Gilles (stock character)

Marc's Gilles was followed in quick succession at the fairs by Gilles of other actors and acrobats: the tumblers Benville and Drouin, in the same year as Marc's debut;[9] Crespin, called Gilles le Boiteux (Gilles the Gimp), "a performer of 'grace and lightness' despite the infirmity of his body", in 1701;[10] Nicolas Maillot, "one of the best Gilles to appear at the Foire", in 1702;[11] and Génois, a grimacing rope-dancer in wooden clogs, in 1711.[12]

Gilles was sometimes given a major role in a "regular" comedy, such as La Conquête de la Toison d'or (The Conquest of the Golden Fleece, 1724) by Lesage and Dorneval.[13] But he could be found more commonly at the fairgrounds (as the citations above suggest) at the acrobatic venues and, rather more revealingly, in the entertainments known as parades. An outdoor performance, usually on a trestle-stage, that was contrived to lure spectators inside a theater, the parade was typically comprised, as William Driver Howarth notes, of five standard elements:

• A "send-up of the conventional Italian plot" in which two lovers are united, despite parental opposition, by the machinations of the so-called "first" zanni, the cleverer of two comic servants. (In the parade, "the heroine is anything but a virtuous ingénue", unlike her counterpart in conventional comedy.)
• "Disguises, verbal altercations and beatings", in which the "second" zanni, the fool, usually feels the brunt of the mayhem.
• Dialogue "full of sexual innuendo and scatological reference."
• A spoofing of "popular Parisian speech, typified by the ubiquitous use of cuirs (irregular liaisons, and ... intrusive consonants ...),[14] together with malapropisms, pleonasms and other standard sources of verbal comedy."
• "[L]iterary parody, mock-heroic and burlesque devices."[15]

The focus here is upon that fool who feels the brunt of the mayhem: he was almost invariably Gilles. In 1756 a three-volume collection of parades was published anonymously as Théâtre des Boulevards,[16][17] and in its pages Gilles acquires a distinct sharpness of outline. Robert Storey traces it with trenchancy: "A character of more simplicity than sense and of less decency than either, Gilles inherits the ignoble side of the commedia's comic masks."[18] His inventiveness rarely exceeds the stratagem of Isabelle, Grosse par vertu (Isabelle, Knocked-up by Virtue), in which he advises his mistress to enlarge her belly with a hidden tureen, thereby convincing the amorous Doctor that he has been beaten to the erotic prize.[17] When Arlequin, the first zanni (and his superior in every way), tells him that shit is fetching high prices on the market, he produces a large batch of it and peddles it through the streets ("Who'd like some of my shit? ... it's nice and fresh"—Le Marchand de Merde: The Shit Merchant, scene X).[19] Gilles's appetites are, in one of his chroniclers' words, "prodigiously insatiable",[20] and his guardian spirits ("Sainte Merde!")[21] are always provocatively profane. If his Italian predecessor, Pedrolino, "often shares the ether with Ariel," as Storey writes, he himself "tumbles, with Puck's witless companions, among the cornflowers."[22]

Quite early in the century, the parade acquired the status of what Howarth calls a "cult entertainment" among the leisured classes.[23] Thomas-Simon Gueullette, a lawyer and "friend of letters, of theater, and of pleasure" (in the words of his biographer, J.-E. Gueullette),[24] was so enamored of a parade he had seen one night around 1707 at the Foire Saint-Laurent that he and his friends performed it at a private soirée.[25] It proved such a success that Gueullette formed a theater society, built a playhouse at Auteuil, and began receiving "an astonishing concourse of spectators of the first rank" to laugh at the ribaldry of Gilles.[26] After he established other theaters at Maisons and Choisy, the parade "very soon became à la mode."[18] Writers of ambition, such as Charles Collé and Barthélemy-Christophe Fagan, seized upon the entertainment[17] and soon "made it one of the favourite genres performed in the 'théâtres de société', or private playhouses, which were to blossom from about 1730 onwards in aristocratic châteaux and the townhouses of the capital."[15] In the 1760s, the author of Le Mariage de Figaro, Beaumarchais, set himself to writing parades, most of which were probably performed in the private theater of his friend and patron, Charles-Guillaume Le Normant d'Etiolles, ex-husband of Madame de Pompadour.[27] Even in a piece like Les Bottes de sept lieues (The Seven-League Boots), the "least substantial" of Beaumarchais' parades, Gilles gives ample evidence of that winning credulity that "makes him a ready victim for Arlequin's comic invention."[28]

Gilles acquired a kind of respectability toward the end of the century, when he was adopted by the boulevard theaters that catered to the predominantly middle-class. We find his name among many of the comedies at the Théâtre de la Cité (1792–1807) and the Variétés Amusantes (1778–89, 1793–98).[29]

Antoine Watteau: Gilles (or Pierrot) and Four Other Characters of the Commedia dell'Arte, c. 1718. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

As the famous portrait by Watteau attests (see inset), Gilles and Pierrot were often confused during this century. The scholar Ludovic Celler suggests that the actor Nicolas Maillot, who, as noted above, played Gilles from 1702, was responsible for the confusion: "at first," Celler writes, Maillot

played the roles of Pierrot under the pseudonym of Gilles: since he was talented and successful, his nom de guerre served to designate the employ. Hence was created the Gilles who took, as a result, a rather important place in the parades of the Boulevards and caused the French Pierrot to be almost completely forgotten ...[30]

Apparently, the confusion was abetted by the erosion of integrity of Pierrot's original character: Giuseppe Giaratone, who played Pierrot in the Comédie-Italienne of the previous century, had brought a rich and unifying consistency to the role.[31] But as the Pierrots of the Foires began to multiply—among dancers, tumblers, and actors—and to accommodate themselves to the disparate Foire genres—puppet shows, comic operas, and every imaginable permutation of both mute and spoken theater—his character began inevitably to coarsen.[32] It is therefore not surprising that Colombine should call Pierrot a "Gille" in Alexis Piron's L'Ane d'Or (The Golden Ass, 1725) or that a police report detailing the suspicious goings-on in Lesage's prologue to Arlequin, valet de Merlin (Harlequin, Merlin's Valet, 1718) should refer to Pierrot indiscriminately as "Pierrot" or as "Gilles".[33] (It should also not be surprising that, when the illustrious Pierrot Hamoche was forbidden, in 1721, to play opéras-comiques, impelling Lesage and Dorneval to lay his Pierrot to rest in Les Funérailles de la Foire [The Foire's Funeral, 1718], Gilles came bustling in during their subsequent play, Le Rappel de la Foire à la Vie [The Recall of the Foire to Life, 1721], to take his double's place.[34] As late as the second decade of the 19th century, we find Pierrot's name changing inexplicably to "Gilles" in the middle of the script of a pantomime performed at the Théâtre des Funambules.)[35] The two characters were often so much alike as to be virtually indistinguishable.

As Francis Haskell has pointed out (and the remarks above imply), not only did Gilles "wear the same costume" as Pierrot, but both generally "had the same character" throughout the 18th century: Pierrot, like Gilles, "was a farcical creature, not a tragic or sensitive one".[36] (Pierrot will become tearful and incipiently tragic only in the middle of the 19th century, in the hands of Paul Legrand.)[37] "It is", writes Haskell, "hard to resist the conclusion that the consumptive Watteau has invested the figure of Gilles with some degree of self-identification, and Mrs. [ Erwin ] Panofsky has also pointed out that on many other occasions when painting Pierrot figures Watteau not only gave them a predominance which was absolutely not justified by the nature of the parts they were called upon to act, but may even have hinted at something Christ-like in their role."[36] As Haskell seems to be implying, there may be at least as much Watteau as either Gilles or Pierrot in the portrait.