Charles Deburau
After his father's death in 1846, Charles kept alive his pantomimic legacy, first in Paris, at the Théâtre des Funambules, and then, beginning in the late 1850s, at theaters in Bordeaux and Marseille.
But their art was nourished by the work of other mimes, particularly of Charles's rival, Paul Legrand, and by earlier developments in nineteenth-century pantomime that were alien to the Deburaux' traditions.
[1] When Jean-Gaspard died, the director of the Funambules, Charles-Louis Billion, offered Charles his father's role, Pierrot, and, after tentative experiments in minor parts,[2] he made his formal début in November 1847.
[3] That début was in The Three Planets, or The Life of a Rose, a "grand pantomime-harlequinade-fairy play" in the old style of his father's day, with feuding supernatural agents, magic talismans, energetic mayhem, and Harlequin's triumphant conquest of Columbine.
Two years later, Charles accepted an engagement at the Délassements-Comiques, and he was not to return to the Funambules until 1862, when he appeared in its last two pantomimes, The Golden Bough and Pierrot's Memoirs, before the theater was demolished, a casualty of Haussmann's renovation of Paris.
According to Paul Hugounet, a contemporary of the mime and one of his earliest biographers, he left the Délassements-Comiques only a year after his engagement, a lawsuit pending between him and its director.
[6] In the following year, 1858, he opened the Salle Lacaze as the Théâtre Deburau, but the venture was a failure, and in 1859, to recover his debts, he left Paris on a tour of the provinces.
[7] His last major attempt to win over audiences at the capital was in 1865, when he signed on at the Fantaisies-Parisiennes, then co-administered by the novelist and enthusiast of pantomime, Champfleury.
"The less-than-tepid reception till then accorded the pantomime", in the words of L.-Henry Lecomte, the chief historian of the theater, "convinced the administration of the Fantaisies-Parisiennes to abandon the genre at about this time".
There Rouffe performed for one season after Charles's death in 1873; then he returned to Marseille, where he found loyal audiences for the next ten years before tuberculosis cut his own life short.
Gautier seemed to sum up the general consensus when he wrote, in 1858, that "the son recalls the father...but without servile imitation": The mask is the same in appearance, as it should be for a traditional character; yet a wholly original wit sends the grimaces wrinkling across it.
Deburau is young, thin, elegant; his features are delicate and distinct, his eyes expressive—and his little mouth, which he knows how to distend to swallow the bigger morsels, has a kind of jeering disdain, an English "sneer", that is very piquant.
A clown's agility animates this slender body, with its delicate limbs, on which the white blouse with its big buttons floats freely; he moves with ease, suppleness, and grace, marking without stressing the rhythm of the music....[15]His technique was universally praised, usually by unflattering reference to that of his rival, Legrand.
In an article in Le Figaro of 1855, William Busnach was blunt in his assessment, calling Legrand, "as a mime, inferior to Debureau [sic] fils.
For at Legrand's theater, the Folies-Nouvelles, "[o]ne oscillates by turns between sadness and joy; peals of laughter break from every breast; gentle tears moisten every barley-sugar stick.
The stage of the Funambules had been designed expressly for what Champfleury called "the largest and grandest" (and also the most popular) of the pantomimes in Jean-Gaspard's repertoire: the "pantomime-fairy play".
[21] It had three traps, "neither more nor less than that of the Opéra", as Théodore de Banville wrote in his Souvenirs, "an arrangement that permitted the changes of scene, the transformations, the perpetual variety of a vision ceaselessly metamorphosed for the pleasure of the eyes and to the heart's content".
[22] The spectacular piece with which Charles débuted there had been set in such a fairyland: The Three Planets, or The Life of a Rose was, as noted above, a "grand pantomime-harlequinade-fairy play" that was "in three parts and twelve changes of scene, mixed with dances, transformations, and sumptuous costumes".
Instead, one finds what Adriane Despot concluded were the usual sorts of productions on Jean-Gaspard's stage: "light, small-scale, nonsensical adventures enlivened with comic dances, ridiculous battles, and confrontations placed in a domestic or otherwise commonplace setting.
Since Cassander is away for most of the piece, the lovers can indulge their appetites, and the pantomime turns out to be little more than a vehicle for comically arch and sweet amorous dalliance.
A mime who never played in Paris—at thirty-six, he died even younger than Charles, and all hopes of performing in the capital were defeated—Rouffe is a shadowy figure in the history of French pantomime, having enjoyed little of the publicity of his Parisian predecessors.
He set himself the task of enlarging it and making it enter the current of modern thought, thereby realizing the program traced by Champfleury in his book on the Funambules.
"[33] Hugounet goes on to remark that Rouffe's work was an "eloquent albeit mute response to Francisque Sarcey, who reproached Paul Legrand for his wish to express in pantomime that which lay outside its domain—ideas".
[34] Like Legrand, Rouffe often performed in character costume, setting aside Pierrot's white blouse and trousers, thereby earning him the epithet "l'Homme Blanc".
[38] But he was bent upon forging his own way with Pierrot's character: it had annoyed him, after Rouffe's death in 1885, to be congratulated on resuscitating his master's spirit in his performances.
Pierrot had died a famous death much earlier in the century, when Gautier, an unabashed lover of pantomime and especially of Jean-Gaspard's art, had invented a piece at the Funambules and then "reviewed" it in the Revue de Paris of September 4, 1842[41] (the "review" was then, only a few weeks later, turned into a pantomime, The Ol' Clo's Man [Le Marrrchand d'habits!
This is the first unarguably "tragic" Pierrot of the nineteenth century, or of any century previous[43] (Gautier had obviously had "high" drama in mind: he titled his review "Shakspeare [sic] at the Funambules", invoking memories of Macbeth, and he doubtless expected his French readers to recall the end of Molière's Don Juan—and perhaps of Mozart's Don Giovanni—when the Commander's statue pays a visit to his murderer).
The young Paul Margueritte, an aspiring mime, whose cousin Stéphane Mallarmé had sung the praises of both Legrand and Deburau fils,[47] one day stumbled upon Rivière's novella, which fired his romantic imagination.
Yet, like his criminal predecessors, he pays very dearly for that crime: for as he turns, drunken, into bed after enacting all the details of the fateful act, he sets his bedclothes alight with his candle and then perishes in the flames.
[49] Margueritte sent copies of his pantomime to several writers who he hoped would take notice; he performed it at a number of venues—most importantly before Edmond de Goncourt and other notables at a soirée of Alphonse Daudet's—and in 1888 the impresario Antoine produced it at the Théâtre Libre.
