Gilles (stock character) disparate Foire genres—puppet shows, comic operas, and every imaginable permutation of both mute and spoken theater—his character began inevitably to coarsen. It is therefore not surprising that Colombine should call Pierrot a "Gille" in Alexis Piron's "L'Ane d'Or" (The Golden Ass, 1725) or that a police report detailing the suspicious goings-on in Lesage's prologue to "Arlequin, valet de Merlin" (Harlequin, Merlin's Valet, 1718) should refer to Pierrot indiscriminately as "Pierrot" or as "Gilles". (It should also not be surprising that, when the illustrious Pierrot Hamoche was forbidden, in 1721, to play "opéras-comiques", impelling Lesage and Dorneval to lay his Pierrot
Pierrot the company of Pierrette or Columbine, appears among the revelers at many carnivals of the world, most notably at the festivities of Uruguay. His name suggests kinship with the Pierrot Grenade of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival, but the latter seems to have no connection with the French clown. Pierrot Grenade is apparently descended from an earlier creature indeed called "Pierrot"—but this name seems to be an outsider's "correction" of the regional "Pay-wo" or "Pié-wo", probably a corruption of "Pay-roi" or "country king," which describes the stature to which the figure aspired. This "Pierrot"—extinct by the mid-twentieth century—was richly garbed, proud