Cyrano de Bergerac

CYRANO DE BERGERAC

By EDMOND ROSTAND

Translated by GLADYS THOMAS and MARY F. GUILLEMARD

Introduction by W. P. TRENT

Cyrano de Bergerac

By Edmond Rostand

Translated by Gladys Thomas and Mary F. Guillemard

Introduction by W. P. Trent

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7575-8

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7742-4

This edition copyright © 2021. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: A detail of Man with long nose, possibly Cyrano De Bergerac (coloured engraving), English School (19th century) / Private Collection / © Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images.

Please visit www.digireads.com

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

ACT I

SCENE I

SCENE II

SCENE III

SCENE IV

SCENE V

SCENE VI

SCENE VII

ACT II

SCENE I

SCENE II

SCENE III

SCENE IV

SCENE V

SCENE VI

SCENE VII

SCENE VIII

SCENE IX

SCENE X

SCENE XI

ACT III

SCENE I

SCENE II

SCENE III

SCENE IV

SCENE V

SCENE VI

SCENE VII

SCENE VIII

SCENE IX

SCENE X

SCENE XI

SCENE XII

ACT IV

SCENE I

SCENE II

SCENE III

SCENE IV

SCENE V

SCENE VI

SCENE VII

SCENE VIII

SCENE IX

SCENE X

ACT V

SCENE I

SCENE II

SCENE III

SCENE IV

SCENE V

SCENE VI

Introduction

The critic of literature has no more difficult task than that of appraising properly a work that has achieved current success to an eminent degree. Such a work needs no interpreter or introducer, because it has already introduced itself. It does not lend itself readily to calm judgment, both because the critic is liable to be influenced by the same enthusiasm that has affected the general public, and because, on the other hand, if he has not been so influenced, he is likely to be overanxious to prove his own independence, and is thus in danger of becoming captious and unjust. Yet it is obvious that if there be any good in criticism, successful authors, who presumably will become still greater public benefactors, ought to get the benefit of it, while the reader who is in danger of being misled by his enthusiasm should be set straight at once. Hence contemporary criticism of all books, successful or unsuccessful, is practically indispensable, and hence it is that even Cyrano de Bergerac, fascinating though it be, cannot escape the common fate of being weighed in the balance.

That it should have tipped the balance in both directions since its production at the Porte St. Martin theatre in Paris, in December, 1897, was to be expected. It was welcomed with a warmth which probably neither its talented author, M. Edmond Rostand, nor its chief actor, M. Coquelin, fully anticipated; it was translated for foreign readers and adapted to foreign stages; it was pronounced a masterpiece by critics of established repute. But less flattering opinions were also heard. Here in America, for example, the most promising of our younger dramatic critics, Mr. Norman Hapgood, writing in the Bookman for November, 1898, did not hesitate to declare that the drama was to him on the stage what it had been in the reading,—an extremely clever proof of skill, a brilliant show of execution, a series of scenes exactly calculated to exhibit the powers of a strong and versatile French actor,—all this, but without simplicity, inevitableness, deep sincerity, without, in short, any true greatness. Four months before, the editor of the Nineteenth Century had permitted one of his contributors, Mr. Stanley Young, to assert that not even Shakespeare has given us a hero that appeals to us as Cyrano, and that if we search the whole range of Corneille, Racine, Molière, Victor Hugo, or any other French dramatist, we shall find nothing on a higher level. Which of these two judgments is the correct one, or does not experience teach us rather that neither judgment is likely to be entirely correct and that we shall do well to seek a safe stand between them? However this may be, it is quite certain that we shall be on sure ground if we say something about the author and his subject before attempting to discuss the play.

M. Edmond Rostand was born in Marseilles, about thirty years ago. His youth was evidently filled with literary ambitions, for he had a drama, Les Romanesques. accepted by the Théâtre Français, by the time he was twenty-three, and he had, two years previously, as nearly all French authors seem to do, published a volume of verse. Indeed, as he has just told us in his testimony relative to the amusing suit brought by a Chicago gentleman to prove that Cyrano was plagiarized from The Merchant Prince of Cornville, the subject of his greatest play had been in his mind from his college days, so that it was no mere haphazard undertaking that was encouraged and finally accepted by M. Coquelin. Meanwhile another great favorite of the Parisian stage, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, had shown her appreciation of our author’s talents by accepting La Princesse Lointaine and La Samaritaine—neither of them great successes, it would seem. In brief, M. Rostand’s literary fortunes have been most happy. If he did not achieve fame at as early an age as Byron or Kipling, he has at least escaped the fate of dreary waiting that overtook even a Browning, and he has reaped his honors and emoluments soon enough to enjoy them. His picture presents him to us as a refined man who will make good use of them, and we may surely all hope that he is but at the beginning of a great and worthy career.

But it is not M. Rostand alone that has suddenly become a celebrity; everyone in Europe and America is also talking about a certain Cyrano de Bergerac. M. Rostand has therefore performed the almost unheard-of feat of making two literary reputations. Not that the now famous French duellist, wit, and semisceptic of the seventeenth century was entirely unknown before he was impersonated by M. Coquelin, but that he was known only to scholars and wide readers. English and American students of Swift and Poe had had to mention Cyrano and his Histoire Comique ou Voyage dans la Lune in connection with Gulliver’s Travels and the Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, while French critics and bibliophiles like Nodier and Lacroix had succeeded in securing a partial currency for his name. In thoroughgoing Germany Professor Heinrich Koerting had actually devoted an important chapter to him in his History of the French Novel in the Seventeenth Century—a chapter which the inquisitive reader will do well to consult. But the labors of bibliophiles and German professors sufficed only to keep poor Cyrano flying like a bat through a literary twilight; the effective talent or genius of a dramatic artist was needed to make him once more walk the earth like the high-minded, full-hearted man he was two hundred and fifty years ago.

That he was such a man and that M. Rostand was justified in taking him for a hero is quite apparent. He seems to have been born in Paris early in March, 1619, and to have borne the name of Savinien Cyrano. He came of a good old family, his grandfather Savinien having been Seignieur de Cyrano Mauvières and subsequently de Bergerac. He got little systematic education and satirized his chief teacher in his comedy Le Pédant joué, from which Molière afterward deigned to borrow a scene or two. Influenced by his friend Le Bret he joined the volunteer Guards of Carbon de Castel-Jaloux and soon won a reputation as a duellist, although it was his habit to fight as second rather than as principal.

Thus far, we at once perceive, M. Rostand has been true to history. Indeed, it may as well be admitted that he has made careful use of Cyrano’s own writings and of the accessible biographical details. The Le Bret of the play was Cyrano’s bosom friend and wrote an account of his life. Magdeleine Robineau, widow of the Baron de Neuvillette (actually killed at the siege of Arras), and Mère Marguerite de Jésus were also his friends in life, just as they are in the play. Moreover, Cyrano did drive the actor Montfleury off the stage, and did defend the poet Lignière, against a hundred men, at the Porte de Nesle. We know, furthermore, that he took pleasure in combining poetry and fighting, that he wrote high-flown epistles in the Marinistic style of the times, and that, for the greater part of his life, he was too independent to have a patron. Finally, the use to which M. Rostand has put Cyrano’s writings is exemplified by the fact that the amusingly ingenious methods of reaching the moon, given in the third act of the comedy, are derived from Cyrano’s most famous work, the Voyage dans la Lune.

The most serious and important side of Cyrano’s character is not, however, sufficiently brought out in the play. The siege of Arras, in which he was wounded, took place when he was twenty-one, and weaned him from the profession of arms. He became a student of philosophy under Gassendi, and the acquaintance, perhaps the friend, of the noble Italian philosopher, Campanella. There seems to be evidence that he travelled in England and Italy, perhaps in Poland, too; it is quite clear that he devoted himself seriously to the profession of letters, and that he rendered himself an object of suspicion to the orthodox, by his liberal opinions on religious matters. He died, finally, in September, 1655, under distressing circumstances, having been wounded by the fall of a log of wood, about fourteen months before. Le Bret and other friends stood by him after his death, just as they had done throughout his life, and endeavored to preserve the literary reputation that had been so dear to him. Their success was small, however, for the taste for Marinism had passed away, and, with improved standards, the poems and the once-admired letters could naturally find few readers. His comic books on the states and empires in the Moon and the Sun deserved a better fate, perhaps, but greater writers than Cyrano have suffered an equal eclipse ere now.

Yet, it is quite obvious, when all is said, that if this old worthy could return to earth and see himself upon the stage, he might order even M. Coquelin off, just as he did Montfleury. M. Rostand has given him an admirable historical setting, has treated him with the utmost sympathy, and has endowed him with a wealth of sentiment to which he was in part, at least, in all probability, a stranger. But he has stressed sentiment, whereas .Cyrano stood, in reality, for keen, realistic intelligence; thus, it is fair to say that the drama does not give us the real man, although from the point of view of art, there is no reason why it should have done so. The historic Cyrano, however, was seemingly little susceptible to feminine influences for temperamental reasons, not entirely connected with his ungainly nose. This member, of which M. Rostand has made so much, was indeed large, and had been greatly disfigured by scars received in duels; it was also a subject of much concern to its owner. But neither history nor art seems quite to warrant the part assigned to what is, for the moment, the most famous of all nasal protuberances.

Yet, the important question is—not whether Cyrano de Bergerac would enjoy M. Rostand’s delineation of his character or whether that delineation is entirely true to the facts that have come down to us—but whether M. Rostand has succeeded in writing a