Pierrot such anguish, when, in a novella called "Pierrot" by Henri Rivière, the mime-protagonist blames his real-life murder of a treacherous Harlequin on Baptiste's "sinister" cruelties. Among the most celebrated of pantomimes in the latter part of the century would appear sensitive moon-mad souls duped into criminality—usually by love of a fickle Columbine—and so inevitably marked for destruction (Paul Margueritte's "Pierrot, Murderer of His Wife" [1881]; the mime Séverin's "Poor Pierrot" [1891]; Catulle Mendès’ "Ol’ Clo's Man" [1896], modeled on Gautier's "review"). Deburau's son, Jean-Charles (or, as he preferred, "Charles" [1829–1873]), assumed Pierrot's blouse the year after his father's death, and
Pierrot with the reigning American Realist and Naturalist aesthetic (though such figures as Ambrose Bierce and John LaFarge were mounting serious challenges to it). It is in fact jarring to find the champion of American prose Realism, William Dean Howells, introducing "Pastels in Prose" (1890), a volume of French prose-poems containing a Paul Margueritte pantomime, "The Death of Pierrot", with words of warm praise (and even congratulations to each poet for failing “to saddle his reader with a moral”). So uncustomary was the French Aesthetic viewpoint that, when Pierrot made an appearance in "Pierrot the Painter" (1893), a pantomime by Alfred