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 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