Paul Legrand (; January 4, 1816 – April 16, 1898), born Charles-Dominique-Martin Legrand, was a highly regarded and influential French mime who turned the Pierrot of his predecessor, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, into the tearful, sentimental character that is most familiar to post-19th-century admirers of the figure. 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 AdelphiHe was not a success, the English finding his Pierrot "spectral", especially in comparison to their rambunctious Clown; see Hugounet, p. 126.—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. The year of his death coincided with the last year of the Cercle's existence.
Life and career Like Deburau père, he was of humble birth—he was the son of a grocer in Saintes—but, unlike Deburau, whose vocation seems to have been chosen by his father, he was early drawn to the Parisian stage by an irresistible love of the theater.Hugounet, pp. 122–23. He made his debut in 1839 at the Concert Bonne-Nouvelle; there his "unique ambition", according to his biographer "J.M.", "was, in this time of naïveté, to play the Lovers of vaudeville ... ".Biographie et portrait de M. Paul Legrand, p. 8; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 37. 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",Jean-Gaspard Deburau, p. 168; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 37. 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. When Deburau died in 1846, he assumed the white blouse in all the new pieces.
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.Hugounet, p. 127. As a consequence, Legrand left the theater in 1853, finding employment across the street at the Folies-Concertantes, which, after several months, underwent renovation, then was reopened as the Folies-Nouvelles.See Lecomte. This would remain Legrand's venue until 1859, and it was here that he won the wide admiration of the public. When the theater changed hands, and its new director proved unsympathetic to pantomime, the years of his itinerancy began: two years in Brazil, then a long stint at the Théâtre Alcazar in Bordeaux (1864–1870); an Egyptian tour in 1870.Hugounet, p. 136. When he returned to Paris after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, it was for an eight-year engagement at the Tertulia, a café-spectacle that had little of the old luster of the Folies-Nouvelles. The last two years of his professional career (1886–1887) were spent at the Théâtre-Vivienne, which catered primarily to children.The Prologue d'ouverture, performed on the theater's inaugural night, features a "valet of comedy" who laments that, previously, "great Paris did not have a stage/Where, before a broad farce, wholesome and lively,/The father and child could laugh together." His stage fills the gap: "I'm bringing the gift of crude comedy,/Short and good, moral, and never too bold:/But gay! Ah, my children! ... A treasure-house of pleasure!": document F18 13442, unnumbered, undated, and unpaginated MS (censor's copy), Archives Nationales de France, Paris; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 305.
In his retirement, Legrand published a volume of his pantomimesSee Larcher. and gave his support to the Cercle Funambulesque, which was founded in 1888. He appeared as Pierrot in its first program—in a "Prologue" with verses by Jacques Normand and music by Auguste Chapuis—and, in its third program, performed in one of his own pieces, Bureaucrat Pierrot.Hugounet, p. 241, 244. But at seventy-two, he would mainly serve the Cercle as a spectator, as young mimes took over his role.
Paul Legrand is interred in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris (section 36c).
Pantomime
Legrand's physique seemed, to the admirers of his predecessor, unsuited to pantomime. Charles Deburau complained to the mime Séverin that he was too thick-set, his trunk and arms too short, his face too fat and round for a mime; he lacked elegance and grace.Séverin, p. 70. 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".La Presse, August 31, 1846; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 38. Charles-François Mazurier (1798–1828) was an acrobatic dancer and mime; his greatest success was in Jocko, or The Brazilian Ape (1825). "Ravel" is apparently Gabriel Ravel (1810–1882) of the famous family of acrobatic mimes; they were admired as much in America as in Europe throughout the nineteenth century. But Legrand's schooling had been in the roles of the lover Leander, not in those of the acrobatic Zanni; he brought a dramatic (and romantic) sensibility to his Pierrot. 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. What unprecedented truthfulness, what depth of observation ... ".La Presse, October 18, 1847; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 39. The Marquis de Moncade is a character in L'Ecole des bourgeois (1728), a comedy by Léonor Jean Christine Soulas d'Allainval. It was not the musculature but the mask that was important to Legrand, as Gautier gradually realized: "How many shades of feeling", he wrote of Legrand's performance in The Brigands for Laughs (1857), "how many ideas he summoned beneath this thick layer of flour that serves him as mask!".Le Moniteur Universel, November 2–3, 1857; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 39.
Deburau's great successes had come in the "pantomime-féerie", featuring frenetic (sometimes violent) action in a fairy-land of transformations, tricks, and triumphs. Legrand's talents lay elsewhere. It was in the subtle, even touching, dramas of his Pierrot that he found his métier, and it was in the "realistic" pantomime that he excelled. At the Folies-Nouvelles he came into his maturity, as another review by Gautier suggests; this is of Pierrot Dandin (1854), written by the mime and Charles Bridault, and the review should be quoted at length:... what absolutely must be seen is Paul Legrand in Pierrot Dandin. 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. Well! Paul Legrand expresses his sadness in such a naïve, true, touching, and profoundly heartfelt manner that the puppet disappears, leaving only the man. In the stage-boxes, the giddiest madcaps forgot to run their tongues over their green barley-sugar sticks and smothered their sobs behind their lace handkerchiefs.Le Moniteur Universel, October 15, 1855; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, pp. 66–67; names have been anglicized. "Dandin" is an allusion to Molière's character Georges Dandin, the unfortunate husband of his play of 1668; Tiercelin was a comic actor of the Napoleonic era. In later years, Gautier grew impatient with Legrand's sentimentalizing of Pierrot. In a review of 1858, he complained that Legrand "mollifies; he calls forth tears and gives Pierrot—in order to have the pleasure of expressing them—all kinds of good qualities that the rascal simply does not have. With him, Pierrot has become a likable, obliging, good-natured fellow, who administers the obligatory kick to Cassandre (whom he would gladly serve as Caleb) with reluctance. He still steals a little, yes—but so honestly!" (Le Moniteur Universel, August 30, 1858; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 68).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. The Pierrot of Pol Mercier's Bureaucrat Pierrot (1856) was conceived as a scamp and a layabout:In the administrative bureau of a railroad, Pierrot is a very lazy, very inaccurate clerk. At the office he spends all his time in distracting his colleagues and playing a thousand little tricks on them. Sometimes he eats this one's lunch; sometimes he drinks that one's little carafe of wine.Pierrot bureaucrate (censor's copy): document F18 1023, MS 3408, sc. 1 (unpaginated), Archives Nationales de France, Paris; tr. Storey, Pierrots on the stage, p. 67; paragraphing has been simplified.