Paul Legrand
He was the first of the Parisian mimes of his era (the second was Deburau fils) to take his art abroad—to London, in late 1847, for a holiday engagement at the Adelphi[1]—and, after triumphs in mid-century Paris at the Folies-Nouvelles, he entertained audiences in Cairo and Rio de Janeiro.
In the last years of the century, he was a member of the Cercle Funambulesque, a theatrical society that promoted work, especially pantomime, inspired by the commedia dell'arte, past and present.
[3] When, later in that same year, he signed on with the management of the Théâtre des Funambules, where Deburau still held sway, it was as the "comic" of the vaudevilles and the lover, Leander, of the pantomimes.
But it was Pierrot, according to Deburau's biographer, Tristan Rémy, "that better suited his fancy",[4] and, after understudying the master for a half-dozen years, he appeared in the role in 1845, probably in the many revivals of old pantomimes.
In the following year, however, Deburau's son, Jean-Charles ("Charles", as he preferred [1829–1873]), also made his debut as Pierrot at the same theater, and its manager, Charles-Louis Billion, careless of finding ways to harmonize their disparate talents, ended up fomenting rivalry between them.
[11] The poet and journalist Théophile Gautier, in a review of The Wager (1846), performed by Legrand at the Funambules, also missed "that unusually long musculature in the legs and arms—natural in some [mimes], obtained in others by dint of hard work—which allowed Mazurier and Ravel to execute their astonishing leaps", and he counseled lessons in "the difficult art ... of delivering and receiving the kick".
And soon Gautier began to value the difference: when Legrand appeared in Marquis Pierrot (1847), a pantomime by Champfleury, Gautier compared him, in the range and finesse of his acting, to the great comic actor Hugues Bouffé: "inasmuch as he is humble, piteous, melancholy, greedy, wheedling, stealthy, endearing, hypocritical in the first part of the piece, so is he arrogant, insolent, scornful—a regular Marquis de Moncade—in the second.
We doubt whether Tiercelin, who played cobblers so well that it is said he could have been transferred to the shoemakers, was ever better at drawing on his hand-leather, at manipulating the knife and the awl, at squaring a sole, at nailing a bit of leather over a frame: one would truly think he has done nothing but this all his life.
—But where he is superb is in the scene in which, returning home with a dress, a little shawl, and an apple turnover he has brought for his wife, he finds the conjugal nest deserted and, in place of the unfaithful spouse, a letter revealing that Madame Pierrot has left with the seducer Leander.
It must indeed be difficult to make people cry when one is wearing a little black skullcap, when one is sporting a face plastered with flour and a ridiculous costume.
Paul Legrand expresses his sadness in such a naïve, true, touching, and profoundly heartfelt manner that the puppet disappears, leaving only the man.
[15]So devoted was Legrand to this conception of the character—as sensitive and vulnerable, his juddering heart on his sleeve—that, when he was consigned to a pantomime recalling Deburau's stage, he simply turned it into one of his own.
Pierrot, from whom of old one borrowed a pen—"to write a word"—and who loaned it so willingly, having not the least bit of interest in it himself, has been reduced by the misery of the times to making it run from morning to night over musty old documents!
[17]Gautier's remark about Legrand's black suit says something else about the mime: that he was as comfortable in character costume (Deburau initiated the practice)[18] as he was in the garb of Pierrot.
The renovators of the Folies had intended to transport its spectators to an elegant "little theater at Naples or Venice",[20] with no stinting on luxuriant details, and its directors prided themselves on their intellectual credentials, as both were contributors to the light art and journalism of the day.
[23]It was doubtless this invitation to "independent inquiry", as well as Gautier's dithyrambic praise of Legrand's performance in the piece, that drew so many artists and writers into collaborative creation with the mime.
Among the contributors of pantomimes to Legrand's repertoire later at the Folies-Nouvelles were the poet Fernand Desnoyers, the composer Charles Plantade, the painter Hippolyte Ballue, and several well-known disciples of the new realism, especially in its satirical and caricatural forms—the Comte de Noé, the caricaturist known as Cham; Jean-Pierre Dantan, the sculptor of caricatural statuettes; Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, the photographer and cartoonist known as Nadar; and of course Champfleury himself.
Among the members of the cast were Pierrotini (Legrand), "of noble race but very clumsy", Caliborgna, "so named because of a halberd that had been stuck in her eye and forgotten", and Gros-Bêta, "villain, with no manners whatsoever".
"The macabre, the terrible", he wrote in his memoir Le Printemps tourmenté (1925), "Paul Legrand only tolerated it as accidental, quickly borne away by fantasy and dream.
A little tipsy, he picks up the doll, believing it to be his daughter; he rocks it to put it back to sleep, smooths its little face and hair, and, growing annoyed over his exertions in undressing it for bed, he throws it on the floor.
When he comes to, he flees the theater of his crime, boards a boat, is taken with seasickness, shipwrecks in the middle of the most terrifying storm, swims to safety and collapses, exhausted, on a desert island.
The nightmare has disappeared; it lingers only as a light headache that the first smile of his little girl will dissipate when Pierrot, fully recovered to himself, runs to give her the newly found doll.
