Deburau is known today, he is known as the Deburau of Children of Paradise. There he is an exemplar of the common people, a tragic long-suffering lover, a friend of the pure and lonely and distant moon. In Reality neither Deburau nor his Pierrot was such a figure. The myth was the product of clever journalism and idealizing romance. George Sand noted, after Deburau's death, that the "titis", the street boys of the Funambules, regarded Pierrot as their "model". The tragic Pierrot In 1842, a pantomime was performed at the Funambules in which Pierrot meets a tragic end. At the final curtain of The Ol’ Clo’s Man (Le Marrrchand d'habits!), Pierrot dies on stage. It was an unprecedented dénouement and one not to be repeated, at least at Deburau’s theater. (Imagine the Little Tramp expiring at the end of one of Charlie Chaplin’s films.) It was also an anomaly for which his romantic admirers were responsible. This pantomime had been invented by Théophile Gautier in a “review” that he had published in the Revue de Paris. He conceived it in the “realistic” vein described above: Pierrot, having fallen in love with a duchess, kills an old-clothes man to secure the garments with which to court her. At the wedding, however, à la the Commander of Don Juan, the ghost of the peddler—the murdering sword protruding from his chest—rises up to dance with the bridegroom. And Pierrot is fatally impaled. The temptation to use such material, devised by such an illustrious poet, was irresistible to the managers of the Funambules, and the “review” was immediately turned into a pantomime (probably by the administrator of the theater, Cot d'Ordan). It was not a success: it had a seven-night run, a poor showing for one of Baptiste’s productions. If he indeed appeared in the piece—the matter is under dispute—he did so very reluctantly. It was never revived at the Funambules. But like Banville’s deathless prose, it was Gautier’s “review” that survived—and prospered. Gautier’s ex-son-in-law, Catulle Mendès, refashioned it into a pantomime in 1896, and when Sacha Guitry wrote his play Deburau (1918) he included it as the only specimen of the mime’s art. Carné did the same. The moonstruck Pierrot Deburau’s Romantic admirers often made the association with the clown and the moon. Banville’s poem "Pierrot" (1842) concludes with these lines: “The white Moon with its horns like a bull / Peeps behind