SOURCE: "The Poet as Clown: Variations on a Theme in Nineteenth-Century French Poetry," in Orbis Litterarum, Vol. 33, No. 3, 1978, pp. 238-52.

In the essay excerpted below, King offers a detailed history and interpretation of the clown figure in French literature, concluding with a study of Laforgue's Pierrot, who is "both the frivolous dilettante and Christ-like prophet-victim. "

Banville's "Le Saut du tremplin," Baudelaire's "Le Vieux Saltimbanque," Verlaine's "Le Clown," Mallarmé's "Le Pitre châtié" and Laforgue's "Pierrots" all seek to suggest a modern, post-romantic image of the artist as a mocked and mocking performer. The full implications of this image, which could need a far more extensive treatment than is possible here, are sometimes profoundly psychological, with the poet's compulsion both to flaunt and to conceal the self, sometimes aesthetic, with a desire to glorify and question the nature and function of art, and always metaphysical, in the exploration...