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!" 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.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