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. So reads the pantomime scenario; what follows is Gautier's review of the piece:... the sight of this pantomime has filled our soul with melancholy. What! Pierrot, from whom of old one borrowed a pen—"to write a word"—and who loaned it so willingly, having not the least bit of interest in it himself, has been reduced by the misery of the times to making it run from morning to night over musty old documents! ... Pierrot! no longer daring to wear his white blouse and his wide trousers! Pierrot in a black suit! And what a black suit! threadbare, tight, curled at the cuffs with age, its seams blackened with ink: a perfect poem of respectable misery! —When he sits down, what pitiful angles his knees make! How pointed his elbows are! What a black gaze is in that pale and flour-covered face! This is what has become of the joyous Pierrot of the pantomime. Pierrot has a profession; Pierrot is employed. He has been made to realize that a century as serious as our own will not suffer the idle!Gautier's remark about Legrand's black suit says something else about the mime: that he was as comfortable in character costume (Deburau initiated the practice) as he was in the garb of Pierrot. About this Gautier was ambivalent: the "truthfulness" of Legrand's acting was unprecedented, but how welcome it was for the spectator still enchanted by the fantasy of Deburau's stage was a valid question: "By virtue of the verisimilitude of his acting," writes Gautier, "[Legrand] turns the fantastic type into a human character whose white face comes as a surprise. He often even abandons the linen blouse and trousers, retaining only the plaster mask, in order to represent beings that are more real." The "realism" of Legrand's pantomime marked a dramatic—and, for some, a disturbing—turn in the fortunes of Pierrot. The Realist Movement and the Folies-Nouvelles In some respects, Pierrot's turn of fortunes was inevitable. The Folies-Nouvelles was not the Funambules, and neither of its administrators, Louis Huart and Marie-Michel Altaroche, was an unlettered Billion. The renovators of the Folies had intended to transport its spectators to an elegant "little theater at Naples or