Richard Holmes - Sidetracks

Deburau, with his narrow ironic face, and quick blue eyes, came pale and weeping to the witness box. He wore a black suit and waistcoat. He gave his evidence with soft, precise assurance, in a court packed with theatregoers and fashionable ladies.

President of the court: How were you holding your walking-stick?

Accused: By the middle.

President: With which end of it did you strike?

Accused: The small end.

President: What was your intention of making use of your cane?

Accused: I repeat, I had no intention of striking at all.

That crucial evidence regarding the holding of the stick was not pursued. Other damaging evidence was turned adroitly aside.

President: Once you realized the victim had died from the blow sustained, did you not instantly exclaim, ‘If he’s dead, too bad for him. When I’m in a rage, I don’t know myself?’

Accused: No Monsieur. That would not have been possible, since I did not know the young man was dead until the following day.

That non-sequitur was not picked up either.

But perhaps the most telling piece of character evidence came quite by chance, towards the end of the case, in the statement of a defence witness, a Monsieur Sartelet, obviously a man of some education. ‘I then advised Monsieur Deburau to take my address, since I might be of use to him in the affair. I added that it was happy for him I had witnessed the scene, since I could provide a true account of the facts. He replied, “Ah Monsieur! It is happy for me – but unhappy too. For had you not been there, I would have continued to support those insults in silence. But seeing you there, I could no longer bear the humiliation of being insulted before onlookers any more; and so the unhappy event took place.” (Gasps in court.)’

That surely was the evidence of the White Clown himself, the evidence of centuries.

The judge summed up the case favourably to Deburau. Young Vielin had been the aggressor, the provocation had been persistent and extreme; the death resulting from the blow was accidental. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Pierrot received an unconditional discharge and returned to the Funambules.

Yet Pierrot’s trial was full of macabre resonances that escaped neither the canaille, nor the literary world. Not least was the revelation that Vielin had been a regular follower of Deburau’s from the paradis, and discussed his performances passionately over the supper-table with his apprentice-master. As Alphonse Karr wrote in Nerval’s theatrical magazine, Le Monde Dramatique:

‘Before the fame brought by Janin’s book, Deburau would never have considered himself insulted. He would have pulled a grimace at his mockers and made them laugh … but instead of that, Deburau, who has never been seen white-faced except for his flour, went white-faced with anger; and with a stroke of his cane he killed a peasant boy that he had probably nearly killed on ten previous occasions with laughter … Deburau has become tragic, while murder has become a farce.’

Deburau himself could hardly avoid making the transfer between the real and the stage world. The theatrical historian Paul Hugounet later published what he claimed was a letter of Deburau at this time: ‘I can’t touch a stick any more without burning my fingers … whatever I do that death will always come between me and my public. Whenever I twirl a slapstick on stage against the make-believe assailants the spectators will think of Pierrot assassin and that will turn their laughter into ice.’

Something irrevocable had indeed occurred. Poor Pierrot had killed his fellow man, his brother, his child, his mocker. The White Clown had encountered Death. Deburau had brought a tragic presence to the role. The evolution of Pierrot’s dramatic character had made one more turn in the folk memory, and gathered one more layer of historic symbolism. The naïve flour-face, the mischievous moon-face, now also contained the deathly marble-face: white with anger, white with shock, black with knowledge. Through pride perhaps, very human pride, Pierrot had lost his innocence.

The full consequences of this are a matter of theatrical, literary and perhaps psychological history. The 1840s saw the sudden development of an entire pantomime of death, more conscious and more literary, heavy with political and moral prophecy. The Marchand d’habits (1842) in which Pierrot kills an old-clothes merchant in order to enter a society ball, gradually became Deburau’s signature piece, brilliantly analysed by Gautier and a century later superbly mimed by Jean-Louis Barrault in Marcel Carné’s celebration of the Funambules, Les Enfants du Paradis (1944). The Marchand d’habits was followed by Pierrot, Valet de la Mort (1846), Pierrot Posthume (1850), and many similar black pantomimes. Nerval wrote thoughtfully, and perhaps autobiographically, of Pierrot playing music in the halls of hell. Baudelaire produced his strange reflections on the comique féroce in a classic essay The Soul of Laughter (1855); and George Sand’s stage-struck son, Maurice, turned back to Pierrot’s pre-lapsarian days in the first authoritative history of the Commedia dell’Arte (1860).

But few of these high affairs concerned Deburau then, or need concern us now. For this is simply one story of the White Faced Clown as it happened in Paris. To imagine that Deburau’s trial seriously affected his popularity would be to misunderstand his relations with the paradis. On the contrary: six months after his acquittal, Deburau signed a new ten-year contract with the management for an unprecedented fee of 250 francs a month with a 6 per cent pension scheme. He continued to dominate the stage for another nine years at the Funambules, though increasingly racked by asthma, that most psychosomatic of diseases. Accounts tell of him leaning in the wings against the woodland scenery flaps, beating his left side with his fist and gasping for air.

In February 1845, his fiftieth year, Deburau struck the back of his head badly while plunging down one of the spring-traps to the troisième dessous, traditionally associated with Hell in the theatrical world. He replied to George Sand’s anxious inquiry on this occasion with his old flourish: ‘I do not know in what terms to express my appreciation. My pen is like my voice on stage, but my heart is like my face.’ The asthma gained relentlessly on him, and on 17 June 1846, Deburau died at three in the morning.

The young Jules Champfleury had witnessed his last night at the Funambules. They were playing the Noces de Pierrot. At the final curtain it was Deburau’s turn to let fall a single tear which traced its dark line down the white enfariné. He left the theatre at midnight by the little side door into the rue Fossés-du-Temple, the white carnation of Pierrot’s wedding feast pinned bravely to his dark lapel.

A radio-drama based on the life of the poet Gérard de Nerval. All Nerval’s speeches are drawn from his own essays, letters and journals.