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 masks of "commedia dell'arte", Pierrot now knew no national boundaries. Thanks to the international gregariousness of Modernism, he would soon be found everywhere. Pierrot played a seminal role in the emergence of Modernism in the arts. He was a key figure in every art-form except architecture. With respect to poetry, T. S. Eliot's "breakthrough work", "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), owed its existence to the poems of Jules Laforgue, whose ""ton 'pierrot'"" informed all of Eliot's early poetry. (Laforgue, he said, "was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of