Pierrot of Pierrot and Columbine". In the last year of the century, Pierrot appeared in a Russian ballet, "Harlequin's Millions" a.k.a. "Harlequinade" (1900), its libretto and choreography by Marius Petipa, its music by Riccardo Drigo, its dancers the members of St. Petersburg's Imperial Ballet. It would set the stage for the later and greater triumphs of Pierrot in the productions of the Ballets Russes. The Pierrot bequeathed to the twentieth century had acquired a rich and wide range of personae. He was the naïve butt of practical jokes and amorous scheming (Gautier); the prankish but innocent waif (Banville, Verlaine, Willette); the
Pierrot helped steer the pantomime away from the old fabulous and knockabout world of fairy-land and into the realm of sentimental—often tearful—realism. In this he was abetted by the novelist and journalist Champfleury, who set himself the task, in the 1840s, of writing "realistic" pantomimes. Among the works he produced were "Marquis Pierrot" (1847), which offers a plausible explanation for Pierrot's powdered face (he begins working-life as a miller's assistant), and the "Pantomime of the Attorney" (1865), which casts Pierrot in the prosaic role of an attorney's clerk. Legrand left the Funambules in 1853 for what was to become his chief