A Voyage to the Moon

most of the titles, and was called Savinien de Cyrano Mauvieres Bergerac Saint–Laurent. He was secretary to the King in 1571, and held other important offices. Since there

ed a fair share of the titles

he certainly deserved to be one. But Fortune, who seems to have taken pleasure in always making him just miss his destiny, began by doing him this first and greatest wrong of not letting him be born a Gascon. The family was not even of distan

(the species seems to have been common at that time), and who had no real scholarship (the two things are by no me

docile acceptance of his teachings. Here again Fortune seems to have played tricks with Cyrano, in giving him by accident for life-long friend one who just missed being what a real friend should be; who

medy Le Pedant joue. He lived the Paris student’s life, burning honest tradesmen’s signs and “doing other crazy things,” as his contemporary Tallemant des Reaux tells us. On leaving college he started upon a downward track, according to Lebret; “on which,” says the same good Lebret, “I dare to b

les that was an essential condition of entrance and almost all of them Gascons. Cyrano, at first in the position rather of the Christian than of the Cyrano of M. Rostand’s play, by his gallantry and w

sceptibilities of a certain “grand seigneur,” who planned to avenge himself by the same method which another noble lord, in the eighteenth century, actually used against Voltaire. He posted his hundred men at the Porte de Nesle, to waylay Liniere. Liniere, hearing of it, came to take refuge with Cyrano for the night. But Cyrano

y and M. de Brissailles both men of the time fairly well known: one the son of an Advocate of the Parliament of Paris, the other Mestre de Camp of the Prince de Conti’s regiment bore witness to the

long sword and nose as long. Cyrano, arriving and seeing this parody of himself exalted on a platform, unsheathes in blind rage, drives the crowd of lackeys and loafers right and left with the flat of his sword, and impales the poor ape who was holding out his sword in a posture of self-defence. According to the contemporary pamphlet, partly in prose and partly in verse, which was made upo

h of the Satiric Letters. According to all the books of theatrical anecdotes, Cyrano one evening ordered him off the stage, and forbade him to reappear for a month; and when two days later he did reappear, Cyrano once mo

ough his body. Hardly recovered from his wound, he rejoined the army at the siege of Arras, in 1640; unfortunately for the story, he was probably no longer with the cadets there, but in the regiment of the P

ks, “as undistractedly as if he had been in a quiet study.” He now joined a group of independents in thought and life, naturalists in ethics and empiricists in philosophy, and forced his way into a private class of the philosopher Gassendi, where he

idely among the half-philosophers, half-occultists of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, such as Cornelius Agrippa, Jerome Cardan, Abbot Tritheim, Cesar de Nostradamus, etc. Among the ancients, his first favorites were Lucretius and Pyrrho: Pyrrho whom he especially admired, “because he was so nobly free, that no thinker of his age had been able to enslave his opinions; and so modest, that he would never give final decision

for less independence than Cyrano’s; though the sentence was fortunately commuted. He probably mingled somewhat in the society of the “Precieuses” of the time as well as in that of the “libertins”; for he has left a series of “Love–Letters” which must almost exactly have suited the taste of those who prepared Discourses on the Tender Passion. He probably had many duels still, for Lebret tells us that he served a hundred times as second — the round number is to be taken as such — and any one acquainted with the epoch,

al! The anecdotes of the duels it caused are so many, that one comes in spite of oneself to believe some of them. It is said that this nose brought death upon more than ten persons; that one could not look upon it, but he must unsheathe; if one looked away, it was worse; and as for speaking of Noses, that was a subject which Cyrano reserved for himself, to do it fitting honor. Listen to his t

time, yet considerably better than the taste of the time. Things went well till Agrippine appeared, which had a “succes de scandale”; but its “belles impietes,” as the happy book-seller called them, seem to have pleased the timidly orthodox Duke less. In the meantime Cyrano had received a wound from a falling beam whether by mere accident or not, will never be known; but Cyrano had many enemies, and it has generally been thought that there was purpose behind the accident. For whatever reason, the Due d’Arpajon seems to have advised Cyrano to leave him, and Cyrano was received by Regnault des Bois–Clairs, a friend of Lebret. There he was kindly cared for and lectured on the evil

few copies had been printed, before the author’s death. The Voyage to the Sun, or, to give the title more accurately, the “Comic History of the States and Empires of the Sun,” was probably written immedia

have, they were meant to be read in company, in the salons, or sometimes (like that “Against Dassoucy”), in the taverns, corresponding to the modern cafes, where men of letters gathered. They were written not for the postman, but for the parlor; and not so

h galley) is exceedingly well imagined, and Moliere did well to use it, sixteen years after Cyrano’s death, for the two best scenes of his Fourberies de Scapin. It is not a matter to reproach Moliere with, but it is a case in which Cyrano should receive due credit. The only serious poetical work of Cyrano is his tragedy of Agrippine, veuve de Germanicus, written at some time in the forties, played in 1653, and published in 1654. The statement, repeated categorically by Mr. Sidney Lee in his recent Life of Shakespeare, that “Cyrano de Bergerac plagiarized ‘Cymbeline,’ ‘Hamlet,’ and ‘The Merchant of Venice’ in his ‘Agrippina,’” has not the slightest foundation. There are no resemblances, either superficial or essential, on which to base it, and it is altogether improbable that Cyrano even knew of Shakespeare’s existence. The subject of Agrippine is similar to that of Corneille’s Cinna — a conspiracy under the Roman Empire. There are no resemblances to Corneille’s work in the details of the plot, but in general spirit the play is what we call Cornelian, partly because Corneille was the only one

’est rien; c’est

tion to become simple as simple as real heroi

ed attaining missed just by the lack of that simplicity, perhaps. But exaggeration, sometimes carr

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