Pierrot the plot, which was interlarded with comically violent (and often scabrous) mayhem. As in the Bakken pantomimes, that plot hinged upon Cassander's pursuit of Harlequin and Columbine—but it was complicated, in Baptiste's interpretation, by a clever and ambiguous Pierrot. Baptiste's Pierrot was both a fool and no fool; he was Cassandre's valet but no one's servant. He was an embodiment of comic contrasts, showing imperturbable sang-froid [again the words are Gautier's], artful foolishness and foolish finesse, brazen and naïve gluttony, blustering cowardice, skeptical credulity, scornful servility, preoccupied insouciance, indolent activity, and all those surprising contrasts that must be expressed by
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