Venice", with no stinting on luxuriant details, and its directors prided themselves on their intellectual credentials, as both were contributors to the light art and journalism of the day. The aim was to attract a high-toned and enlightened public, and, to the enlightened of the early 1850s, realism (and its handmaid, satire) was the style in vogue. Even before Legrand had left the Funambules, the pioneering realist Champfleury had dedicated himself to a reform of the pantomime: "to realize for the mimic art what Diderot had done for the comedy—that is to say, bourgeoise pantomime." His Marquis Pierrot (1847) marked the beginning of the pantomimic revolution, as Gautier understood immediately, noting that its premiere "dated a new era in the poetics of the Funambules": M. Champfleury gives to the allegorical whiteness of Pierrot a wholly physical cause: it is the flour from the mill [where he works] that is sprinkled over the face of this pale and melancholy personage. One could not find a more plausible means of giving probability to this white phantom ...: it is clear that the era of the Catholic art is closing for the pantomime and the era of the Protestant art beginning. Authority and tradition no longer exist; the doctrine of independent inquiry is about to bear its fruits. Goodbye to the naive formulas, the byzantine barbarities, the impossible complexions: analysis is opening its scalpel and is going to begin its dissections. It was doubtless this invitation to "independent inquiry", as well as Gautier's dithyrambic praise of Legrand's performance in the piece, that drew so many artists and writers into collaborative creation with the mime. Among the contributors of pantomimes to Legrand's repertoire later at the Folies-Nouvelles were the poet Fernand Desnoyers, the composer Charles Plantade, the painter Hippolyte Ballue, and several well-known disciples of the new realism, especially in its satirical and caricatural forms—the Comte de Noé, the caricaturist known as Cham; Jean-Pierre Dantan, the sculptor of caricatural statuettes; Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, the photographer and cartoonist known as Nadar; and of course Champfleury himself. Even Gustave Flaubert wrote a pantomime for Legrand, though it was rejected by Huart and Altaroche (apparently on the grounds that it was insufficiently realistic). Like realism and satire, parody was welcome at the Folies-Nouvelles. In 1858, Donizetti's opera Lucrezia Borgia was given a drubbing in Legrand and Bridault's In Venice, or Dagger, Gallows, and Rat Poison. Among the members