Definition of "Pierrot"

I'll win them by politeness, and... and... show them that I've nothing to do with that Aesop, that buffoon, that Pierrot, and have merely been taken in over this affair, just as they have.

1912, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translated by Constance Garnett, The Brothers Karamazov, published 1880, Book II, chapter 8

And he was attending that fancy-dress ball, mark you--not, like every other well-bred Englishman, as a Pierrot, but as Mephistopheles […] "He said that the costume of Pierrot, while pleasing to the eye, lacked the authority of the Mephistopheles costume."

1934, P. G. Wodehouse, Right Ho, Jeeves

The rest of the family then invades the studio, three boys dressed as Pierrots and three girls dressed as Pierrettes.

2019, Karl Toepfer, Pantomime, page 741