Pierrot (French pronunciation: [pjeRo]) is a stock character of pantomime and commedia dell'arte whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comedie-Italienne; the name is a diminutive of Pierre (Peter), via the suffix -ot. His character in contemporary popular culture--in poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, as well as works for the stage, screen, and concert hall--is that of the sad clown, pining for love of Columbine, who usually breaks his heart and leaves him for Harlequin. Performing unmasked, with a whitened face, he wears a loose white blouse with large buttons and wide white pantaloons. Sometimes he appears with a frilled collaret and a hat, usually with a close-fitting crown and wide round brim, more rarely with a conical shape like a dunce's cap.

In 1842, Deburau was inadvertently responsible for translating Pierrot into the realm of tragic myth, heralding the isolated and doomed figure--often the fin-de-siecle artist's alter-ego--of Decadent, Symbolist, and early Modernist art and literature. In that year, Gautier, drawing upon Deburau's newly acquired audacity as a Pierrot, as well as upon the Romantics' store of Shakespearean plots and of Don-Juanesque legend, published a "review" of a pantomime he claimed to have seen at the Funambules. He entitled it "Shakespeare at the Funambules", and in it he summarized and analyzed an unnamed pantomime of unusually somber events: Pierrot murders an old-clothes man for garments to court a duchess, then is skewered in turn by the sword with which he stabbed the peddler when the latter's ghost lures him into a dance at his wedding. The pantomime under "review" was a fabrication (though it inspired a hack to turn it into an actual pantomime, The Ol' Clo's Man [1842], in which Deburau probably appeared--and also inspired Barrault's wonderful recreation of it in Children of Paradise). But it importantly marked a turning-point in Pierrot's career: henceforth Pierrot could bear comparisons with the serious over-reachers of high literature, like Don Juan or Macbeth; he could be a victim--even unto death--of his own cruelty and daring. When Gustave Courbet drew a crayon illustration for The Black Arm (1856), a pantomime by Fernand Desnoyers written for another mime, Paul Legrand (see next section), the Pierrot who quakes with fear as a black arm snakes up from the ground before him is clearly a child of the Pierrot in The Ol' Clo's Man. So, too, are Honore Daumier's Pierrots: creatures often suffering a harrowing anguish. In 1860, Deburau was directly credited with inspiring such anguish, when, in a novella called Pierrot by Henri Riviere, the mime-protagonist blames his real-life murder of a treacherous Harlequin on Baptiste's "sinister" cruelties. Among the most celebrated of pantomimes in the latter part of the century would appear sensitive moon-mad souls duped into criminality--usually by love of a fickle Columbine--and so inevitably marked for destruction (Paul Margueritte's Pierrot, Murderer of His Wife [1881]; the mime Severin's Poor Pierrot [1891]; Catulle Mendes' Ol' Clo's Man [1896], modeled on Gautier's "review").

Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
In 1842, Deburau was inadvertently responsible for translating Pierrot into the realm of tragic myth, heralding the isolated and doomed figure