In the midst of the moral dilemmas of Don Juan and Sganarelle, Molière brings on another clown: pale, white-faced Pierrot, with the eternal tear on his cheek. Pierrot is a distant Commedia cousin of Sganarelle (possibly derived from the Italian sgannare, to undeceive, and the name Pierrot has a faint echo of pierre or stone.) Pierrot is often a sufferer of unrequited love – later in the eighteenth century he wears soft white clothes and carries a flower. His modern incarnation was as Baptiste in Jean-Louis Barrault's Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise). Through Pierrot we glimpse the deepest part of Molière's heart. We go beyond the man of the theater and his choices about the production; beyond the actor's sense of the stage and his audience; beyond the writer's sense of literary precedent and topical thematic material, to his wrenching feelings about Armande. We know he was already working on Le Misanthrope, and we can also venture the opinion that ever since falling in love with the girl-child of fifteen, he had been waiting to write that play. He also had in his memory the little scene he wrote for the servants in L'École des Femmes about women being the “soup of man.” Grinning at his own obsession, he writes in Don Juan a comic version of the love between an obsessed male and a disinterested female and he gives it to his fisher-folk in act 2, not in poetry but in the rough dialect of the peasant.