Circus and literature

A theoretician of romanticism, Hugo created the monstrous figures of Quasimodo and Gwynplaine,"the laughing man", the clown disfigures since childhood. From Musset's Fantasio to Zemlinsky's Dwarf via Verdi's Rigoletto, Leoncavallo's Pailasse and Schoenberg's Pierrot, the grimacing, deformed and fantastical figures appeared in dramatic art.
The triumph of the bizarre filled a romantic universe with strange, macabre and trivial creatures. Charles Nodier invented the "frenetic school," and Baudelaire the "satanic school," in the years in which the circus, housing monsters and prodigies, became established as a new religion. From 1831, in Barnave , Jules Janin affirmed that the circus, with its "real blood" and "real tears," was superior to the theatre. In 1859, the Goncourts saw in the circus, "the only talents in the world that are incontestable and absolute like maths, or rather, like the somersault.²" In 1879, Edmond's novel, Les Frères Zemganno , immortalised them. The circus renewed links with the sacred origins of tragedy and resuscitated medieval mysteries.
In big tops, modern man was on a quest for transcendence, which had disappeared form the secularised cupolas and naves. Joris-Karl Huysmans saw in the circus "the masterpiece of new architecture:" "there, in a prodigious cathedral altitude, cast-iron columns fuse with unrivalled audacity. The slender thin stone pillars so admired in some old basilicas seem timid and cumbersome near the jet of these light stems that rise to the gigantic arcs of this revolving ceiling, linked by extraordinary iron networks that stem from every side, blocking, passing each other and tangling up their formidable beams. ³ " Octave Mirbeau compared the decoration of the Cirque d’Été, with "its champlevé enamels set with gems, mosaic shrines, gold plate, and heavy lamé fabrics," to "all the rich service of a dead abbey. ⁴  "

When Baudelaire described the "English Pierrot" in 1855 in De l’essence du rire , as having the consumptive's pale skin and red cheeks, he defined the French clown, and this model was established among compatriots and then worldwide. The shadow of the clown spread, and invaded the literary landscape. Jules Laforgue imagined a clownish Hamlet. Stéphane Mallarmé praised the "Dorst brothers, these clowns, no, these convulsionaries, no, these strange quadrille dancers, who go by the calm exasperated name of Frétillants⁵ ». The wild Pierrots of Henri Rivière and Jean Richepin's novels Pierrot (1860) and Braves gens  (1886), confirmed the transformation of the amiable, fanciful dreamer into a troubling lunatic. This development had already been described in 1833 by Théophile Gautier: before descending into madness, the painter Onophrius had seen, in the moon, "the pale long face of his close friend Jean-Gaspard Deburau, the great  Paillasse des Funambules⁶" ( read the extract). The darling of writers and artists, the sinister clowns of Hanlon Lee , Pierrots in black clothes, accentuated the anxiety given off by these "White men^7". Their success at the Folies Bergère in the 1870s, coincided with the beginnings of a doctor, an acrobat in amphitheatres of a different nature. Perceiving the histrionics of these public sessions, Joséphin Péladan wrote, "Theatre people are Charcots.^8" ( read the extract ), announcing polemical words on the contemporary literary world, and "a Salpêtrière of literature," that contained "enough to astonish, every morning, the Charcots of criticism – those blockhead charlatans." The pamphlet writer concluded: "I laugh at these clowns of hysteria."

In the final third of the 19^th century, Adolphe Willette's Pierrots, standards of the day and the doubles of a painter attached to the French spirit down to its most grievous aberrations (this "son of the moon" was a dreadful anti-Semite), confirmed the Christianisation of the clown. For the Chat Noir cabaret, Willette composed: Parce Domine a gigantic funereal charivari showing a procession of Pierrots in Calvary. Embroidering on Au clair de la lune, the famous quadrille mistakenly attributed to Lully, Willette multiplied scenes of comic mortification with the Hung Pierrots, and Pierrot at Père Lachaise, entitled De Profundis.