Pierrot gave kicks and no longer received them; Harlequin now scarcely dared brush his shoulders with his bat; Cassander would think twice before boxing his ears. Deburau seems to have had a predilection for "realistic" pantomime—a predilection that, as will later become evident here, led eventually to calls for Pierrot's expulsion from it. But the pantomime that had the greatest appeal to his public was the ""pantomime-arlequinade-féerie"", sometimes "in the English style" (i.e., with a prologue in which characters were transformed into the "commedia" types). The action unfolded in fairy-land, peopled with good and bad spirits who both advanced and impeded
Gilles (stock character) did Gilles "wear the same costume" as Pierrot, but both generally "had the same character" throughout the 18th century: Pierrot, like Gilles, "was a farcical creature, not a tragic or sensitive one". (Pierrot will become tearful and incipiently tragic only in the middle of the 19th century, in the hands of Paul Legrand.) "It is", writes Haskell, "hard to resist the conclusion that the consumptive Watteau has invested the figure of Gilles with some degree of self-identification, and Mrs. [Erwin] Panofsky has also pointed out that on many other occasions when painting Pierrot figures Watteau not only gave them a