, and Marcel...
film Children of Paradise
Children of Paradise
Les Enfants du Paradis, released as Children of Paradise in North America, is a 1945 French film by French director Marcel Carné, made during the German occupation of France during World War II...
(1945), where he appears (under his stage-name, "Baptiste") as a major character. His most famous pantomimic creation was Pierrot
Pierrot
Pierrot is a stock character of pantomime and Commedia dell'Arte whose origins are in the late 17th-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne; the name is a hypocorism of Pierre , via the suffix -ot. His character in postmodern popular culture—in...
—a character that served as the godfather of all the Pierrots of Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
, Decadent
Decadent movement
The Decadent movement was a late 19th century artistic and literary movement of Western Europe. It flourished in France, but also had devotees in England and throughout Europe, as well as in the United States.-Overview:...
, Symbolist
Symbolism (arts)
Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire...
, and early Modernist
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
theater and art.
Life
Born in KolínKolín
Kolín is a town in the Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic some east from Prague, lying on the Elbe river.-History:Kolín was founded by king Přemysl Otakar II in the 13th century, first mentioned in 1261. Later on, 1437, a castle was founded here...
, Bohemia
Bohemia
Bohemia is a historical region in central Europe, occupying the western two-thirds of the traditional Czech Lands. It is located in the contemporary Czech Republic with its capital in Prague...
(now Czech Republic
Czech Republic
The Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....
), Deburau was the son of a former soldier, a native of Amiens
Amiens
Amiens is a city and commune in northern France, north of Paris and south-west of Lille. It is the capital of the Somme department in Picardy...
. Some time before 1814, when he appeared in Paris, the soldier had turned showman, and had begun performing at the head of a nomadic troupe probably made up, at least in part, of his own children. When the company was hired, in 1816, by the manager of the Funambules for mimed and acrobatic acts, the young Deburau was included in the transaction.
He probably began his professional life there as a stagehand. Historians of both the mime and the Funambules agree that his debut as Pierrot came no earlier than 1819, perhaps as late as 1825. His "discovery" by the theater-savvy public did not take place, at any rate, until 1828, when the influential writer Charles Nodier
Charles Nodier
Jean Charles Emmanuel Nodier , was a French author who introduced a younger generation of Romanticists to the conte fantastique, gothic literature, vampire tales, and the importance of dreams as part of literary creation, and whose career as a librarian is often underestimated by literary...
wrote a panegyric on his art for La Pandore. Nodier persuaded his friends, fellow men-of-letters, to visit the theater; the journalist Jules Janin
Jules Janin
Jules Gabriel Janin was a French writer and critic.-Biography:Born in Saint-Étienne , Janin's father was a lawyer, and he was educated first at St. Étienne, and then at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris...
published a book of effusive praise, entitled Deburau, histoire du Théâtre à Quatre Sous, in 1832; and by the middle of the 1830s Deburau was known to "tout Paris". Théophile Gautier
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....
wrote of his talent with enthusiasm ("the most perfect actor who ever lived"); Théodore de Banville
Théodore de Banville
Théodore Faullain de Banville was a French poet and writer.-Biography:Banville was born in Moulins in Allier, Auvergne, the son of a captain in the French navy. His boyhood, by his own account, was cheerlessly passed at a lycée in Paris; he was not harshly treated, but took no part in the...
dedicated poems and sketches to his Pierrot; Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the nineteenth century...
alluded to his style of acting as a way of understanding "The Essence of Laughter" (1855). He seems to have been almost universally loved by his public, which included the high and the low, both the Romantic poets of the day and the working-class "children of paradise", who installed themselves regularly in the cheapest seats of the house.
But some of that public confused his creation with his character, and one day in 1836, as he was out strolling with his family, he was taunted as a "Pierrot" by a street-boy, with ugly consequences: the boy died from one blow of his heavy cane. Deburau's biographer, Tristan Rémy, contends that the incident throws into relief the darker side of his art. "The bottle", Rémy writes, "whose label 'Laudanum' he smilingly revealed after Cassander had drained it, the back of the razor he passed over the old man's neck, were toys which he could not be allowed to take seriously and thus put to the test his patience, his reserve, his sang-froid." And Rémy concludes: "When he powdered his face, his nature, in fact, took the upper hand. He stood then at the measure of his life—bitter, vindictive, and unhappy."
In court, he was acquitted of murder. Carné remarked, "There ensued a trial which le tout Paris crowded into, in order to get to hear the voice of the famed Debureau." The composer Michel Chion
Michel Chion
Michel Chion born in 1947 in Creil, France, is a composer of experimental music. He teaches at several institutions within France and currently holds the post of Associate Professor at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle where he is a theoretician and teacher of audio-visual...
named this curiosity about a voice the Debureau effect. The idea of a Deburau effect has been extended to any drawing of the listener's attention to an inaudible sound—which, once heard, loses its interest.
When he died, his son Jean-Charles
Charles Deburau
Jean-Charles Deburau was an important French mime, the son and successor of the legendary Jean-Gaspard Deburau, who was immortalized as Baptiste the Pierrot in Marcel Carné's film Children of Paradise...
(1829–1873) took over his role and later founded a "school" of pantomime, which flourished in the south of France, then, at the end of the century, in the capital. A line can be drawn from that school to the Bip of Marcel Marceau
Marcel Marceau
Marcel Marceau was an internationally acclaimed French actor and mime most famous for his persona as Bip the Clown.-Early years:...
.
Jean-Gaspard Deburau is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery
Père Lachaise Cemetery
Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest cemetery in the city of Paris, France , though there are larger cemeteries in the city's suburbs.Père Lachaise is in the 20th arrondissement, and is reputed to be the world's most-visited cemetery, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to the...
in Paris.
Pantomime
The Pierrot of his predecessors at the Funambules—and that of their predecessors at the Foires St.-Germain and St.-LaurentThéâtre de la foire
Théâtre de la foire is the collective name given to the theatre put on at the annual fairs at Saint-Germain and Saint-Laurent in Paris.-Foire Saint-Germain:The earliest references to the annual fair date to 1176...
of the previous century—had been quite different from the character that Deburau eventually devised. He had been at once more aggressive in his acrobatics (his "superabundance", in Louis Péricaud's words, "of gestures, of leaps") than Baptiste's "placid" creation, and much less aggressive in his audacity and daring. The Pierrot of Saphir the Enchanter, Pantomime in 3 Parts (1817) is a typical pre-Deburau type. Lazy and sexless, he much prefers stuffing his gut to the amorous pastimes of Harlequin
Harlequin
Harlequin or Arlecchino in Italian, Arlequin in French, and Arlequín in Spanish is the most popularly known of the zanni or comic servant characters from the Italian Commedia dell'arte and its descendant, the Harlequinade.-Origins:...
and Claudine. And when Harlequin's heroics seem on the point of bringing the machinations of the Enchanter to an end, Pierrot's stupid bungling nearly precipitates disaster. Even when he summons up the pluck and resourcefulness to initiate actions of his own, as he does in The Rose Genie and the Blue Genie, or The Old Women Rejuvenated (1817), he shows—in the Rose Genie's words at the end of the piece—"only the signs of an unjust and wicked heart", and so is buried in a cage in the bowels of the earth.
The mature Pierrot of Deburau never brooked such degradation. The poet Gautier, though a great admirer of the mime, reproached him after his death for having "denaturalized" the character: "he gave kicks and no longer received them; Harlequin now scarcely dared brush his shoulders with his bat; Cassander would think twice before boxing his ears." Deburau restored to Pierrot some of the force and energy of the earlier Italian type Pedrolino (though he probably never heard of that predecessor). Part of this may have been due to what Rémy calls the vindictiveness of Deburau's own personality; but what seems more likely is that, with the assurance that comes with great talent, Deburau instinctively forged a role with a commanding stage presence.
He also changed the costume. His overlarge cotton blouse and trousers freed him from the constraints of the woolen dress of his predecessors, and his abandoning the frilled collaret and hat gave prominence to his expressive face. A black skullcap was his only stark adornment.
But his real innovations came in the pantomime itself. His biographers, as well as the chroniclers of the Funambules, contend that his pantomimes were all alike. The "naive scenarios" that "limited" his acting, according to his Czech biographer, Jaroslav Švehla, "did little more than group together and repeat traditional, threadbare, primitive, and in many cases absurd situations and mimic gags (cascades), insulting to even a slightly refined taste." And Adriane Despot, author of "Jean-Gaspard Deburau and the Pantomime at the Théâtre des Funambules", agrees: "most of the pantomimes are essentially the same; they share the atmosphere of light, small-scale, nonsensical adventures enlivened with comic dances, ridiculous battles, and confrontations placed in a domestic or otherwise commonplace setting." But Despot was familiar only with a handful of the scenarios, those few in print; by far the greater number, fifty-six in all, are in manuscript in the Archives Nationales de France. And Švehla is proceeding along misguided lines by assuming that Deburau "longed to represent a better character" than Pierrot: Deburau was apparently proud of his work at the Funambules, characterizing it to George Sand
George Sand
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, later Baroness Dudevant , best known by her pseudonym George Sand , was a French novelist and memoirist.-Life:...
as an "art" (see next section below). "He loved it passionately", Sand wrote, "and spoke of it as a grave thing."
The fact is that four distinct kinds of pantomime held the stage at the Funambules, and for each Deburau created a now subtly, now dramatically different Pierrot.
- The Rustic Pantomime: Gesturing towards Pierrot's roots outside the Commedia dell'ArteCommedia dell'arteCommedia dell'arte is a form of theatre characterized by masked "types" which began in Italy in the 16th century, and was responsible for the advent of the actress and improvised performances based on sketches or scenarios. The closest translation of the name is "comedy of craft"; it is shortened...
, to the peasant Pierrot of bucolic tradition (such as MolièreMolièreJean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...
's Pierrot of Don Juan [1665]), the action of these scenarios is set in a hamlet or village. Pierrot is the hero: he is honest, good-hearted, but poor (and egotistically, comically naïve). Through an act of courage, he is able to overcome the scruples of the father of his beloved—a Lisette, or Finetta, or Babette—and win her at the dénouement. These pieces appeared late in the mime's career, all but one of those extant having been first performed in the 1840s. Examples: The Cossacks, or The Farm Set Ablaze (1840); Pierrot's Wedding (1845). - The Melo-Pantomime: Finding their inspiration in the popular boulevard melodramasMelodramaThe term melodrama refers to a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions. It may also refer to the genre which includes such works, or to language, behavior, or events which resemble them...
having no connection with the Commedia dell'Arte, these scenarios present Pierrot, not as a hero, but as a subaltern—often a soldier, sometimes a retainer working in the employ of the hero of the piece. They are set in exotic locales—Africa, America, Malta, China—and the action is (or is meant to be) thrillingly dramatic, fraught with villainous abductions, violent clashes, and spectacular rescues and reversals of fortune, often brought about by Pierrot's cleverness and daring. They were also comparatively late additions to the repertoire. Examples: The Enchanted Pagoda (1845); The Algerian Corsaire, or The Heroine of Malta (1845). - The Realistic Pantomime: These are the pieces with which Despot seems most familiar. They are set in commonplace urban locales (shops, salons, public streets) and are usually peopled with the Parisian bourgeoisie (shopkeepers, merchants, valets). Pierrot is the center of attention in these scenarios, but it is a Pierrot very different from the character thus-far described. "Libidinous and unscrupulous," writes Robert Storey, "often spiteful and cruel, he is redeemed only by his criminal innocence." He steals from a benefactress, takes outrageous advantage of a blind man, kills a peddler to procure the garments in which he presumes to court a duchess. This is the Pierrot described by Charles Nodier as a "naive and clownish Satan." Examples: Pierrot and His Creditors (1836); Pierrot and the Blind Man (1841).
- The Pantomimic Fairy-Play: The largest and most popular class of pantomimes, of which there are three subclasses:
- The Pantomimic Pierrotique Fairy-Play: Pierrot is the only Commedia dell'Arte character (except Cassander, who sometimes puts in an appearance). Like the action in the other subclasses, the plot here unfolds in fairyland, which is populated by sorcerers and sorceresses, ogres and magicians, fairies and enchanters. Pierrot is usually sent on a quest, sometimes to achieve an amatory goal (for himself or his master), sometimes to prove his mettle, sometimes to redress an injustice. The settings are fantastic and gothic, the action bizarre and frenetic, and the comedy very broad. Examples: The Sorcerer, or The Demon-Protector (1838); Pierrot and Croquemitaine, or The Ogres and the Brats (1840).
- The Pantomimic Harlequinesque Fairy-Play: The basis for the pantomimes still performed at BakkenDyrehavsbakkenDyrehavsbakken , commonly referred to as Bakken , is the world's oldest operating amusement park. It is located near Klampenborg but belongs under Lyngby-Taarbæk Kommune, Denmark about 10 km north of Copenhagen...
in Denmark. In the landscape described above (and populated by the same warring spirits), Harlequin, the lover, carries Columbine off, triggering a pursuit by her papa, Cassander, and his serving-man Pierrot. The end of their adventures is, of course, their union, reluctantly blessed by their pursuers. Examples: Pierrot Everywhere (1839); The Three Hunchbacks (1842). - The Pantomimic Harlequinesque Fairy-Play in the English Style: Borrows the "opening" of early nineteenth-century English pantomime: at the rise of curtain, two suitors are in dispute for the same young lady, and her father, a miser, chooses the richer of the two. A fairy appears to protect the sentimentally more deserving (Harlequin, after his transformation)—and to change all the characters into the Commedia types. Then begins the chase. Examples: The Ordeals (1833); Love and Folly, or The Mystifying Bell (1840).
The people's Pierrot
If the casual theater-goer (from the mid-twentieth century on) knows Deburau at all, it is the Deburau of Children of Paradise. There, through a brilliant interpretation by Jean-Louis BarraultJean-Louis Barrault
Jean-Louis Barrault was a French actor, director and mime artist, training that served him well when he portrayed the 19th-century mime Jean-Gaspard Deburau in Marcel Carné's 1945 film Les Enfants du Paradis .Jean-Louis Barrault studied with Charles Dullin in whose troupe he acted...
, he emerges, on-stage and off-, as an exemplar of the common people, a tragic long-suffering lover, a friend of the pure and lonely and distant moon. Neither Deburau nor his Pierrot was such a figure. (That figure is much closer to the Pierrot of his successor, Paul Legrand
Paul Legrand
Paul Legrand , born Charles-Dominique-Martin Legrand, was a highly regarded and influential French mime who turned the Pierrot of his predecessor, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, into the tearful, sentimental character that is most familiar to post-nineteenth-century admirers of the figure...
.) But the myth sprang into being very early, simultaneous with the emergence of Deburau's celebrity. It was the product of clever journalism and idealizing romance: Janin's Deburau first set things in motion. Deburau, he wrote, "is the people's actor, the people's friend, a windbag, a glutton, a loafer, a rascal, a poker-face, a revolutionary, like the people." Théodore de Banville followed suit: "both mute, attentive, always understanding each other, feeling and dreaming and responding together, Pierrot and the People, united like two twin souls, mingled their ideas, their hopes, their banter, their ideal and subtle gaiety, like two Lyres playing in unison, or like two Rhymes savoring the delight of being similar sounds and of exhaling the same melodious and sonorous voice." Indeed, George Sand noted, after Deburau's death, that the "titis", the street boys, of the Funambules seemed to regard his Pierrot as their "model"; but, earlier, when she had asked Deburau himself what he thought of Janin's conclusions, he had had this to say: "the effect is of service to my reputation, but all that is not the art, it's not the idea I have of it. It is not true, and the Deburau of M. Janin is not me: he has not understood me."
The noble Pierrot
As for Banville's idealized Pierrot, it is best appreciated if set against the figure that we find in the scenarios themselves. Late in his life, Banville recalled a pantomime he had seen at the Funambules: Pierrot-baker is confronted by two women—"two old, old women, bald, disheveled, decrepit, with quivering chins, bent towards the earth, leaning upon gnarled sticks, and showing in their sunken eyes the shadows of years gone by, more numerous than the leaves in the woods.""Really now! there's no common sense in this!" exclaimed (in mute speech) the wise baker Pierrot: "to allow women to come to such a state is unthinkable. So why hasn't anyone noticed they need to be melted down, remade, rebaked anew?" And immediately, in spite of their protestations, he seized them, laid them both on his shovel, popped them right in the oven, and then stood watch over his baking with faithful care. When the number of desired minutes had elapsed, he took them out—young, beautiful, transformed by brilliant tresses, with snow at their breasts, black diamonds in their eyes, blood-red roses on their lips, dressed in silk, satin, golden veils, adorned with spangles and sequins—and modestly said then to his friends in the house: "Well now, you see? It's no more difficult than that!"
What he is remembering is a scene from Pierrot Everywhere: Pierrot has just stolen Columbine from Harlequin, and he, Cassander, and Leander, along with the fiancées of the latter two, have stumbled upon an oven with magical powers. The fiancées have been aged and wizened by Harlequin's magic bat, and the men hope that the oven can restore their youth.
[Isabelle and Angelique] refuse to enter the oven, finding themselves fine as they are. Pierrot brings in Columbine and wants to burn her alive, too, if she continues to resist his advances; she struggles [emphasis added]; the two others succeed in thrusting Isabelle and Angelique inside; Pierrot helps them. Meanwhile Harlequin sticks his head up through the emberbox and signals to Columbine to run off with him. Pierrot sees him; Leander pushes the lid down, hard, and sits on top of it. But hardly has he done so when the box sinks into the ground, swallowing him up.
Pierrot tries to put Columbine inside. He opens the oven door; Isabelle and Angelique come out, young and fresh; they are delighted. Isabelle looks for Leander. A moaning comes from the oven. It is Leander, who has been shut up in it, and who emerges half-baked and furious. They clean him up. Meanwhile, Harlequin has come back in; he makes Columbine step down—she was already on the shovel—and seizes Pierrot. The wicked genie appears and helps Harlequin. They pinion the poor Pierrot and are going to throw him into the oven, when a gong announces the [good] fairy. . . .
Deburau neither idealized nor sentimentalized his Pierrot. His creation was “poor Pierrot”, yes, but not because he was unfairly victimized: his ineptitude tended to baffle his malice, though it never routed it completely. And if Deburau was, in Švehla’s phrase, an actor of “refined taste”, he was also a gleeful inventor, like Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
(that artist of ultimate refinement), of sexual and scatological fun. Of his pantomimes in general, George Sand wrote that “the poem is buffoonish, the role cavalier, and the situations scabrous.” And Paul de Saint-Victor echoed her words several weeks after Deburau’s death: “Indeed, in plenty of places, the poem of his roles was free, scabrous, almost obscene.” Unfortunately, Banville’s sanitized—even sanctified—Deburau survives, while the scenario of Pierrot Everywhere, like the more overtly scabrous of the Funambules “poems”, lies yellowing in the files of the Archives Nationales de France.
The tragic Pierrot
At one moment in his career, Deburau—quite inadvertently—contributed to the myth. In 1842, a pantomime was performed at the Funambules in which Pierrot meets a shockingly tragic end: at the final curtain of The Ol’ Clo’s Man, Pierrot dies on stage. It was an unprecedented dénouement and one not to be repeated, at least at Deburau’s theater. (Imagine the Little Tramp expiring at the end of one of Charlie ChaplinCharlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I...
’s films.) It was also an anomaly for which his Romantic admirers were responsible. This pantomime had been invented by Théophile Gautier in a “review” that he had published in the Revue de Paris. He conceived it in the “realistic” vein described above: Pierrot, having fallen in love with a duchess, kills an old-clothes man to secure the garments with which to court her. At the wedding, however, à la the Commander of Don Juan
Don Juan
Don Juan is a legendary, fictional libertine whose story has been told many times by many authors. El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra by Tirso de Molina is a play set in the fourteenth century that was published in Spain around 1630...
, the ghost of the peddler—the murdering sword protruding from his chest—rises up to dance with the bridegroom. And Pierrot is fatally impaled.
Claiming that he had seen the pantomime at the Funambules, Gautier proceeded to analyze the action in familiarly idealizing terms. “Pierrot,” he wrote, “walking the street in his white blouse, his white trousers, his floured face, preoccupied with vague desires—is he not the symbol of the human heart still white and innocent, tormented by infinite aspirations toward the higher spheres?” And this dreaming creature of vague desires is essentially innocent of criminal intent: “When Pierrot took the sword, he had no other idea than of pulling a little prank!”
The temptation to use such material, devised by such an illustrious poet, was irresistible to the managers of the Funambules, and the “review” was immediately turned into a pantomime (probably by the administrator of the theater, Cot d'Ordan). It was not a success: it had a seven-night run, a poor showing for one of Baptiste’s productions. If he indeed appeared in the piece—the matter is under dispute—he did so very reluctantly; it was decidedly not his kind of play. It was never revived at the Funambules, and it should have survived as merely a footnote in Deburau's career.
But like Banville’s deathless prose, it was Gautier’s “review” that survived—and prospered. Gautier’s son-in-law, Catulle Mendès
Catulle Mendès
Catulle Mendès was a French poet and man of letters.Of Portuguese Jewish extraction, he was born in Bordeaux. He early established himself in Paris and promptly attained notoriety by the publication in the Revue fantaisiste of his Roman d'une nuit, for which he was condemned to a month's...
, refashioned it into a pantomime in 1896, and when Sacha Guitry
Sacha Guitry
Alexandre-Pierre Georges Guitry was a French stage actor, film actor, director, screenwriter, and playwright of the Boulevard theatre.- Biography :...
wrote his play Deburau (1918) he included it as the only specimen of the mime’s art. Carné did the same (if we may exempt Baptiste’s street-corner extemporizing). It stands today, for the nonscholarly public, as the supreme (and sole) exemplar of Deburau’s pantomime.
The moonstruck Pierrot
And what of Deburau and Pierrot-the-friend-of-the moon? No connection is visible in the scenarios—save in one, and that, like The Ol’ Clo’s Man, is a clear anomaly. Performed in 1844, after Gautier’s “review” had—at least in the minds of the lettered public—renewed the luster of the Funambules, it was obviously written by an aspiring auteur, judging from its literary pedigree. Entitled The Three Distaffs and inspired by a tale of the Comtesse d’AulnoyMadame d'Aulnoy
Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy , also known as Countess d'Aulnoy, was a French writer known for her fairy tales...
, it finds, at the end of its action, Harlequin, Pierrot, and Leander all trapped underneath the earth. When the good fairy appears, she announces that her powers are now useless in the terrestrial realm:
. . . it is on the moon that your happiness must be realized. Poor Pierrot . . . it is you who will be entrusted with the leadership of the celestial voyage that we are about to undertake.
In the other fifty-nine scenarios that are extant, there is no mention of the moon.
But Deburau’s Romantic admirers often made the association. Banville’s poem "Pierrot" (1842) concludes with these lines: “The white Moon with its horns like a bull/Peeps behind the scenes/At its friend Jean Gaspard Deburau.” And as the century progressed, the association—rendered inevitable by the universal familiarity of “Au clair de la lune”—became ever more strong. With the advent of the Symbolist poets, and their intoxication with everything white (and pure: swans, lilies, snow, moons, Pierrots), the legendary star of the Funambules and what Jules Laforgue
Jules Laforgue
Jules Laforgue was an innovative Franco-Uruguayan poet, often referred to as a Symbolist poet. Critics and commentators have also pointed to Impressionism as a direct influence and his poetry has been called "part-symbolist, part-impressionist".-Life:...
called Our Lady the Moon became inseparable. Albert Giraud
Albert Giraud
Albert Giraud , was a Belgian poet who wrote in French.-Biography:Giraud was born Emile Albert Kayenbergh in Leuven, Belgium. He studied law at the University of Louvain. He left university without a degree and took up journalism and poetry...
's Pierrot lunaire
Pierrot lunaire (book)
Pierrot lunaire: rondels bergamasques is a collection of fifty poems published in 1884 by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud , who is usually associated with the Symbolist Movement. The protagonist of the cycle is Pierrot, the comic servant of the French Commedia dell'Arte and, later, of Parisian...
(1884) marked a watershed in the moon-maddening of Pierrot, as did the song-cycle that Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...
derived from it (1912). If Carné’s hero had not been moonstruck, his audiences would still be wondering why.