Pierrot [1883]; "The Painter Aman-Jean as Pierrot" [1883]), Léon Comerre ("Pierrot" [1884]), Henri Rousseau ("A Carnival Night" [1886]), Paul Cézanne ("Mardi gras [Pierrot and Harlequin]" [1888]), Fernand Pelez ("Grimaces and Miseries" a.k.a. "The Saltimbanques" [1888]), Pablo Picasso ("Pierrot and Columbine" [1900]), Guillaume Seignac ("Pierrot's Embrace" [1900]), and Édouard Vuillard ("The Black Pierrot" [c. 1890]). The mime "Tombre" of Jean Richepin's novel "Nice People" ("Braves Gens" [1886]) turned him into a pathetic and alcoholic "phantom"; Paul Verlaine imagined him as a gormandizing naïf in "Pantomime" (1869), then, like Tombre, as a lightning-lit specter in "Pierrot" (1868, pub. 1882). Laforgue put three of
Pierrot demise in order to make way for "characters less conventional, more human." Marcel Marceau's Bip seems a natural, if deliberate, outgrowth of these developments, walking, as he does, a concessionary line between the early fantastic domain of Deburau's Pierrot and the so-called realistic world. In the 1880s and 1890s, the pantomime reached a kind of apogee, and Pierrot became ubiquitous. Moreover, he acquired a counterpart, Pierrette, who rivaled Columbine for his affections. (She seems to have been especially endearing to Xavier Privas, hailed in 1899 as the "prince of songwriters": several of his songs ["Pierrette Is Dead", "Pierrette's Christmas"] are