He had difficulty understanding the character in rehearsal and asked Benois for guidance. On the night of performance however, Nijinsky's superhuman understanding of character transformed him into the puppet. Benois wrote, "The metamorphosis took place when he put on his costume and covered his face with make-up I was surprised at the courage Vaslav showed, after all his "jeune premier" successes, in appearing as a horrible half-doll, half-human grotesque. The great difficulty of Petrushka's part is to express his pitiful oppression and his hopeless efforts to achieve personal dignity without ceasing to be a puppet. Both music and libretto are spasmodically interrupted by outbursts of illusive joy and frenzied despair. The artist is not given a single "pas" or "fioriture" to enable him to be attractive to the public, and one must remember that Nijinsky was then quite a young man and the temptation to be "attractive to the public" must have appealed to him far more strongly than to an older artist."