Charles Deburau
Encyclopedia
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
(1945). After his father's death in 1846, Charles kept alive his pantomimic
legacy, first in Paris, at the Théâtre des Funambules, and then, beginning in the late 1850s, at theaters in Bordeaux
and Marseille
. He is routinely credited with founding a southern "school" of pantomime; indeed, he served as tutor to the Marseille mime Louis Rouffe, who, in turn, gave instruction to Séverin Cafferra, known simply as "Séverin". But their art was nourished by the work of other mimes, particularly of Charles's rival, Paul Legrand
, and by earlier developments in nineteenth-century pantomime that were alien to the Deburaux' traditions.
-fairy play" in the old style of his father's day, with feuding supernatural agents, magic talismans, energetic mayhem, and Harlequin
's triumphant conquest of Columbine
.
Unfortunately, his début came at a time when another Pierrot at the Funambules, Paul Legrand
, was just beginning to make a reputation for himself; Charles had been conscripted as his replacement, in fact, while Legrand fulfilled an engagement at the Adelphi in London. When he returned, he and Charles fell into a rivalry, which persisted until Legrand left the theater in 1853. Two years later, Charles accepted an engagement at the Délassements-Comiques, and he was not to return to the Funambules until 1862, when he appeared in its last two pantomimes, The Golden Bough and Pierrot's Memoirs, before the theater was demolished, a casualty of Haussmann's makeover of Paris.
Charles did not prosper in the capital. According to Paul Hugounet, a contemporary of the mime and his earliest biographer, he left the Délassements-Comiques only a year after his engagement, a lawsuit pending between him and its director. In the following year, 1858, he opened the Salle Lacaze as the Théâtre Deburau, but the venture was a failure, and in 1859, to recover his debts, he left Paris on a tour of the provinces. His last major attempt to win over audiences at the capital was in 1865, when he signed on at the Fantaisies-Parisiennes, then co-administered by the novelist and enthusiast of pantomime, Champfleury
. Champfleury wrote his last pantomime, The Pantomime of the Attorney, for Deburau's début, and, though it was praised by the likes of Théophile Gautier
, Charles's engagement was cancelled not four months after its premiere. "The less-than-tepid reception till then accorded the pantomime", in the words of L.-Henry Lecomte, the chief historian of the theater, "convinced the administration of the Fantaisies-Parisiennes to abandon the genre at about this time."
It was abroad—notably in Egypt for ten months (1859)—and in the provinces that Charles found admiring audiences. The Alcazar theaters in Bordeaux and Marseille were especially welcoming. He spent two years at the former after his Egyptian tour and assumed its directorship in 1871. From 1867 to 1869, he played at the Alcazar in Marseille, and it was there that a young disciple of Pierrot, Louis Rouffe, first saw him perform, and was enchanted. The disciple became the student of the mime when Charles accepted the Bordeaux directorship, and the southern "school" of pantomime was born.
Charles had always wished to be more than a performer. According to Hugounet, he dreamed of becoming a Professor of Mime at the Paris Conservatoire or Opéra. But he died too young—lamentably premature—before he could begin to realize his ambition. He is buried beside his father at the Père Lachaise Cemetery
in Paris.
His technique was universally praised, usually by unflattering reference to that of his rival, Legrand. In an article in Le Figaro of 1855, William Busnach was blunt in his assessment, calling Legrand, "as a mime, inferior to Debureau [sic] fils." Gautier was more tactful, but the criticism was the same: "Deburau has the sharper mask, the cleaner technique, the livelier leg." Why then did Charles fail to find audiences in Paris? The answer may lie in the reasons for Legrand's success there. Legrand created a Pierrot wholly different from either of the Deburaux' characters, père or fils. To the critic Taxïle Delord, writing in Le Charivari, Legrand's Pierrot seemed fashionably (if deplorably) "modern". "The old pantomime no longer exists", he declared; "now we have a...neo-Pierrotism, if such an expression is permissible":
They find him, he wrote, in Legrand, and, through his Pierrot, "[t]he great marriage of the sublime and the grotesque of which Romanticism dreamed has now been realized...." For at Legrand's theater, the Folies-Nouvelles, "[o]ne oscillates by turns between sadness and joy; peals of laughter break from every breast; gentle tears moisten every barley-sugar stick."
Charles's pantomime was, by contrast, old-fashioned: he apparently had no desire to part with his father's conception of Pierrot. Unfortunately, once he left the Théâtre des Funambules, he did not have the resources to sustain public interest in the figure. The stage of the Funambules had been designed expressly for what Champfleury called "the largest and grandest" (and also the most popular) of the pantomimes in Jean-Gaspard's repertoire: the "pantomime-fairy play". It had three traps, "neither more nor less than that of the Opéra," as Théodore de Banville
wrote in his Souvenirs, "an arrangement that permitted the changes of scene, the transformations, the perpetual variety of a vision ceaselessly metamorphosed for the pleasure of the eyes and to the heart's content." The spectacular piece with which Charles débuted there had been set in such a fairyland: The Three Planets, or The Life of a Rose was, as noted above, a "grand pantomime-harlequinade-fairy play" that was "in three parts and twelve changes of scene, mixed with dances, transformations, and sumptuous costumes". A glance into the volume of pantomimes that Emile Goby published in 1889, Pantomimes de Gaspard et Ch. Deburau, turns up nothing so ambitious as this. Instead, one finds what Adriane Despot concluded were the usual sorts of productions on Jean-Gaspard's stage: "light, small-scale, nonsensical adventures enlivened with comic dances, ridiculous battles, and confrontations placed in a domestic or otherwise commonplace setting." But what the Goby collection represents is not so much Jean-Gaspard's pantomimes as Charles's own (or sometimes Charles's versions of the former). As Champfleury notes in his preface to the volume, it reproduces only "a repertoire easy to perform in the course of many peregrinations through the provinces." Jean-Gaspard never played in the provinces; Charles sought work frequently there. To secure that work, he had to travel light, and to make do with the theaters that were offered him. And there were few opportunities for spectacular effects, even if he could have exploited them, on the French stages outside Paris.
As a consequence, he watered down a repertoire that was already overly familiar, at least to Parisian audiences. (To the provincials, he was a welcome, even marvelous, diversion.) He also, as a consequence, thrust himself into dramatic territory for which his talents were not altogether suited. Typical of his post-Funambules pantomimes is Champfleury's Pantomime of the Attorney, which takes last (pride of?) place in the Goby collection. Here we are in that "commonplace setting", an attorney's office, that Despot describes above, confronting a "light, small-scale" adventure. Pierrot is the clerk of Cassander, an attorney, and is in love with Columbine, the office assistant. Since Cassander is away for most of the piece, the lovers do what all lovers do (at least chaste nineteenth-century lovers) in unchaperoned intimacy: the pantomime is little more than a vehicle for comically arch and sweet amorous dalliance. It is, in fact, an ideal vehicle for the mime for whom Champfleury wrote his first pantomimes, Paul Legrand.
For if Charles consistently outdid his rival in cleanness of technique and liveliness of leg, Legrand took all the honors when it came to sentimental comedy. Charles's mask was "sharp", but Legrand's art, wrote Gautier, was "more consummate, more extensive, more varied." When, rarely, their Pierrots were paired together, as they were twice in their early Funambules years, Charles played the "funny" or "clever" Pierrot, Paul the Pierrot of sincerity and feeling, who evoked not just laughter but tears. The Pantomime of the Attorney seems to have been written with the latter Pierrot in mind.
But the fate that awaited his titular hero was not so novel as Séverin implied. Pierrot had died a famous death much earlier in the century, when Gautier, an unabashed lover of pantomime and especially of Jean-Gaspard's art, had invented a piece at the Funambules and then "reviewed" it in the Revue de Paris of September 4, 1842. (The "review" was then, only a few weeks later, turned into a pantomime, The Ol' Clo's Man, by an anonymous librettist for the Funambules.) Pierrot, in love with a duchess, runs a sword through the back of an old-clothes man and steals his bag of wares. Rigged out in his ill-gotten finery, he courts the duchess—and he wins her. But at their wedding, the ghost of the peddler rises up from the floor, pulls Pierrot to his chest for a dance, and impales him on the tip of the sword. Pierrot dies as the curtain falls. This is the first unarguably "tragic" Pierrot of the nineteenth century, or of any century previous. (Gautier had obviously had "high" drama in mind: he titled his review "Shakspeare [sic] at the Funambules", invoking memories of Macbeth
, and he doubtless expected his French readers to recall the end of Molière
's Don Juan—and perhaps of Mozart's Don Giovanni
—when the Commander's statue pays a visit to his murderer.) Gautier's "review" was widely admired by the literati, and it was instrumental in taking the character of Pierrot one step beyond the tearful, sentimental creation of Legrand. (Legrand, himself, deplored such a step, tolerating "the macabre, the terrible," as he told Paul Margueritte
, only as "accidental, quickly borne away by fantasy and dream.")
One writer who particularly profited from the piece was the naval officer-cum-novelist Henri Rivière. In 1860, he published Pierrot, a novella in which a young mime, Charles Servieux, conceives of his Pierrot as a "fallen angel". After watching Deburau père perform one evening (or, rather, a Deburau refracted through "Shakspeare at the Funambules"), Servieux slowly begins to construct in his mind "a genius of evil, grandiose and melancholic, of an irresistible seductiveness, cynical one instant and clownish the next—in order to raise himself up still higher after having fallen." Pierrot's new-found villainy is put to good use when his Columbine grows too familiar with Harlequin: Pierrot decapitates his rival in the middle of a pantomime—with a blade rather sharper than the customary cardboard.
The young Paul Margueritte, an aspiring mime, whose cousin Stéphane Mallarmé
had sung the praises of both Legrand and Deburau fils, one day stumbled upon Rivière's novella, which fired his romantic imagination. Two lines from Gautier's play Posthumous Pierrot (1847)—"The tale of Pierrot, who tickled his wife/And thus made her, with laughter, give up her life"—gave him a plot, and his Pierrot, Murderer of His Wife (1881) was born. Like the Pierrot of "Shakspeare at the Funambules" and of Rivière's Pierrot, Margueritte's anti-hero is a murderer, though one of an impressive ingenuity: to leave no trace of his crime, he tickles the soles of his Columbine's feet until she literally laughs to death. Yet, like his criminal predecessors, he pays very dearly for that crime: for as he turns, drunken, into bed after enacting all the details of the fateful act, he sets his bedclothes alight with his candle and, his feet dancing like his wife's tortured toes, then perishes in the flames.
Margueritte sent copies of his pantomime to several writers who he hoped would take notice; he performed it at a number of venues—most importantly before Edmond de Goncourt
and other notables at a soirée of Alphonse Daudet
's—and in 1888 the impresario Antoine
produced it at the Théâtre Libre
. In the early 1880s, the "Decadence
" was gathering force in France, and Margueritte's Pierrot (and others like him) would be in the forefront of the movement. The ground was, then, more than amply prepared for the success of Séverin's Poor Pierrot.
In fact, Séverin must have known of some or even all of these developments, certainly "Shakspeare at the Funambules" (or the Funambules piece that it spawned), maybe the Margueritte pantomime. What role did Charles Deburau play in all this? Very little apparently. After inspiring Rouffe with his silent acting, and after Rouffe's in turn inspiring Séverin, he disappeared as an agent of direction of their pantomime, the currents of the Zeitgeist
bearing it into metamorphoses of which he could not have imagined or, probably, condoned. Few traces of his art are visible in Poor Pierrot;
fewer still in Séverin's pantomimes to come. The '90s (or, rather, certain aspects of the '90s to which Séverin wished to appeal) had little sympathy with the naive and innocent figure of either of the Deburaux' creation. What stirred it was what had visited Gautier's prescient imagination when, a half-century earlier, he had dared to conceive a murderous and mortal Pierrot. It seems almost inevitable that, in 1896, Séverin would perform in Chand d'habits! (The Ol' Clo's Man)—a pantomime by Catulle Mendès
, Gautier's son-in-law, that was derived (once more) from "Shakspeare at the Funambules".
Mime
The word mime is used to refer to a mime artist who uses a theatrical medium or performance art involving the acting out of a story through body motions without use of speech.Mime may also refer to:* Mime, an alternative word for lip sync...
, the son and successor of the legendary Jean-Gaspard Deburau
Jean-Gaspard Deburau
Jean-Gaspard Deburau, sometimes Debureau —born Jan Kašpar Dvořák—was a celebrated Bohemian-French mime...
, who was immortalized as Baptiste the 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...
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 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). After his father's death in 1846, Charles kept alive his pantomimic
Pantomime
Pantomime — not to be confused with a mime artist, a theatrical performer of mime—is a musical-comedy theatrical production traditionally found in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Jamaica, South Africa, India, Ireland, Gibraltar and Malta, and is mostly performed during the...
legacy, first in Paris, at the Théâtre des Funambules, and then, beginning in the late 1850s, at theaters in Bordeaux
Bordeaux
Bordeaux is a port city on the Garonne River in the Gironde department in southwestern France.The Bordeaux-Arcachon-Libourne metropolitan area, has a population of 1,010,000 and constitutes the sixth-largest urban area in France. It is the capital of the Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture...
and Marseille
Marseille
Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...
. He is routinely credited with founding a southern "school" of pantomime; indeed, he served as tutor to the Marseille mime Louis Rouffe, who, in turn, gave instruction to Séverin Cafferra, known simply as "Séverin". But their art was nourished by the work of other mimes, particularly of Charles's rival, 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...
, and by earlier developments in nineteenth-century pantomime that were alien to the Deburaux' traditions.
Life
Deburau père, feeling burdened by the hardships of the performer, discouraged Charles's taking a professional interest in the theater. He apprenticed him, when he reached maturity, first to a clock-maker, then to a firm that specialized in painting on porcelain. Charles was indifferent to both professions. When Jean-Gaspard died, the director of the Funambules, Charles-Louis Billion, offered Charles his father's role, Pierrot, and, after tentative experiments in minor parts, he made his formal début in November 1847. That début was in The Three Planets, or The Life of a Rose, a "grand pantomime-harlequinadeHarlequinade
Harlequinade is a comic theatrical genre, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "that part of a pantomime in which the harlequin and clown play the principal parts". It developed in England between the 17th and mid-19th centuries...
-fairy play" in the old style of his father's day, with feuding supernatural agents, magic talismans, energetic mayhem, and 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:...
's triumphant conquest of Columbine
Columbina
Columbine is a fictional character in the Commedia dell'Arte. She is Harlequin's mistress, a comic servant playing the tricky slave type, and wife of Pierrot...
.
Unfortunately, his début came at a time when another Pierrot at the Funambules, 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...
, was just beginning to make a reputation for himself; Charles had been conscripted as his replacement, in fact, while Legrand fulfilled an engagement at the Adelphi in London. When he returned, he and Charles fell into a rivalry, which persisted until Legrand left the theater in 1853. Two years later, Charles accepted an engagement at the Délassements-Comiques, and he was not to return to the Funambules until 1862, when he appeared in its last two pantomimes, The Golden Bough and Pierrot's Memoirs, before the theater was demolished, a casualty of Haussmann's makeover of Paris.
Charles did not prosper in the capital. According to Paul Hugounet, a contemporary of the mime and his earliest biographer, he left the Délassements-Comiques only a year after his engagement, a lawsuit pending between him and its director. In the following year, 1858, he opened the Salle Lacaze as the Théâtre Deburau, but the venture was a failure, and in 1859, to recover his debts, he left Paris on a tour of the provinces. His last major attempt to win over audiences at the capital was in 1865, when he signed on at the Fantaisies-Parisiennes, then co-administered by the novelist and enthusiast of pantomime, Champfleury
Champfleury
Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson , who wrote under the name Champfleury, was a French art critic and novelist, a prominent supporter of the Realist movement in painting and fiction.In 1843 Fleury-Husson moved to Paris...
. Champfleury wrote his last pantomime, The Pantomime of the Attorney, for Deburau's début, and, though it was praised by the likes of Théophile Gautier
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....
, Charles's engagement was cancelled not four months after its premiere. "The less-than-tepid reception till then accorded the pantomime", in the words of L.-Henry Lecomte, the chief historian of the theater, "convinced the administration of the Fantaisies-Parisiennes to abandon the genre at about this time."
It was abroad—notably in Egypt for ten months (1859)—and in the provinces that Charles found admiring audiences. The Alcazar theaters in Bordeaux and Marseille were especially welcoming. He spent two years at the former after his Egyptian tour and assumed its directorship in 1871. From 1867 to 1869, he played at the Alcazar in Marseille, and it was there that a young disciple of Pierrot, Louis Rouffe, first saw him perform, and was enchanted. The disciple became the student of the mime when Charles accepted the Bordeaux directorship, and the southern "school" of pantomime was born.
Charles had always wished to be more than a performer. According to Hugounet, he dreamed of becoming a Professor of Mime at the Paris Conservatoire or Opéra. But he died too young—lamentably premature—before he could begin to realize his ambition. He is buried beside his father at 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
It was inevitable that, as a mime, he should be compared to his father. Gautier seemed to sum up the general consensus when he wrote, in 1858, that "the son recalls the father...but without servile imitation":The mask is the same in appearance, as it should be for a traditional character; yet a wholly original wit sends the grimaces wrinkling across it. Deburau is young, thin, elegant; his features are delicate and distinct, his eyes expressive—and his little mouth, which he knows how to distend to swallow the bigger morsels, has a kind of jeering disdain, an English "sneer", that is very piquant. A clown's agility animates this slender body, with its delicate limbs, on which the white blouse with its big buttons floats freely; he moves with ease, suppleness, and grace, marking without stressing the rhythm of the music....
His technique was universally praised, usually by unflattering reference to that of his rival, Legrand. In an article in Le Figaro of 1855, William Busnach was blunt in his assessment, calling Legrand, "as a mime, inferior to Debureau [sic] fils." Gautier was more tactful, but the criticism was the same: "Deburau has the sharper mask, the cleaner technique, the livelier leg." Why then did Charles fail to find audiences in Paris? The answer may lie in the reasons for Legrand's success there. Legrand created a Pierrot wholly different from either of the Deburaux' characters, père or fils. To the critic Taxïle Delord, writing in Le Charivari, Legrand's Pierrot seemed fashionably (if deplorably) "modern". "The old pantomime no longer exists", he declared; "now we have a...neo-Pierrotism, if such an expression is permissible":
Pierrot is not content to rouse laughter: he also calls forth tears: the times demand it, we have become extremely sensitive, we want Pierrot to have an old mother, a sweet fiancée, a sister to rescue from the snares of a seducer. The egoistic, lazy, gluttonous, cowardly Pierrot of old offends the exquisite delicacy of the younger generations: they must have a Pierrot-Montyon.
They find him, he wrote, in Legrand, and, through his Pierrot, "[t]he great marriage of the sublime and the grotesque of which Romanticism dreamed has now been realized...." For at Legrand's theater, the Folies-Nouvelles, "[o]ne oscillates by turns between sadness and joy; peals of laughter break from every breast; gentle tears moisten every barley-sugar stick."
Charles's pantomime was, by contrast, old-fashioned: he apparently had no desire to part with his father's conception of Pierrot. Unfortunately, once he left the Théâtre des Funambules, he did not have the resources to sustain public interest in the figure. The stage of the Funambules had been designed expressly for what Champfleury called "the largest and grandest" (and also the most popular) of the pantomimes in Jean-Gaspard's repertoire: the "pantomime-fairy play". It had three traps, "neither more nor less than that of the Opéra," as 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...
wrote in his Souvenirs, "an arrangement that permitted the changes of scene, the transformations, the perpetual variety of a vision ceaselessly metamorphosed for the pleasure of the eyes and to the heart's content." The spectacular piece with which Charles débuted there had been set in such a fairyland: The Three Planets, or The Life of a Rose was, as noted above, a "grand pantomime-harlequinade-fairy play" that was "in three parts and twelve changes of scene, mixed with dances, transformations, and sumptuous costumes". A glance into the volume of pantomimes that Emile Goby published in 1889, Pantomimes de Gaspard et Ch. Deburau, turns up nothing so ambitious as this. Instead, one finds what Adriane Despot concluded were the usual sorts of productions on Jean-Gaspard's stage: "light, small-scale, nonsensical adventures enlivened with comic dances, ridiculous battles, and confrontations placed in a domestic or otherwise commonplace setting." But what the Goby collection represents is not so much Jean-Gaspard's pantomimes as Charles's own (or sometimes Charles's versions of the former). As Champfleury notes in his preface to the volume, it reproduces only "a repertoire easy to perform in the course of many peregrinations through the provinces." Jean-Gaspard never played in the provinces; Charles sought work frequently there. To secure that work, he had to travel light, and to make do with the theaters that were offered him. And there were few opportunities for spectacular effects, even if he could have exploited them, on the French stages outside Paris.
As a consequence, he watered down a repertoire that was already overly familiar, at least to Parisian audiences. (To the provincials, he was a welcome, even marvelous, diversion.) He also, as a consequence, thrust himself into dramatic territory for which his talents were not altogether suited. Typical of his post-Funambules pantomimes is Champfleury's Pantomime of the Attorney, which takes last (pride of?) place in the Goby collection. Here we are in that "commonplace setting", an attorney's office, that Despot describes above, confronting a "light, small-scale" adventure. Pierrot is the clerk of Cassander, an attorney, and is in love with Columbine, the office assistant. Since Cassander is away for most of the piece, the lovers do what all lovers do (at least chaste nineteenth-century lovers) in unchaperoned intimacy: the pantomime is little more than a vehicle for comically arch and sweet amorous dalliance. It is, in fact, an ideal vehicle for the mime for whom Champfleury wrote his first pantomimes, Paul Legrand.
For if Charles consistently outdid his rival in cleanness of technique and liveliness of leg, Legrand took all the honors when it came to sentimental comedy. Charles's mask was "sharp", but Legrand's art, wrote Gautier, was "more consummate, more extensive, more varied." When, rarely, their Pierrots were paired together, as they were twice in their early Funambules years, Charles played the "funny" or "clever" Pierrot, Paul the Pierrot of sincerity and feeling, who evoked not just laughter but tears. The Pantomime of the Attorney seems to have been written with the latter Pierrot in mind.
Louis Rouffe
How Charles shaped the career of Louis Rouffe (1849–85) is still a matter of speculation. A mime who never played in Paris—at thirty-six, he died even younger than Charles, and all hopes of performing in the capital were defeated—Rouffe is a shadowy figure in the history of French pantomime, having enjoyed little of the publicity of his Parisian predecessors. Unlike Charles Deburau, he left none of his work in print, and, unlike his student Séverin, he did not live long enough to write his memoirs. But the little we know of him suggests an independent spirit, closer to Legrand than to Deburau fils. According to Hugounet, Rouffe was determined that "his art should not remain imprisoned in the bands of tradition. He set himself the task of enlarging it and making it enter the current of modern perceptiveness, thereby realizing the program traced by Champfleury in his book on the Funambules." Hugounet goes on to remark that Rouffe's work was an "eloquent albeit mute response to Francisque Sarcey, who reproached Paul Legrand for his wish to express in pantomime that which lay outside its domain—ideas." Like Legrand, Rouffe often performed in character costume, setting aside Pierrot's white blouse and trousers, thereby earning him the epithet "l'Homme Blanc". All of this suggests that, although Rouffe undertook formal study with Charles, he had been more impressed, in various ways, by the Legrand who had played at the Alcazar in Bordeaux from 1864 to 1870. And the career of Rouffe's student Séverin Cafferra (or simply "Séverin", as he preferred) represents a betrayal of Charles's pantomimic traditions in still other important respects.Séverin
When Séverin (1863–1930) brought his mature art to Paris, he did so with the pantomime Poor Pierrot, or After the Ball (1891), which concludes with Pierrot's death. He seems to have considered his début something of an audacity: his audiences at Marseille had registered discomfort over its dénouement before deciding to applaud the piece. (Charles Deburau would have regarded it as apostasy.) But he was bent upon forging his own way with Pierrot's character: it had annoyed him, after Rouffe's death in 1885, to be congratulated on resuscitating his master's spirit in his performances. "I wanted to be me", he writes in his Souvenirs; "I began to write plays [of my own]." He was pleased with the innovations he brought to his art: "Henceforth," he wrote, after Poor Pierrot, "Pierrot could suffer and even die, like every human being."But the fate that awaited his titular hero was not so novel as Séverin implied. Pierrot had died a famous death much earlier in the century, when Gautier, an unabashed lover of pantomime and especially of Jean-Gaspard's art, had invented a piece at the Funambules and then "reviewed" it in the Revue de Paris of September 4, 1842. (The "review" was then, only a few weeks later, turned into a pantomime, The Ol' Clo's Man, by an anonymous librettist for the Funambules.) Pierrot, in love with a duchess, runs a sword through the back of an old-clothes man and steals his bag of wares. Rigged out in his ill-gotten finery, he courts the duchess—and he wins her. But at their wedding, the ghost of the peddler rises up from the floor, pulls Pierrot to his chest for a dance, and impales him on the tip of the sword. Pierrot dies as the curtain falls. This is the first unarguably "tragic" Pierrot of the nineteenth century, or of any century previous. (Gautier had obviously had "high" drama in mind: he titled his review "Shakspeare [sic] at the Funambules", invoking memories of Macbeth
Macbeth
The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...
, and he doubtless expected his French readers to recall the end of Molière
Molière
Jean-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 Don Juan—and perhaps of Mozart's Don Giovanni
Don Giovanni
Don Giovanni is an opera in two acts with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and with an Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte. It was premiered by the Prague Italian opera at the Teatro di Praga on October 29, 1787...
—when the Commander's statue pays a visit to his murderer.) Gautier's "review" was widely admired by the literati, and it was instrumental in taking the character of Pierrot one step beyond the tearful, sentimental creation of Legrand. (Legrand, himself, deplored such a step, tolerating "the macabre, the terrible," as he told Paul Margueritte
Paul Margueritte
Paul Margueritte, , as his brother Victor Margueritte, was born in Algeria, the son of General Jean Auguste Margueritte , who was mortally wounded in the Battle of Sedan. An account of his life was published by Paul Margueritte as Mon père . The names of the two brothers are generally associated,...
, only as "accidental, quickly borne away by fantasy and dream.")
One writer who particularly profited from the piece was the naval officer-cum-novelist Henri Rivière. In 1860, he published Pierrot, a novella in which a young mime, Charles Servieux, conceives of his Pierrot as a "fallen angel". After watching Deburau père perform one evening (or, rather, a Deburau refracted through "Shakspeare at the Funambules"), Servieux slowly begins to construct in his mind "a genius of evil, grandiose and melancholic, of an irresistible seductiveness, cynical one instant and clownish the next—in order to raise himself up still higher after having fallen." Pierrot's new-found villainy is put to good use when his Columbine grows too familiar with Harlequin: Pierrot decapitates his rival in the middle of a pantomime—with a blade rather sharper than the customary cardboard.
The young Paul Margueritte, an aspiring mime, whose cousin Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
had sung the praises of both Legrand and Deburau fils, one day stumbled upon Rivière's novella, which fired his romantic imagination. Two lines from Gautier's play Posthumous Pierrot (1847)—"The tale of Pierrot, who tickled his wife/And thus made her, with laughter, give up her life"—gave him a plot, and his Pierrot, Murderer of His Wife (1881) was born. Like the Pierrot of "Shakspeare at the Funambules" and of Rivière's Pierrot, Margueritte's anti-hero is a murderer, though one of an impressive ingenuity: to leave no trace of his crime, he tickles the soles of his Columbine's feet until she literally laughs to death. Yet, like his criminal predecessors, he pays very dearly for that crime: for as he turns, drunken, into bed after enacting all the details of the fateful act, he sets his bedclothes alight with his candle and, his feet dancing like his wife's tortured toes, then perishes in the flames.
Margueritte sent copies of his pantomime to several writers who he hoped would take notice; he performed it at a number of venues—most importantly before Edmond de Goncourt
Edmond de Goncourt
Edmond de Goncourt , born Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt, was a French writer, literary critic, art critic, book publisher and the founder of the Académie Goncourt.-Biography:...
and other notables at a soirée of Alphonse Daudet
Alphonse Daudet
Alphonse Daudet was a French novelist. He was the father of Léon Daudet and Lucien Daudet.- Early life :Alphonse Daudet was born in Nîmes, France. His family, on both sides, belonged to the bourgeoisie. The father, Vincent Daudet, was a silk manufacturer — a man dogged through life by misfortune...
's—and in 1888 the impresario Antoine
André Antoine
André Antoine was a French actor, theatre manager, film director, author, and critic who is considered the father of modern mise en scène in France.-Biography:...
produced it at the Théâtre Libre
Théâtre Libre
The Théâtre Libre was a theatre company that operated from 1887 to 1896 in the Montmartre district of Paris, France.-History:Théâtre Libre was founded on 30 March 1887 by André Antoine, who wanted to create a dramatization of an Émile Zola novel, Thérèse Raquin after the theater group for which he...
. In the early 1880s, the "Decadence
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:...
" was gathering force in France, and Margueritte's Pierrot (and others like him) would be in the forefront of the movement. The ground was, then, more than amply prepared for the success of Séverin's Poor Pierrot.
In fact, Séverin must have known of some or even all of these developments, certainly "Shakspeare at the Funambules" (or the Funambules piece that it spawned), maybe the Margueritte pantomime. What role did Charles Deburau play in all this? Very little apparently. After inspiring Rouffe with his silent acting, and after Rouffe's in turn inspiring Séverin, he disappeared as an agent of direction of their pantomime, the currents of the Zeitgeist
Zeitgeist
Zeitgeist is "the spirit of the times" or "the spirit of the age."Zeitgeist is the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambiance, morals, sociocultural direction, and mood associated with an era.The...
bearing it into metamorphoses of which he could not have imagined or, probably, condoned. Few traces of his art are visible in Poor Pierrot;
fewer still in Séverin's pantomimes to come. The '90s (or, rather, certain aspects of the '90s to which Séverin wished to appeal) had little sympathy with the naive and innocent figure of either of the Deburaux' creation. What stirred it was what had visited Gautier's prescient imagination when, a half-century earlier, he had dared to conceive a murderous and mortal Pierrot. It seems almost inevitable that, in 1896, Séverin would perform in Chand d'habits! (The Ol' Clo's Man)—a pantomime by 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...
, Gautier's son-in-law, that was derived (once more) from "Shakspeare at the Funambules".