Cercle Funambulesque

The Cercle Funambulesque (1888-1898)—roughly translatable as "Friends of the Funambules"—was a Parisian theatrical society that produced pantomimes inspired by the Commedia dell'Arte, particularly by the exploits of its French Pierrot. It included among its approximately one hundred and fifty subscriber-members such notables in the arts as the novelist J.-K. Huysmans, the composer Jules Massenet, the illustrator Jules Chéret, and the actor Coquelin cadet. Among its successes was L'Enfant prodigue (1890), which was filmed twice, first in 1907, then in 1916, making history as the first European feature-length movie and the first complete stage-play on film.

From about 1825 to 1860, the theater-goers of Paris were witness to a Golden Age of Pantomime. At the Théâtre des Funambules, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, called by the eminent poet and journalist Théophile Gautier "the most perfect actor who ever lived", created, in his celebrated mute Pierrot, a legendary, almost mythic figure, immortalized by Jean-Louis Barrault in Marcel Carné's film Children of Paradise (1945). After his death, his son Charles, playing at the same theater, revived for the grateful enthusiasts of the genre his father's agility and gaity; and Charles's rival Paul Legrand, who reinvented Pierrot as the sensitive soul so familiar to post-nineteenth-century devotees of the figure, earned warm admiration from his public (including Gautier) for his performances at the Folies-Nouvelles. But, by the early 1860s, interest in the pantomime, at least in the capital, had begun to flag, and both Legrand and Deburau fils had to seek out audiences elsewhere. Deburau died young, in 1873, having taken his art to Marseille and Bordeaux, where he founded a so-called school of pantomime. Legrand, after working in Bordeaux and abroad, found employment in the 1870s at the Tertulia, a Parisian café-concert, and in the late 1880s, at the end of his career, at a children's theater, the Théâtre-Vivienne. Both venues represented a considerable step down from the Folies-Nouvelles. One of the historians of French pantomime, Robert Storey, writes that Legrand, in these years, "seems to have been forgotten by his public, the pantomime itself suffering death-throes at the capital while struggling for rebirth in the south of France." When the mime made an appearance, around 1880, in a pantomime at the Variétés, he struck Paul and Victor Margueritte, rare admirers of his art, as "a survivor of a quite distant epoch."

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