page_title: Charles Deburau
section_title: Pantomime
hierarchical_section_title: Charles Deburau / Pantomime
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Jean Pezous (1815-1885), Portrait du mime Debureau, Paris, musée Carnavalet.
context_page_description: Jean-Charles Deburau was an important French mime, the son and successor of the legendary Jean-Gaspard Deburau, who was immortalized as Baptiste the Pierrot in Marcel Carné's film Children of Paradise. 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. He is routinely credited with founding a southern "school" of pantomime; indeed, he served as tutor to the Marseille mime Louis Rouffe, who, in turn, gave instruction to Séverin Cafferra, known simply as "Séverin". 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.
context_section_description: It was inevitable that, as a mime, he should be compared to his father.  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....
  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."  Gautier was more tactful, but the criticism was the same: "Deburau has the sharper mask, the cleaner technique, the livelier leg."  Why then did Charles fail to find audiences in Paris?  The answer seems to lie in the reasons for Legrand's success there.  Legrand created a Pierrot wholly different from that of either of the Deburaux, père or fils.  To the critic Taxïle Delord, writing in Le Charivari, Legrand's Pierrot seemed fashionably (if deplorably) "modern".  "The old pantomime no longer exists", he declared; "now we have a...neo-Pierrotism, if such an expression is permissible":
  Pierrot is not content to rouse laughter: he also calls forth tears: the times demand it, we have become extremely sensitive, we want Pierrot to have an old mother, a sweet fiancée, a sister to rescue from the snares of a seducer.  The egoistic, lazy, gluttonous, cowardly Pierrot of old offends the exquisite delicacy of the younger generations: they must have a Pierrot-Montyon.
  They find him, he wrote, in Legrand, and, through his Pierrot, "[t]he great marriage of the sublime and the grotesque of which Romanticism dreamed has now been realized...."  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."
  Charles's pantomime was, by contrast, old-fashioned: he apparently had no desire to part with his father's conception of Pierrot.  Unfortunately, once he left the Théâtre des Funambules, he did not have the resources to sustain public interest in the figure.  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".  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."  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".  A glance into the volume of pantomimes that Emile Goby published in 1889, Pantomimes de Gaspard et Ch. Deburau, turns up nothing so ambitious as this.  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."  But what the Goby collection represents is not so much Jean-Gaspard's pantomimes as Charles's own (or sometimes Charles's versions of the f
caption: Portrait of Deburau
   by Jean Pezous
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