of the cast were Pierrotini (Legrand), "of noble race but very clumsy", Caliborgna, "so named because of a halberd that had been stuck in her eye and forgotten", and Gros-Bêta, "villain, with no manners whatsoever". Legrand was not above poking fun at himself—as he did in The Little Cendrillon (1857), a tale, as Storey puts it, "of a white-faced Cinderfella", or in Le Grand Poucet (1858), the punning title of which alerted his audience to the ensuing self-mocking fun. As his tenure at the Folies drew to a close, Legrand could even be said to have been teetering on a kind of pantomimic decadence. Storey describes a piece from the last year before he left the theater:In Bridault's Les Folies-Nouvelles peintes par elles-mêmes [The Folies-Nouvelles' Self-Portrait] (1858), which announced the theater's reopening after summer renovations of the salle, the concierge of the establishment, one Père Pétrin, invokes the pantomimic muse of its stage. It is she, he remarks, to whom the audience owes its entertainment, she who inspires its authors "in the simple goal of molding the mind and the heart." He cites as examples of such inspiration the maxims that conclude Pierrot millionnaire [1857] and Le Petit Cendrillon: "Money does not bring happiness!" and "Polished boots make good husbands!" The muse replies: "You're caustic, Père Pétrin!" But apparently Legrand drew back from this brink of cynicism, for when Pierrot, incarnated by younger mimes, crossed the barriers that had forestalled him from violations of his own naïveté, Legrand demurred. After enjoying some success with his Pierrot, Murderer of his Wife (1881), a pantomime in which a disillusioned Pierrot tickles Columbine to death, the young Paul Margueritte interviewed Legrand, now an aging artist whose triumphs at the Folies lay far behind him. Margueritte's reception was not warm. "The macabre, the terrible," he wrote in his memoir Le Printemps tourmenté (1925), "Paul Legrand only tolerated it as accidental, quickly borne away by fantasy and dream." And it was Legrand's old Pierrot, unstained by crime and disillusionment, that would survive into the twenty-first century. Specimen pantomime: Pierrot's Dream Pierrot enters carrying newspapers and a doll. The newspapers for himself, the doll for his little girl, who is sleeping in the next room. Having checked on her sleep, he doesn't want to disturb it, so plunges into the reading of his newspapers, which, after filling him with horror, end up by putting him to