Cyrano de Bergerac

Source

• Born: 1619
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: 28 July 1655 (head injury)
• Best Known As: Long-nosed literary hero

Name at birth: Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac

De Bergerac was a real person but is still better known as the hero of Edmond Rostand's 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac. Rostand depicts Cyrano as a brilliant and charming soldier whose love life is hampered by his extra-large nose. Eventually Cyrano provides a handsome fellow soldier, Christian, with the words to woo Roxane, the beauty they both love. In real life de Bergerac was at first a soldier (and like his literary counterpart, an expert swordsman and duellist). Later he became a student of the philosopher Pierre Gassendi and then the author of fiction and political satire. His whimsical stories of travel to the moon and the sun made him a forerunner of sci-fi authors like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke.

De Bergerac died after being hit in the head by a falling beam; it's unclear if the incident was an accident or an assassination attempt, but in Rostand's play the incident is dramatized as an attack by Cyrano's enemies... The big-nosed hero has been played in the movies by Jose Ferrer (who won an Oscar for his 1950 film Cyrano de Bergerac), Gerard Depardieu (Cyrano de Bergerac, 1990) and many others... Steve Martin played the Cyrano-like character C.D. Bales, courting Daryl Hannah in the 1987 comedy Roxanne.

This tale of a huge‐nosed, comic‐tragic poseur, who is so homely he must woo by proxy, remains one of the great French romantic plays of the late 19th century. Rostand's work was first presented in New York by Richard Mansfield in 1898 and by Augustin Daly in Philadelphia with a cast headed by Charles J. Richman, Ada Rehan, and Mrs. Gilbert. Within a month of its opening, Weber and Fields presented their famous spoof, Cyranose de Bric‐a‐Brac, while in 1899 Victor Herbert's failed musical version was produced with Francis Wilson as its star. Walter Hampden revived the play in 1923 and returned to it at intervals. In 1946 José Ferrer led a successful revival. Two other musical versions, in 1973 and 1993, both failed, although Christopher Plummer was highly praised in the former. The Royal Shakespeare Company's revival, with Derek Jacobi, earned rave notices in 1984, while Frank Langella had one of his rare disappointments when he essayed Cyrano in 1997.

For more information on Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, visit Britannica.com.

Ballet in three acts, with choreography and libretto by Petit, music by Constant, sets by Basarte, and costumes by Saint-Laurent. Premiered 17 Apr. 1959 by the Ballets de Paris at the Alhambra Theatre in Paris, with Petit, Jeanmaire, and Reich. The ballet is based on Rostand's 1897 heroic comedy about Cyrano, the man with the unfortunate nose who is forced to woo the woman he loves on behalf of another man. It was revived for the Royal Danish Ballet in 1961. David Bintley also choreographed a full-length version for Covent Garden in 1991 using a commissioned score by Wilfred Josephs, although the ballet was not a success.

Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien de Cyrano, known as (1619-55). One of his century's most colourful and controversial figures and most talented and original French writers. He was initially a soldier, known for his bravery. Fact and fantasy are hopelessly entangled in his subsequent biography. Already in 1640, while he was a student of the philosopher Gassendi, contemporaries began to circulate larger-than-life legends about him, notably the story of his single-handed rout of 100 men. This triumphal image is one early example of Cyrano's gradual transformation into a fictional character, a process that culminated in Rostand's (largely fictive) Cyrano de Bergerac. Cyrano's complicity in his own fictionalization is undeniable: the various signatures he began to use in the 1630s include Hercule de Bergerac and Alexandre de Cyrano Bergerac.

The young mythomaniac frequented writers, especially the libertin circle in which Tristan L'Hermite and Scarron moved. By 1645 he was known as the author of a comedy, Le Pédant joué (published 1654), a satire of educators and educational methods from which his friend Molière later borrowed choice bits. Early in the Fronde he published a number of virulent mazarinades, notably Le Ministre d'état fllambé (1649). He subsequently switched sides and defended Mazarin, for example in Lettre contre les frondeurs (1651). During this period he broke off relations with all his former literary friends. Cyrano achieved his greatest prominence after the war with the staging of his tragedy, La Mort d'Agrippine (1653), especially during the ensuing scandal, when he was often accused of atheism.

As early as 1650 Cyrano was reported to have written a work called L'Autre Monde. However, he did not include it in his Œuvres diverses (1654). He undoubtedly realized that the novel was so irreverent regarding matters religious and philosophical that the censors would never have allowed it to be made public. In 1654 he was struck on the head by a falling beam, an incident for which, even in the absence of evidence, his enemies have been blamed. He died the following year from complications due to the accident. L'Autre Monde was finally published in 1657, under the title Histoire comique, in an edition heavily expurgated by the author's friend Lebret. A second posthumous edition, Nouvelles œuvres (1662), made public the novel's unfinished sequel, États et empires du soleil. His second imaginary voyage, while it contains dazzling flights of imagination, cannot compare with the sustained brilliance of L'Autre Monde.

Cyrano virtually disappeared from the French collective imagination throughout the 18th c. He later became a cult figure for writers such as Nodier and Gautier, whose rehabilitation prepared the way for Rostand's fiction and also for the editions that, in the early 20th c., finally made the unexpurgated L'Autre Monde available, revealing its startling originality. [See also Pointe.]

[Joan Dejean]

Bibliography

• J. DeJean, Libertine Strategies (1981)

Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien (sävēnyăN' sēränō' də bĕrzhəräk') , 1619–55, French novelist. Satirizing the customs and beliefs of his time, he wrote two fantastic romances about visits to the moon and sun—L' Autre Monde; ou, Les Estats et empires de la lune (1657) and Les Estats et empires du soleil (1662); these usually appear together, as in the translation by Richard Aldington, Voyages to the Moon and the Sun (new ed. 1962). Cyrano's swaggering personality, evinced by the many duels he fought over insults to his unusually large nose, was romanticized by Edmond Rostand in the verse drama Cyrano de Bergerac (1897).

Bibliography

See study by E. Harth (1970).

1619–1655.

French satirist and duelist whose works include the spirited drama The Pedant Imitated (1654). He is the subject of Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), which depicts him as a chivalric duelist with a comically long nose.

Quotes:

"In it he proves that all things are true and states how the truths of all contradictions may be reconciled physically, such as for example that white is black and black is white; that one can be and not be at the same time; that there can be hills without valleys; that nothingness is something and that everything, which is, is not. But take note that he proves all these unheard-of paradoxes without any fallacious or sophistical reasoning."

"Luckless is the country in which the symbols of procreation are the objects of shame, while the agents of destruction are honored! And yet you call that member your pudendum, or shameful part, as if there were anything more glorious than creating life, or anything more atrocious than taking it away."

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