Жан Гаспар Дебюро: Богемский мим и создатель Пьеро

Bohemian French mime

Jean Gaspard Deburau (born Jan Kašpar Dvořák; 31 July 1796 – 17 June 1846), sometimes erroneously called Debureau, was a Bohemian French mime. He performed from 1816 to the year of his death at the Théâtre des Funambules, which was immortalized in Marcel Carné's poetic realist film Children of Paradise (1945); Deburau appears in the film (under his stage name, "Baptiste") as a major character. His most famous pantomimic creation was Pierrot—a character that served as the godfather of all the Pierrots of Romantic, Decadent, Symbolist, and early Modernist theater and art.

Born in Kolín, Bohemia (now Czech Republic), Deburau was the son of a Czech servant, Kateřina Králová (or Catherine Graff), and a former French soldier, Philippe Germain Deburau, a native of Amiens. Philippe turned showman and performed at the head of a nomadic troupe. In 1814 he took the company to Paris and they were hired in 1816 by the manager of the Funambules. Cast lists indicate that he appeared as Pierrot right away, although it was not until 1825 that he became the sole actor to claim the role. He attained a certain fame in 1828, when the influential writer Charles Nodier published a panegyric about him. The journalist Jules Janin published a book of effusive praise, entitled Deburau, histoire du Théâtre à Quatre Sous, in 1832. By the middle of the 1830s, Deburau was widely known. Théophile Gautier wrote of his talent with enthusiasm ("the most perfect actor who ever lived"); Théodore de Banville dedicated poems and sketches to his Pierrot; Charles Baudelaire praised his style of acting. In 1832, when he took his pantomime to the Palais Royal, he failed spectacularly. The occasion was a benefit performance of a pantomime performed earlier—with great success—at the Funambules. Louis Péricaud, the chronicler of the Funambules, wrote that "never was there a greater disaster, a rout more complete for Deburau and his fellow artists". Deburau himself was hissed, and he vowed to play thereafter before no other public than those "naïfs and enthusiasts" who were habitués of the Boulevard du Crime. In 1836, Deburau was charged with murder after killing a boy who called him "Pierrot" on the street. When he died, his son Jean Charles (1829–1873) took over and later founded a "school" of pantomime, which flourished first in the south of France and then, at the end of the century, in Paris. Jean Gaspard Deburau is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris (see photo at right).

Pierrot was not Baptiste's only creation. As Robert Storey has pointed out, Deburau performed in many pantomimes unconnected with the commedia dell'arte:
He was probably the student sailor Blanchot in Jack, l'orang outang (1836), for example, and the farmhand Cruchon in Le Tonnelier et le somnambule ([The Cooper and the Sleepwalker] late 1838 or early 1839), and the goatherd Mazarillo in Fra Diavolo, ou les Brigands de la Calabre ([Brother Devil, or The Brigands of Calabria] 1844). He was certainly the Jocrisse like comique of Hurluberlu (1842) and the engagingly naïve recruit Pichonnot of Les Jolis Soldats ([The Handsome Soldiers] 1843). Like Chaplin's various incarnations, all of whom bear some resemblance to the Little Tramp, these characters, though singular and independent creations, must undoubtedly have struck their audiences as Pierrot like. For Deburau and Pierrot were synonymous in the Paris of post Revolutionary France.

If Deburau is known today, he is known as the Deburau of Children of Paradise. There he is an exemplar of the common people, a tragic long suffering lover, a friend of the pure and lonely and distant moon. In Reality neither Deburau nor his Pierrot was such a figure. The myth was the product of clever journalism and idealizing romance. George Sand noted, after Deburau's death, that the "titis", the street boys of the Funambules, regarded Pierrot as their "model".

In 1842, a pantomime was performed at the Funambules in which Pierrot meets a tragic end. At the final curtain of The Ol' Clo's Man (Le Marrrchand d'habits! ), Pierrot dies on stage. It was an unprecedented dénouement and one not to be repeated, at least at Deburau's theater (imagine the Little Tramp expiring at the end of one of Charlie Chaplin's films). It was also an anomaly for which his romantic admirers were responsible. This pantomime had been invented by Théophile Gautier in a "review" that he had published in the Revue de Paris. He conceived it in the "realistic" vein described above: Pierrot, having fallen in love with a duchess, kills an old clothes man to secure the garments with which to court her. At the wedding, however, à la the Commander of Don Juan, the ghost of the peddler—the murdering sword protruding from his chest—rises up to dance with the bridegroom. And Pierrot is fatally impaled. The temptation to use such material, devised by such an illustrious poet, was irresistible to the managers of the Funambules, and the "review" was immediately turned into a pantomime (probably by the administrator of the theater, Cot d'Ordan). It was not a success: it had a seven night run, a poor showing for one of Baptiste's productions. If he indeed appeared in the piece—the matter is under dispute—he did so very reluctantly. It was never revived at the Funambules. But like Banville's deathless prose, it was Gautier's "review" that survived—and prospered. Gautier's ex son in law, Catulle Mendès, refashioned it into a pantomime in 1896, and when Sacha Guitry wrote his play Deburau (1918) he included it as the only specimen of the mime's art. Carné did the same.

Deburau's Romantic admirers often made the association with the clown and the moon. Banville's poem "Pierrot" (1842) concludes with these lines: "The white Moon with its horns like a bull / Peeps behind the scenes / At its friend Jean Gaspard Deburau." As the century progressed, the association grew stronger. Albert Giraud's Pierrot lunaire (1884) marked a watershed in the moon maddening of Pierrot, as did the song cycle that Arnold Schoenberg derived from it (1912).