‘Pierrots’ by Jules Laforgue (1886)
Above a neck that emerges stiffly from a ruff starched likewise, it is a beardless cold-creamed face, with the air of a hydrocephalic asparagus. The eyes are drowned in the opium of universal indulgence, the clown’s mouth bewitches like a peculiar geranium. Mouth which goes from the unbunged hole, glacially hilarious, to the transcendental elusiveness of the Mona Lisa’s empty…