Pierrot Pierrot Pierrot (, ; ) is a stock character of pantomime and "commedia dell'arte" whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne; the name is a diminutive of "Pierre" (Peter), via the suffix "-ot." His character in contemporary popular culture—in poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, as well as works for the stage, screen, and concert hall—is that of the sad clown, pining for love of Columbine, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin. Performing unmasked, with a whitened face, he wears a loose white blouse
Pierrot of Pierrot "loquitur": "Although this pantomime of life is passing fine,/Who would be happy must not marry Columbine".) Another pocket of North-American sympathy with the Decadence—one manifestation of what the Latin world called "modernismo"—could be found in the progressive literary scene of Mexico, its parent country, Spain, having been long conversant with the "commedia dell'arte". In 1897, , another Decadent who, at the age of twenty-two, died even more tragically young than Peters, embarked on a series of Pierrot-themed short stories—"Pierrot Enamored of Glory" (1897), "Pierrot and His Cats" (1898), "The Nuptials of Pierrot" (1899), "Pierrot's Gesture" (1899), "The Caprices