Sidetracks. Richard Holmes

with commissioned portraits of Deburau, and a fictionalized account of his early career, including a discussion supposed to have been held with Napoleon before Waterloo on the problems of French drama; and a lawsuit against the theatre management involving an impious toadstool said to have sprouted in the great clown’s dressing-room.

      The long-haired poets Gautier and Nerval, then both in their twenties, attended the Funambules so regularly that whenever Pierrot carried out one of his ritual abductions of jam-tarts or pies, a salutation of pastries would fly up to greet them where they sat at their posts in the front-of-house box. Many other writers and feuilletonistes later came to watch the pantomime, and those who have left records include Baudelaire, Champfleury, Alphonse Karr and George Sand.

      But Gautier’s summary is perhaps the best: ‘The pantomime is the real comédie humaine; and even though it does not employ two thousand characters like Balzac’s, it is none the less complete for that. It embraces everything in four or five type-parts. Cassandra represents the family; Columbine the ideal woman or the dream pursued, the flower of youth and beauty; Arlequin with his monkey’s snout and snake-like body, his patchwork and his shower of spangles, represents Love, Wit, Impulse, Audacity, and all that glitters in vice or virtue; while Pierrot, poor haggard, pallid Pierrot in his glimmering draperies, always hungry and always beaten, is the antique slave and the modern proletarian, the pariah, the helpless and disinherited being, who witnesses the orgies and follies of his masters with mournful and yet cunning eyes.’

      At the Funambules, Deburau began to give a peculiar and startling authority to the Pierrot, that être passif et déshérité. Partly this came from the conditions under which he played. The theatre, an erstwhile circus of performing dogs, Les Chiens Savants, was situated on the ancient boulevard du Temple, at the heart of the popular revolutionary quarter of Paris, between the market of Les Halles and the faubourg Saint Antoine. The canaille which crowded along the iron balustrade of the paradis – the gods, with its famous 4-sous seats – were the roughest, rowdiest, most unpredictable audience in Paris. Nerval recalled that to use a lorgnette in their presence was to incite a riot.

      But it was just this audience that Deburau dominated. He did it, said George Sand, simply by expressing their own feelings. Moreover he did it in total silence. For in Deburau’s masterly hands, Pierrot had become an entirely silent mime.

      Originally, this silence had a political cause. Throughout its existence between 1816 and 1862, the Funambules never received a government licence to perform speaking plays, as these were regarded, in the circumstances, as subversive of morality, law and order. Instead it confined itself to a spectacular show of tightrope walking, tumbling, quick-change, flying traps, dancing, slapstick and popular music, based on the pantomime plots of the traditional harlequinade. In place of dialogue, it developed rather more visual and violent methods of exchanging ideas and emotions. There were three specialities: cascades, highly complex, balletic fights with clubs, punches and the celebrated leaping pied au cul – or kick up the arse – which the tall, muscular Deburau excelled in. Then the sauts, startling and often perilous leaps up and down counterweighted trapdoors. And finally trucs, bizarre instantaneous changes of scenery or stage-prop, so that a sheltering wardrobe might become a ravenous whale, or a cooling icecream – for Pierrot – a spluttering Roman candle.

      Moving calmly, almost sardonically, through this stylized, rather brutal form of ‘English’ pantomime, the long pale figure of Deburau gradually became the dominating genius of the theatre. The White Clown came into his own kingdom. The extraordinary, hypnotic power of the blanched face, with mournful eyes and derisive lips thrown into vivid relief, gave Deburau a dramatic instrument infinitely more subtle than Arlequin’s mask and spangles, or Columbine’s skirts and prettiness. Moreover, the taciturn Bohemian revealed an astonishing inventiveness of gesture and grimace, an entire argot of winks, sneers, nods, gapes, twinkles and guffaws. The paradis hung upon his face.

      George Sand wrote that along the seething balustrade an almost studious concentration would appear, in row upon row of cupped chins and gaping mouths: ‘you really feel he is speaking, you could write down all his bons mots, all his caustic repartee, all his eloquent apologies. When the machinists make a noise backstage, the public, frightened of losing a single word of their Pierrot, howl “Silence in the wings”, and he thanks them …’

      Increasingly, Deburau instilled Pierrot with his own personality: mocking, subtly malicious, charming and yet bitter, perhaps even menacing. He removed the buffoon ruff of the Commedia clown, since it obscured his face in the lurid ramp-lights, and replaced Gilles’s floppy hat with the severe black skullcap which further offset the white of his flour, and which henceforth became an obligatory part of the Parisian Pierrot’s costume. More and more he played over the heads of the other characters, directly to his audience, assuming their complicity in his schemes, nonchalant, powerfully reserved. In some pantomimes it was now he, and not the wigged Arlequin, who clasped Columbine’s waist in the traditional finale of flaring orange Bengal Flames.

      By 1835, Deburau was undisputed master of the Funambules stage. His salary stood at 200 francs a month, and he had remarried. His second wife was the pretty, twenty-year-old daughter of a prosperous artisan; Deburau was thirty-nine, and his illegitimate son, Charles, from a previous liaison, was seven. He was an established professional man. At the theatre he played dominoes in his dressing-room, or criticized the other actors’ improvisations from the wings. When Placide, the old comedian who had played Cassandra, came to retire, he was presented with a pair of silver candlesticks at the final curtain, and burst into tears. The cast gathered round and the audience shook with emotional applause: then suddenly Pierrot advanced with a huge bathsponge and mopped disapprovingly at an imaginary puddle round Cassandra’s feet, thus instantly drawing laughter and then applause back to himself.

      Gautier recalled sadly: ‘With Deburau the role of Pierrot grew and expanded until he finished by occupying the whole piece and distorting his own nature till its origins were almost lost. Beneath the flour and smock of the illustrious Bohemian, Pierrot took on masterful airs and inappropriate aplomb. He still delivered his kicks but he received none in return. Arlequin scarcely dared dust his shoulders with the bat, and Cassandra thought twice before landing a clout. He kissed Columbine and wrapped his arm round her waist like a seducer from the Comic Opera. He directed the action just as it suited him, and arrived at a height of insolence and daring that seemed to threaten even his own good genius …’

      For one teenage spectator, Henri Rivière, there were openly sadistic moments in Deburau’s weird by-play with the paradis. Much later he formed his impressions into a brilliant first novella, entitled lightly Pierrot. ‘The audience would not have been entirely surprised if the bottle which he gave Cassandra marked “laudanum”, had really contained poison; or if, when he pretended to shave him on stage, instead of merely making Cassandra shudder with a touch of the cold razor, he had actually opened his throat from ear to ear …’

      It happened, finally, in 1836, in the spring. Pierrot killed a man. Or rather, Deburau did.

      The transcripts of the trial have survived, and for the first and last time Pierrot stands forth and speaks to his public. It is a moment of acute human insight, heralded in that curious way by Watteau’s unmasking of the White Clown a century before. On the surface the case was straightforward enough. Evidence was brought before the Assize to show that Deburau and his new wife had been out walking one sunny April afternoon in the suburb of Bagnolet. They were followed by a young apprentice called Nicholas Vielin, who unaccountably began to hurl taunts and insults at them: ‘Eh, Pierrot! Eh Paillasse, méchant paillasse, te voilà avec ta margot, ta putain!’ Vielin pursued them along the streets for some time, shouting obscenities at the tall clown. Deburau remained obstinately and ominously silent. Then at last, in a sudden access of rage, he turned, strode back up the road and struck a single blow with his cane. The apprentice collapsed instantly on the cobbles, with a deep wound over his left temple. He died later that evening. He was seventeen.

      Deburau, with his narrow ironic face, and quick blue eyes, came pale and weeping to the witness box. He wore a black suit and waistcoat. He gave his evidence with soft, precise assurance, in a court packed with theatregoers and fashionable ladies.