Christa Giles

80
These demonic Pierrots remind one of the ubiquitous
Pierrot in Beardsley’s drawings – particularly those for
Wilde’s Salomé. The toilette scene of Salomé, for example,
with its masked Pierrot adjusting Salomé’s hair and the
volume of Marquis De Sade on the table, evokes a ˝froide
folie…férocement comique . . . une incarnation nouvelle et
charmante de la farce lugubre, de la bouffonerie sinistre.˝ 226
Symons viewed Beardsley as a Pierrot who
knows his face is powdered and if he sobs it is
without tears and it is hard to distinguish
under the chalk, if the grimace which twists
his mouth is more laughter or mockery and so
he becomes exquisitely false… 227
The element of mockery and demonic parody – the
empty despair hidden behind the mask – are concomitant
with an inability to believe, a loss of innocence. In the
drawings religious images are applied exclusively to the
erotic, and all masks, makeup, costume conduce to a
brilliantly artificial surface, an ornate re-ordering of the
natural world. Rops, the artist who perhaps most explicitly
juxtaposed and confused religious, satanic, and erotic
imagery, was a favourite of both Huysmans and Des
Esseintes. Péladan claimed that: