Rafael Padilla—known by the stage name Chocolat—and George Foottit performed together as the enormously popular clown duo “Foottit et Chocolat” at the Nouveau Cirque in Paris in the 1890s. It is believed that Padilla was born to African slaves in Havana and then brought to Europe, where he was technically free but confined to servitude; he escaped and began street performing. Foottit (often misspelled) and Chocolat used their racial identities to amplify the double-act convention in which a clown in white stage makeup is accompanied by a hapless sidekick. Their celebrity transcended the stage, and their images, which often caricatured Chocolat’s race, appeared widely across advertisements and products. They were also one of the earliest stage acts recorded on film (see the film loop on the wall nearby).