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.

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Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, engraving after a painting. (credit: H. Roger-Viollet)

(born March 6, 1619, Paris, France — died July 28, 1655, Paris) French satirist and dramatist. He was a soldier until 1641 and studied under the philosopher Pierre Gassendi (1592 – 1655). He wrote plays as well as fantastical works combining science-fantasy and political satire that inspired such later writers as Jonathan Swift. He became the basis of many romantic legends, including Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), in which he is portrayed as a gallant and brilliant but shy and ugly lover, with a remarkably large nose (which in fact he had).

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

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.

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)

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."

For other uses, see Cyrano de Bergerac (disambiguation).

Cyrano de Bergerac
Cyrano de Bergerac
Born	6 March 1619(1619-03-06) Paris, France
Died	28 July 1655 (aged 36) Paris, France
Occupation	Playwright, Soldier

Hector Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (6 March 1619 – 28 July 1655) was a French dramatist and duellist who is now best remembered for the many works of fiction which have been woven around his life story. In these fictional works he is featured with an overly large nose; portraits suggest that he did have a big nose, though not nearly as large as described in Edmond Rostand's play and the subsequent works about him. A statue of him stands in the town of Bergerac, Dordogne.

Contents 1 Life and works 2 In fiction 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

Life and works

Cyrano de Bergerac — born Savinien de Cyrano — was born into an old Parisian family and spent much of his childhood in Saint-Forget (now Yvelines). He went to school in Paris and spent his adult life there when he was not on a military campaign. He was not, therefore, a Gascon. Many of his fellow soldiers would have been Gascons, and their swashbuckling manner was much admired; so he may have cultivated a myth of Gascon origins. Although it is true that he was a popular poet and a fine swordsman who fought many duels, his abilities were embellished by Edmond Rostand, the playwright of Cyrano de Bergerac. Cyrano de Bergerac's writings do, in fact, indicate that he had an unusually large nose, of which he was quite proud.

Though not as famous as his classical contemporaries, Bergerac was a successful writer. The playwright Molière even borrowed a scene from Le Pédant Joué. Bergerac's most prominent works are his duo of proto-science fiction novels, The Other World: The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657) and The Comical History of the States and the Empires of the Sun (unfinished at his death) which describe fictional journeys to the Moon and Sun. The methods of space travel he described are inventive, often ingenious, and sometimes rooted in science. They reflect the materialist philosophy of which Bergerac was a devotee. Bergerac's primary purpose in writing those early science fiction novels was to criticize subtly the anthropocentric view of man's place in creation, as well as the social injustices of the 17th century. The Other World was subjected to censorship.

Modern scholars contend that de Bergerac was homosexual.^{[1] [2]} It is believed that around 1640 he became the lover of Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy, a writer and musician, until around 1653, when they became engaged in a bitter rivalry. This led to Bergerac sending d'Assoucy death threats that compelled him to leave Paris. The quarrel extended to a series of satirical texts by both men. Bergerac wrote Contre Soucidas (an anagram of his enemy's name) and Contre un ingrat ("Against an Ingrate"), while D’Assoucy counterattacked with Le Combat de Cyrano de Bergerac avec le singe de Brioché au bout du Pont-Neuf ("The Battle of Cyrano de Bergerac with the Monkey of Brioché on the Pont Neuf").

The model for the Roxane character of the Rostand play was Bergerac's cousin, who lived with his aunt, Catherine de Cyrano, at the Convent of the Daughter of the Cross, where Bergerac was tended for injuries sustained from a falling beam.[1] As in the play, Bergerac did fight at the siege of Arras (1640), a battle of the Thirty Years' War between French and Spanish forces in France (though this was not the more famous final Battle of Arras, fought fourteen years later). One of his confreres in the battle was the Baron of Neuvillette, who married Cyrano's cousin. However, the play's plotline involving Roxane and Christian is almost entirely fictional — the real Cyrano did not write the Baron's love letters for him.

Cyrano was a freethinker and a pupil of Pierre Gassendi, a canon of the Catholic Church who tried to reconcile Epicurean atomism with Christianity. Cyrano's insistence on reason was rare in his time, and he would have been at home in the Enlightenment that came a century after his death.

He was injured by a falling wooden beam in 1654 while entering the house of his patron, the Duc D'Arpajon. Whether it was a deliberate attempt on his life or merely an accident is unknown. It is also inconclusive as to whether or not his death was a result of the injury, or an unspecified disease.^[3] He died over a year later on July 28, 1655, aged 36. His place of death was the house of his cousin, Pierre De Cyrano, in Sannois. ^[4] He was buried in a Church in Sannois.

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Main article: Cyrano de Bergerac (fictional character)

See also

• Cyrano de Bergerac (play)
• Cyrano de Bergerac (film)
• Asteroid 3582 Cyrano, named after de Bergerac.

References

1. ^ Cronk, Nicholas (Introduction), Cyrano de Bergerac: A Heroic Comedy in Five Acts, (Oxford University Press, 1998), ISBN 0192836439
2. ^ Addyman, Ishbel, Cyrano: The Life and Legend of Cyrano de Bergerac, (Simon & Schuster Ltd, 2008), ISBN 0743286197
3. ^ Afterword to Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Other World - by Don Webb
4. ^ www.cyranodebergerac.fr.

• Addyman, Ishbel (2008). Cyrano: The Life and Legend of Cyrano De Bergerac, Simon & Schuster Ltd.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Cyrano de Bergerac

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Cyrano de Bergerac

• Brief biography at Kirjasto (Pegasos)
• Le Vrai Cyrano de Bergerac (French)—Biography
• Cyrano(s) de Bergerac (French)—Information on fictional portrayals versus real person
• The Other World: Society and Government of the Moon—annotated English language edition
• Cyrano de Bergerac at Project Gutenberg —English language edition.
• Cyrano de Bergerac at Project Gutenberg —French language edition.

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