SOURCE: “Ideas,” in Cyrano de Bergerac: L'Autre Monde, Grant & Cutler, 1984, pp. 22-47.

[In the following excerpt, Mason outlines the materialist philosophy Cyrano promotes in his stories of space travel.]

To most people, Cyrano's work is best known for its science-fiction qualities. Here is an imagination to foresee possibilities such as interplanetary space travel, or modern discs and tapes. The moon is also the land of mobile houses—a veritable caravan park!—and houses that can spend the winter underground. The ‘boule de feu’ which Socrates' demon brings as illumination, sun's rays purged of their heat, anticipates a sense of electric light and energy. But all such wonderful inventions are not merely paraded for their own virtuosity. Above all they are useful to mankind in giving him a control over his environment and thereby improving the quality of his existence. The auditory book, for instance, opens up possibilities of learning incomprehensible to most in the seventeenth century. Cyrano's joy in acquiring knowledge comes out in this portrait of an infinitely richer world:

… je ne m'étonnai plus de voir que les jeunes hommes de ce pays-là possédaient davantage de connaissance à seize et à dix-huit ans que les barbes grises du nôtre, car sachant lire aussitôt que parler, ils ne sont jamais sans lecture; dans la chambre, à la promenade, en ville, en voyage, à pied, à cheval, ils peuvent avoir dans la poche ou pendus à l'arçon de leurs selles une trentaine de ces livres dont ils n'ont qu'à bander un ressort pour en ouïr un chapitre seulement, ou bien plusieurs s'ils sont en humeur d'écouter tout un livre; ainsi vous avez éternellement autour de vous tous les grands hommes, et morts et vivants, qui vous entretiennent de vive voix.

(p. 414)

Not that Cyrano de Bergerac is the only author of the time to conceive of ingenious inventions. In an age when the machine was beginning to take hold of men's imaginations, other thinkers too delighted in the potential of new techniques. Nor is his technology by any means always an accurate predictor of the twentieth century. To name but one example, Cyrano's ascent to the sun is due not to some effect similar to hot-air ballooning as has been sometimes thought but to Nature's horror of a vacuum. But, in qualifying the author's brilliance of invention, one must add that not only is he often wonderfully prescient but that, more important, he weaves these ideas into a philosophy which makes a mental universe that liberates and extends our notion of what the world may contain. It is above all the exhilarating effect of this imagination that makes L'Autre Monde of importance for us today.

However, leaving this aspect for the moment, let us examine the author's philosophical outlook as it is portrayed here. We are immediately faced with a difficulty. It is much easier to state what he is against than what he is for. One of his prime aims is clearly to reject the authority of traditional customs and opinions, so as to encourage in the reader a new spirit of open and critical enquiry. All support for the established point of view of current opinion is subjected to questioning in various forms. In a religious age this must mean an assault on religion, beginning with criticism of the Bible. When one thinks of the scandal which Voltaire was to arouse a hundred years later by his iconoclastic attitude to the Scriptures, the extent of Cyrano de Bergerac's daring only halfway through the much more pious seventeenth century begins to be clear. The author permits himself, in both of his works, a sceptical alternative to the story in Genesis. In Le Soleil, the solar flood of ancient times has a purely materialist explanation, without any reference to divine intervention or wrath. In La Lune there is a Paradise with a Tree of Knowledge—which, as we have seen, the author at once treats irreverently when his hero lands on it. We are to learn that the fruit of the lunar Tree has complicated properties. The apple skin produces not knowledge but forgetfulness; only if you bite firmly into the apple itself do you attain truth. So when God expelled Adam from the Garden He rubbed Adam's gums with the skin—and that is why neither he nor his descendants down to Moses ever remembered anything about the Creation! The serpent too takes on a curious destiny after incurring God's displeasure. He enters man's body, which explains why our intestines cry out from hunger; it is simply the snake's hissing. Not content to stop there, the author imagines a more licentious form of irreverence. We see the serpent protruding in the male genitals; and this allows room for a highly blasphemous interpretation of the Biblical remark that ‘it shall bruise thy head, and then shalt bruise his heel’. If furthermore Enoch reaches with God's help the lunar Eden it is not by way of Jacob's ladder, for that, we are told, has not yet been invented. Instead, he rises upon the smoke from one of those Old Testament sacrifices in which God sends down upon the just His chastising fire, which the author corrosively describes as the ‘feu de la charité’ (p. 370).

Such is the caricatural nature of the Biblical story as the author presents it. But the attack on scriptural authority is but one aspect of the author's critical stance. It forms part of a whole onslaught on the human penchant for belief in the marvellous and supernatural. The satire on miracles runs throughout these works. If, for instance, Elijah needs help on arrival in Paradise, there is at hand a deus ex machina, a divine messenger who introduces himself blandly: ‘Je suis, me dit-il, l'Archange que tu cherches, je viens de lire dans Dieu qu'il t'avait suggéré les moyens de venir ici, et qu'il voulait que tu y attendisses sa volonté’ (p. 374). Such ridiculously adventitious aids are to be found, quite gratuitously, when a more straightforward encounter would have done the job just as well. In similar vein, God created Eve out of Adam's ribs; but, comments the author, He could have made her out of earth just as easily as He had made Adam. Human beings are forever seeking a glamorous, easy answer to the incomprehensible. But no serious enquirer after truth should countenance such methods. As the host's son rejoins angrily to Cyrano when he carelessly uses the word ‘miracle’:

… ne déferez-vous jamais votre bouche aussi bien que votre raison de ces termes fabuleux de miracles? Sachez que ces noms-là diffament le nom de Philosophe. Comme le Sage ne voit rien au monde qu'il ne conçoive ou qu'il ne juge pouvoir être conçu, il doit abominer toutes ces expressions de miracles, de prodiges, d'événements contre nature qu'ont inventés les stupides pour excuser les faiblesses de leur entendement.

(p. 419)

If belief in miracles arises in part from mental laziness, it also derives from human arrogance, the conviction that a special place in the universe has been provided for mankind. Indeed, the refutation of this fallacy is the starting-point of La Lune. Cyrano fails to convince his friends by bookish authority that the moon is a world like ours, so he undertakes the existential proof by going there. But he too is at once seduced into superstitious thinking. When he comes down in Canada and finds the sun at its height at what in France would have been midnight, he assumes that God had arrested the sun on its path through the skies for Cyrano's convenience just as He had done in the Old Testament for Joshua. The readiness of man to believe that God is arranging the cosmos specially for his benefit never ceases to spring up anew. In Canada the conversation quickly turns to a topic dear to Cyrano's heart, the thesis that the earth revolves around the sun. The Copernican theory attracted little open support or enthusiasm in France in 1750, even among otherwise bold thinkers (7, pp. 84-85), which makes Cyrano's vigorous espousal of the thesis all the more remarkable. The Viceroy of Canada represents to our hero, as we have seen, the commonsensical point of view of the time, but Cyrano displaces the philosophical centre of the discussion. We are but a dependency upon the solar centre; the small needs the large, not vice versa. It would be as ridiculous to think that such a great luminous body should turn around our diminutive planet as to imagine, ‘quand nous voyons une alouette rôtie qu'on a, pour la cuire, tourné la cheminée à l'entour’ (p. 362). We believe in the outdated Ptolemaic theory for two reasons: because we allow our deceptive senses to persuade us, and because of ‘I’orgueil insupportable des humains qui leur persuade que la Nature n'a été faite que pour eux’ (p. 363).

It is up to us to reject all such comforting teleological beliefs and give up our self-absorption. For this fallacious thinking about the universe goes much deeper than simply inverting the roles of sun and earth. The author wants to convey to his reader the sense of a universe limitless both in time and space. The point follows directly on from the debate with the Viceroy of Canada over the Copernican theory. Indeed, it is the Viceroy himself, by a shrewd stroke on the author's part, who is permitted to deduce this. If it is only a contingency, and not directly willed by God, that the sun gives us light, and if the stars are so many suns, then it must follow, in his view, that there is a plurality of worlds in an infinite cosmos. This argument is elaborated later by one of the professors on the moon. The universe, he says, is like a large animal, within which there are beings who of themselves constitute whole worlds for other creatures, and so on ad infinitum. Is it so hard to believe that a louse may take the human body for a universe and that, if he travels from one human ear to the other, his companions say that he has been to both poles? This sense of the infinitely large and infinitely small is not new with Cyrano de Bergerac—one can trace the concept back to the Italian sixteenth-century philosopher Giordano Bruno—but it is expressed in characteristically striking form; Pascal himself may well have found the source for his famous Pensée on ‘les deux infinis’ in La Lune. But unlike Pascal, Cyrano de Bergerac does not take refuge from the upsetting idea of an endless universe by total faith in God. It is rather his purpose to remove from man any sense of sitting at the centre of the world, the unique beneficiary of divine gifts. The medieval closed universe is simply shattered, and the reader is left with the contemplation of his own insignificance. It is, indeed, an early version of the death of God, if by God we understand the notion of a benevolent, omniscient figure rather like us in form but idealised.

Such a God is explicitly eliminated by the second professor, when he comes to supplement his colleague's contribution to Cyrano's education by doing for time what the former had done for space: extending it to infinity. Human beings, incapable of conceiving that the universe has always existed, transfer the idea of eternity to God, ‘comme s'il leur était plus aisé de l'imaginer dedans l'un que dans l'autre’ (p. 408), and ascribe to Him the Creation of the world. But this is an absurd way of proceeding: ‘a-t-on jamais conçu comment de rien il se peut faire quelque chose?’ (ibid.). So one is necessarily led to admit matter as coeternal with God. At this point the author advances the argument with a bold stroke: ‘et alors il ne sera plus besoin d'admettre un dieu, puisque le monde aura pu être sans lui’ (ibid.). The next question is self-evident: ‘comment ce chaos s'est-il arrangé de soi-même?’ To which the professor (and with him the author) eagerly replies: ‘Ha! je vous le vais expliquer!’ (ibid.).

As we saw in the first chapter, the theory now advanced is that matter contains an inherent dynamism. Within it there is an essential fire—and fire is ‘le constructeur et destructeur des parties et du tout de l'Univers’ (p. 409). To the consequences of this view of things we shall presently return. Here, let us just note how completely Cyrano deprives man of any privileged position in the universe, relegating him to an accidental role of no consequence in a cosmos that, by being so overwhelmingly vast, reduces him to the status of a mere speck. As Jacques Prévot puts it in his edition of the Œuvres complètes: ‘Nous sommes chassés du Paradis pour la seconde fois’ (2, p. 354).

It is therefore no surprise to find the author making an attack, in both La Lune and Le Soleil, on the self-congratulatory human belief in the spirituality and immortality of the human soul. On occasion this attack takes on a burlesque quality. Why should cabbages not equal kings?: ‘ce chou dont vous parlez, n'est-il pas autant créature de Dieu que vous? … Dira-t-on que nous sommes faits à l'image du Souverain Etre et non pas les choux?’ (pp. 402-03). Or the assault is couched in terms of dramatic irony, as when some of the inhabitants of the Republic of Birds take it for granted that man's soul is not immortal as theirs, of course, are. Similarly, the quadruped priests whom Cyrano encounters at the lunar Court insist, to use Orwellian language: ‘Four legs good, two legs bad’. It is to them a sign of God's grace that He bade them go on all fours so as to give the greatest possible support to ‘une chose si précieuse’ as mankind and to encourage them to ‘contempler les biens dont nous sommes seigneurs’ (pp. 390-91). Once again, a reason is discovered in divine intentions for the way men happen to be. Such derogatory aspersions upon man's conviction that he and he alone possesses spirituality are taken up more directly in the concluding discussions of La Lune, where the host's son casts derision upon such belief. Why, he asks, do we assume that only mankind has the power of reason and not the animal world? It is simply not true. But even if it were, why do we go on to deduce that God has ‘enriched’ man with immortality, because He had already endowed him with reason?

Je dois donc, à ce compte là, donner aujourd'hui à ce pauvre une pistole parce que je lui donnai hier un écu? Vous voyez bien vous-même la fausseté de cette conséquence, et qu'au contraire, si je suis juste, plutôt que de donner une pistole à celui-ci, je dois donner un écu à l'autre, puisqu'il n'a rien touché de moi. Il faut conclure de là, ô mon cher compagnon, que Dieu, plus juste encore mille fois que nous, n'aura pas tout versé aux uns pour ne rien laisser aux autres.

(p. 417)

The same sense of cosmic fair play had been deployed earlier on behalf of the cabbages. If such plants have indeed no soul, surely God will have tried to compensate them in some other way, perhaps by giving them a higher intellect and understanding than we possess. We human beings have no right to assume that we are pre-eminent in every domain: ‘dans la famille de Dieu, il n'y a point de droit d'aînesse’ (p. 403). Yet mankind thinks, on no authority whatsoever, that to him that hath shall everything be given. We have no reason to believe in a soul, because to every appearance all our so-called intellectual and immortal properties desert us the moment our body perishes. If this spiritual insight is supposed to be independent of the corporeal frame in which it is housed why, for instance, do persons blind from birth have no concept of what it means to see? Yet this soul, which acts only imperfectly if one of the senses is impaired, is expected to work to perfection when, after our death, it will have no senses left at all! If the soul needs no instruments to perform its functions, one might as well give the blind a whipping, for merely pretending that they cannot see.

This thoroughgoing materialist argument, which goes back as far as Lucretius, is supported by another one more curious, dating from medieval times (1, pp. 201-02n.). Suppose a Christian eats a Moslem; what is the nature of the ensuing mixture? One or other body and soul seems to have disappeared. How will God separate them at the Resurrection? It seems, indeed, that the amalgam will merit both Hell and Heaven—damned as a Moslem, saved as a Christian. ‘Il faut donc, s'il [Dieu] veut être équitable, qu'il damne et sauve éternellement cet homme-là’ (p. 422).

Cyrano has no answer, save to say that these arguments are sophistical, since God has spoken of the Resurrection and He cannot lie. But this merely brings the host's son to the crucial point in his subversive argument. How does Cyrano know that this God exists? The young man himself flatly denies it. We have no evidence at all of His existence. Why, if belief in Him were so essential to us, should He have wished to play hide-and-seek with us? Such a God must be either foolish or malicious, hence not a God at all such as the Christians conceive of. There is therefore no reason to wager on His existence, as Cyrano had proposed to the young man, using an argument that many other seventeenth-century thinkers, most notably Pascal, propounded. For a God so imperfect as He must be, if He existed, is not worthy of our faith and adoration.

The basis, then, for all human belief in the soul rests on nothing. It is exposed as total self-delusion. Nevertheless, blindly confident in his imagined rights in the world where he lives, man invokes them not to rule in peace and benevolence but to deceive, domineer and murder his fellow-creatures. Human presumptuousness is bad enough because of its total folly; but from the absurd we now pass to the horrible. The fact of man's cruelty is particularly stressed in Le Soleil, but it is not ignored in La Lune. When the lunar quadrupeds treat Cyrano and the Spaniard as though they were circus animals on the basis of the former's belief in the superiority of their own species, the satirical analogy is not hard for the reader to deduce. Later, when Socrates' demon compares the human situation with that of the vegetable world, he makes an eloquent plea for the vulnerability of plants to man's imperious ways:

Ne croyez-vous pas, en vérité, si cette pauvre plante pouvait parler quand on la coupe, qu'elle ne dît: “Homme, mon cher frère, que t'ai-je fait qui mérite la mort? Je ne crois que dans tes jardins … je dédaigne d'être l'ouvrage d'autres mains que les tiennes … je m'épanouis, je te tends les bras, je t'offre mes enfants en graine, et pour récompense de ma courtoisie, tu me fais trancher la tête!

(p. 403)

It is no defence to say that plants do not protest against our deeds; surely, that merely increases the degree of our cruelty against such dumb and helpless creatures.

The argument may seem to verge on the absurd. But, as we shall see, Cyrano held a firm belief in the unity of all matter, and we have already noted his contention that there is no ‘droit d'aînesse’ in the universe. What holds true for our unfeeling attitudes to plants is equally valid for our treatment of animals, as the ‘Histoire des Oiseaux’ brings out with virulent force. Brought to justice by the birds, man is symbolically arraigned, in the person of Cyrano, for his misdeeds to his fellow-creatures. Not only does the human race seize and devour animals, it dares to argue its inherent superiority precisely from the latter's weakness. The accusation is damning: ‘il [l'homme] nous dresse des embuscades, il nous enchaîne, il nous jette en prison, il nous égorge, il nous mange’ (p. 472). Man even debauches certain species of birds, such as the falcons, to kill other birds for him. Though Cyrano is in the end spared the terrible capital punishment of being eaten alive, stung and bitten to death, the nature of his sentence sufficiently indicates the horror that the author wishes to evoke in us for our dreadful ways.

In short, man is not at the centre of the universe, nor does he in the least deserve to be. But the charge against humankind goes deeper even than that. In the end, it is not clear what man is. Both of Cyrano de Bergerac's works testify to a certain bewilderment about human nature. We are poor creatures, suffering from permanent sensory deprivation when one compares the people of the sun or moon. Furthermore, we are deteriorating. Socrates' demon tells Cyrano why he and his companions had quit the earth under the Roman Empire, during Augustus' reign. The ancient Greeks like Socrates and the early Romans like Brutus had been models of virtue. But gradually man had become stupid, brutish, warlike, and there was no pleasure left in dwelling amongst them. The demon has recently paid a return visit to the earth. While there he had met a number of worthy men, usually philosophers, like Campanella in Italy and Gassendi in France; above all, he had encountered in Tristan L'Hermite (a contemporary poet and tragedian) ‘le seul poète, le seul philosophe et le seul homme libre que vous ayez’ (p. 378). But he had also come into contact with a large number of clergy, ‘que votre siècle traite de divins, mais je n'ai rien trouvé en eux que beaucoup de babil et beaucoup d'orgueil’ (ibid.). Indeed, with the rare exceptions explicitly named by the demon, everyone else whose acquaintance he had made on earth was ‘si fort au-dessous de l'homme que j'ai vu des bêtes un peu plus haut’ (ibid.).

Such is the denunciation made by the good demon. Man has generally sunk below the animals. The lunar priests may reveal their own absurdity in deciding that Cyrano is an unfeathered parrot, just as common lunar opinion does in believing he is some kind of ostrich, but it is also clear that, removed from the comfortable assumptions of our earthbound existence, we have nothing to demonstrate that we belong to any assured or eminent category of creatures. In the end, the court accepts that Cyrano is a man, but only because the demon intervenes eloquently to plead for tolerance on his behalf. When brought to trial in the Republic of the Birds, Cyrano is in even worse case. Such is the detestation for the human race there that he must try to conceal his human identity. It is significant that in both La Lune and Le Soleil the hero finds himself in trouble with the law. Human beings appear, to those with eyes not blinded by prejudice, as a race incurring the gravest suspicions. We are the arch-criminals of the universe and fully merit being put on trial for our misdeeds.

The attack, then, on human opinions and arrangements is far-reaching, caustic, often ferocious. Learned authority, whether Christian or classical, is suspect. So too are the conventional social supports for such beliefs. We might here recall an exemplary instance. On the moon, as we have seen, there is no cult of paternity or old age. Indeed, in a typical reversal of earthly customs, we find the host's son roundly abusing his father for idleness in terms more suited, at least in the seventeenth century, to the authoritarian paterfamilias. When the father humbly offers a reasonable excuse, this only makes matters worse: ‘N'importe, repartit-il en lui lâchant une ruade, vous devez obéir aveuglément, ne point pénétrer dans mes ordres et vous souvenir seulement de ce que je vous ai commandé’ (p. 407). The poor man is, in addition, seized and whipped as a punishment for a good quarter of an hour. He departs in tears, but his son is still full of bitter indignation: ‘Pour moi, je pense que ce coquin-là me fera mourir …’ (ibid.). Cyrano adds that he had to bite his lips in order not to laugh at ‘ce monde renversé’, and he changes the subject. But a defence of these attitudes had already been provided by the demon. Respect for age is based on no realistic or natural foundation. Parenthood has come about simply from sexual lust:

… je voudrais bien savoir si vos parents songeaient à vous quand ils vous firent? hélas, point du tout! et toutefois vous croyez leur être obligé d'un présent qu'ils vous ont fait sans y penser. … Votre père consulta-t-il votre volonté lorsqu'il embrassa votre mère? … hélas, vous que l'affaire concernait tout seul, vous étiez le seul dont on ne prenait point l'avis!

(pp. 399-400)

The demon tactfully admits at the end of this argument that he may have exaggerated the case somewhat, ‘contre ma conscience’, but he feels the need to redress a balance that had been lost, in order to correct fathers of their tyrannical arrogance. It is the young, by contrast, who have the propensity for action, vigour, zeal for justice. Such attitudes closely resemble the naturalist prescriptions that emerge from Molière plays like L'Avare and L'École des femmes. But in L'Autre Monde the moral climate is different. Instead of a sense that moderation and fairness should be achieved, we have instead the spectacle of an ironic, even shocking, reversal. Nor does the author fail explicitly to take his distance from Biblical writ. The demon anticipates Cyrano's objections:

Oui mais, direz-vous, ce vieillard est mon père et le ciel me promet une longue vie si je l'honore. Si votre père, ô mon fils, ne vous ordonne rien de contraire aux inspirations du Très-Haut, je vous l'avoue; autrement, marchez sur le ventre du père qui vous engendra, trépignez sur le sein de la mère qui vous conçut, car de vous imaginer que ce lâche respect que des parents vicieux ont arraché de votre faiblesse soit tellement agréable au Ciel qu'il en allonge pour cela vos fusées, je n'y vois guère d'apparence.

(pp. 398-99)

So much for the Fifth Commandment. But the example is symbolic of the attitude pervading the whole work. For paternity and age, read authority of any kind not based on rational persuasion. The right to subject all opinions to critical enquiry is asserted in a thoroughgoing way, and matters touching religious faith are not excepted from this purview as they were by Cyrano de Bergerac's contemporary Descartes, for all the latter's audacity in other respects. Throughout, the intention is to reject all assured positions, to remind us of how inessential we are. This painful lesson of our relativity is forced upon us unremittingly. Abstract essences like Truth are forever beyond our grasp.

But here a distinction must be made between Cyrano de Bergerac and sceptics like Montaigne and La Mothe le Vayer. Our author is not interested in doubt for doubt's sake or simply in order to put down human vanity by the demonstration of our ignorance. The rejection of dogmatic theory is but the gateway to a freer exploration of the world, more in keeping with its enigmatically rich possibilities. It is up to us to seek out knowledge, even if that knowledge is surrounded by a measure of uncertainty. Books are in principle an index of progress; that is why the ‘talking books’ of the moon are so enviously desired, as representing the wider possibilities of disseminating knowledge in that superior world. The book is an object of almost superstitious awe for Cyrano de Bergerac. When at the beginning of La Lune the hero returns home after his vain attempt to persuade his friends that the moon is a world like ours, he finds on his table an open book which he had not put there. It is by the Italian philosopher Cardano, who recounts on the page at which it is open how he had been visited by two old men from the moon. Cyrano takes the ‘miracle’ of a book flying from his shelves onto his table and opening at just the right place as a portent and encouragement. Doubtless there is some self-irony in this account of the hero's reactions. Even so, the value placed upon a learned authority in determining him on his flight to the moon should not be underestimated. The written word gives impulse to the exploratory adventure. It is entirely in keeping, therefore, that the good life which Cyrano is pursuing at the outset of Le Soleil with his friends Colignac and Cussan makes full allowance for the activities of the mind, supported by reading:

Les plaisirs innocents dont le corps est capable, ne faisaient que la moindre partie. De tous ceux que l'esprit peut trouver dans l'étude et la conversation, aucun ne nous manquait; et nos bibliothèques unies comme nos esprits appelaient tous les doctes dans notre société.

(p. 428)

Similarly, the heroes of L'Autre Monde are mainly philosophers, like the few good people still remaining on the earth according to the account given by Socrates' demon. The latter figure is himself a noble and articulate person; and even though it would be unwise to see him as a simple representative of the author's opinions, he is given a central position in La Lune and allowed the opportunity to express incisive views on a multiplicity of diverse issues. If he now lives on the moon, it is because its inhabitants, like him, accord intellectual equality and independent reasoning the priority over acceptance of established opinions:

les hommes y sont amateurs de la vérité … les philosophes ne se laissent persuader qu'à la raison … l'autorité d'un savant ni le plus grand nombre ne l'emportent point sur l'opinion d'un batteur en grange, si le batteur en grange raisonne aussi fortement.

(pp. 378-79)

This way of life attains its finest form on the sun, where the people have achieved remarkable capacities, such as the little man who speaks the perfect language of nature, or the spirits who transform themselves from the form of a tree into the form of men. Pre-eminent in such a marvellous world, the philosophers ‘ne parlent pas avec la langue … comme leur corps est alors diaphane, on aperçoit à travers leur cerveau ce dont ils se souviennent, ce qu'ils imaginent, ce qu'ils jugent’ (p. 501). When one of their number meditates within himself, ‘on remarque clairement … les caractères de chaque chose qu'il médite qui … viennent présenter aux yeux de celui qui regarde, non pas un discours articulé, mais une histoire en tableaux de toutes ses pensées’ (ibid.). In such fashion does learning at its highest point become moral honesty of the purest kind. Unattainable ideal it may be. None the less, besieged by our petty conceit and foolish fantasies, it may stand as the metaphorical end-point of all our aspirations. Thus do knowledge and morality go hand in hand.

In contrast with absolute Truth, the domain of pedants, sophists and orators (all disdained as fools by Socrates' demon), Cyrano de Bergerac advocates Knowledge, which belongs to the world of the probable or possible. If our universe is possessed of a richness almost unimaginable even in our most fertile thoughts, it is essentially because there is a fundamental unity to all matter; and that matter is possessed of total plasticity, capable of every kind of metamorphosis. A magic is at large in the universe. But it is not the magic of irrational credulity; it is based on natural powers whose existence we barely suspect. The Spaniard whom Cyrano encounters in the lunar palace rejects the traditional concept of four elements in the universe. There is but one. Earth, air, fire and water are never found in pure form:

… l'air n'est que de l'eau fort dilatée, l'eau n'est que de la terre qui se fond et la terre elle-même n'est autre chose que de l'eau beaucoup resserrée, et ainsi à pénétrer sérieusement la matière, vous trouverez qu'elle n'est qu'une, qui comme une excellente comédienne joue ici-bas toutes sortes de personnages sous toutes sortes d'habits …

(pp. 385-86)

In a phrase, ‘tout est en tout’ (p. 388). As the host's son will later explain, an apple tree absorbs the grass and earth around it; a pig eats the apples; a man eats the pig. Thus is achieved, through the assimilation of food, the passage from the inanimate mineral to the human world: ‘Ainsi ce grand pontife que vous voyez la mitre sur la tête était, il n'y a que soixante ans, une touffe d'herbe en mon jardin’ (p. 418). Indeed, the demon elaborates the rudiments of an evolutionary concept, a kind of natural metamorphosis towards the more perfect, as all beings aspire to becoming human. This view of nature affords the hero of the tale much satisfaction when expounded to him by the host's son.

It is this same view of the interpenetrability of matter which the author exploits with a greater degree of fantasy in Le Soleil. The solar paradise contains a landscape of jewelled beauty, trees with trunks of solid gold, silver branches and emerald leaves. So far, this is pure conventionality of description. But, as the hero watches, a rubied pomegranate begins to pulsate with life. Out of it first appears the bust of a human being, which gradually extends downwards until the whole fruit has lost all its original appearance and become a fully-formed dwarf—who finally frees himself from his twig and falls at Cyrano's feet. How are marvellous changes such as this accomplished? Cyrano is eventually vouchsafed an explanation. The inhabitants of ‘la partie claire’ of the sun, where ‘le principe de la matière est d'être en action’, simply have a more active imagination, joined to a more ethereal body. Therefore, their imagination encounters no obstacle in their bodily substance and can rearrange it as they wish in every particle. Such effort of will has virtually limitless possibilities. Even the birds of the country partake of these faculties: if an eagle has its eyes put out, it has only to imagine that it is sighted in order to remedy the infirmity: ‘car toutes nos transformations arrivent par le mouvement’ (p. 462). Similarly Socrates' demon, as native of the sun, has a life-span of three or four thousand years by virtue of his solar origins, because when he feels his bodily carcass begin to decay, ‘je me souffle dans un jeune corps nouvellement mort’ (p. 379). In Le Soleil mortality has become extended even further, to seven or eight thousand years. When death at last comes to the solar people, it is not by corruption but through the splitting up of the body's particles, which then return to ‘la grosse matière de ce monde allumé’ (p. 499), until they again find their way back to vegetable, then animal, and finally human form.

Whence comes this self-creative capacity within matter? As we have seen, it is the work of fire, which has a function central to the whole cosmos. This fire, ‘qui se meut de soi-même’, has the capacity to create the faculty of reason or of sentiment: ‘car ayant trouvé les organes propres à l'agitation nécessaire pour raisonner, il a raisonné; quand il en a trouvé de propres à sentir seulement, il a senti’ (p. 410).¹ It is even possible for a wise man like the demon to separate heat from light, when he furnishes lamps for Cyrano and his hosts from the sun's rays.

Heat, indeed, leads us back inevitably to the sun, the centre of our universe and the dynamo of all our energy: ‘tous les corps qui sont dans la nature ont besoin de ce feu radical, qui habite au cœur du royaume’ (p. 362), as central as the seeds in an apple or the genital parts in man. Given such a universe, it is clear why the author must establish from the outset of his work the fundamental truth of the Copernican theory. The sun is the home of physical and moral health, ‘presque exempt de guerres et de maladies’ (p. 378). Long life, superior sensory endowments, a higher moral code, such is the portion of its natives. In Le Soleil the cult of the sun is even more explicit. Its immaterial purity prevents its heat from burning up the celestial traveller during his flight: ‘le feu du soleil ne peut être mêlé d'aucune matière’ (p. 445). When Cyrano is obliged to abandon his craft, ‘j'élevai mes yeux au soleil, notre père commun’, and this ‘ardeur de ma volonté’ (p. 454) sustains him in his aspiration to reach the longed-for goal. Here is a transcendental principle supporting human frailty, if only human beings have the courage to exercise the willpower they indubitably possess. When Cyrano at last reaches his destination he feels a sense of awe, and shame at defiling the surface of this ‘terre transparente’ by merely treading upon it.

The sun-people, indeed, are made up of the spirits of those who die on the surrounding planets like Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and our earth. These spirits are united to ‘la source du jour’ and purged of the matter which limited and hindered them in their vital functions. Hence, the sun has a spiritual vigour far beyond us,

… puisque c'est par la chaleur d'un million de ces âmes rectifiées, dont la sienne est un élixir, qu'il connaît le secret de la vie, qu'il influe à la matière de vos mondes la puissance d'engendrer, qu'il rend des corps capables de se sentir être, et enfin qu'il se fait voir et fait voir toutes choses …

(p. 493)

If the very power of procreation comes from the sun, then it follows without difficulty that, as Campanella tells Cyrano, ‘le soleil est votre Père et … l'auteur de toutes choses’ (p. 496). In such a radiantly luminous world the souls of philosophers are naturally pre-eminent, being quintessential immateriality. Unlike those of other men, theirs have no dross to discard; the philosophic spirit is as pure as gold or diamonds or the stars, and like them so much of an integral whole as to be invulnerable to dissolution.

In every sense, therefore, the sun is at the centre of Cyrano's universe. It is tempting to see here a system that merely transposes the essentials of Christian theology, substituting the Sun for Heaven but otherwise arriving at similar conclusions about the noble soul and the impure body. Such temptations are to be rejected. For all its apparent indissolubility, even the sun belongs to a universe in endless flux. The point is clearly made early in Le Soleil during Cyrano's flight. Although the sun's purity saves him from being burnt up, he realises as he mounts in the heavens that there is no reason why that heavenly body should be exempt from the same laws of decay that have already applied to the planets in the solar system, formerly perhaps suns in their own right but now obliged to turn around the one remaining world with heat and energy enough to hold them in orbit. The sunspots appear to be constantly getting larger. Do they represent a crust on the sun's surface from which the light is disappearing? Will the whole sun become one day ‘un globe opaque comme la Terre?’ (p. 447).

Cyrano does not labour the point, preferring instead to dwell on the decadence of the earth as compared with its former state. Doubtless, for someone whose adoration of the sun verges on the idolatrous, such thoughts would have been most painful. But the reference, fleeting though it is, is quite explicit, and it illuminates a fundamental difference between the spiritual idealists and Cyrano. For our author is, as the remark itself helps to indicate, a thoroughgoing materialist.

When the demon tells Cyrano that he and his kind change bodies from time to time, Cyrano is prompted to enquire whether ‘ils étaient des corps comme nous’. The demon's answer is unequivocally in the affirmative—provided one does not fall into the vulgar error of earthmen in thinking that a body has necessarily to be tangible: ‘au reste, il n'y avait rien en la nature qui ne fût matériel’ (p. 379). In other words, we must not assume, when we hear talk of mysterious changes in nature, that they are due to miraculous happenings of a wholly spiritual kind. Spirit is always a manifestation of the physical world. The first of the two philosophers Cyrano meets on the moon demonstrates that personal temperament has a material basis. The ‘bilieux’ is more sensitive than the ‘flegmatique’ because he is

animé en bien plus de parties, et l'âme n'étant que l'action de ces petites bêtes, il est capable de sentir en tous les endroits où ce bétail se remue, là où le flegmatique n'[est] pas assez chaud pour faire agir qu'en peu d'endroits.

(p. 406)

The second philosopher gives the same materialist account of the emotions and the senses. There is nothing, he says, that cannot easily be explained by ‘les petits corps’. The ‘premiers et indivisibles atomes font un cercle sur qui roulent sans difficulté les difficultés les plus embarrassantes de la physique’ (p. 410).

These explanations are extended further in Le Soleil. As we have seen, the sunspot had once known a flood just like the Biblical one, but for which there were purely physical causes. Inchoate matter, a sort of primeval ooze, had been changed by the heat of the sun's rays, as dissimilar properties had been separated, the compact and the fluid each rendered more so. From this mass of heat had come a perspiration, none other than the Great Flood. There followed the separation of sea and land. The latter, baked three times over by the sun, gave birth to man. The first ‘coction’ had given him the vegetative capacity to grow, the second the capacity to act, the third the capacity to reason. All is linked in nature. Cyrano is able to confirm this thesis by observation. He sees the earth in labour, ready to bring forth a brother of the little man who has been explaining all this to him.

It is essential, then, to refute the belief of Descartes and others that the universe is a plenum without any empty space anywhere. The Spaniard whom Cyrano meets at the lunar Court insists upon this: ‘j'ose bien dire que s'il n'y avait point de vide, il n'y aurait point de mouvement’ (p. 387). Otherwise, the slightest movement by a flea's little toe would, by piling up each bit of air in front of it, eventually create ‘une bosse’ somewhere beyond the world! The universe of L'Autre Monde cannot allow of the perfectly ordered regularity of Descartes's cosmos, moving by unvarying laws. Such a world takes no account of the energy, the imagination, the creativity, which must come from within matter, and not be imparted simply by some Supreme Being from outside. Heat engenders movement; and movement requires a void. Such is the dynamic quality of the world that spontaneous generation is entirely credible. Water can engender fish, because it contains both fire and salt, which go to make up part of the substance of every organic body.

Like many another writer in his own century and indeed during the following one, Cyrano de Bergerac is obliged to speculate, through lack of the necessary facilities for scientific research, on possibilities which have not always been borne out by scholarly observation. But that should not negate his brilliant intuition of the extent to which the universe is creatively active. It is true that, as Madeleine Alcover suggests (5, p.89), the author moves from a greater emphasis on mechanist materialism in La Lune to a more vitalist interpretation in Le Soleil. In the former, he still gives a place to the traditional notion, dating back to Lucretius, that our world has come about by chance. Given an infinite number of throws of the dice, as the second professor makes clear, it was impossible that a number of ordered objects should not make their appearance in due course. In Le Soleil, by contrast, the narrative builds up to the sublime purity of the disembodied philosophers. But the thread that runs through the two works is consistent. The random happenings in the universe produce eventually, for example, a flower or a man because they operate upon a mass of matter that is not inert but potentially self-creative as a consequence of the fire within it. Likewise, even the solar philosophers are not immortal. There comes at last a time when the creature breaks up into particles ‘semblables à de la cendre rouge’ (p. 499). We witness such a death. The dying philosopher has amassed in his head image upon image to such an extent that his brain is congested and can take no more: ‘Cette façon de mourir est celle des grands génies, et cela s'appelle crever d'esprit’ (p. 500). For although these images are very small, ‘elles sont corporelles, et capables par conséquent de remplir un grand lieu, quand elles sont fort nombreuses’ (ibid.). The same phenomenon is true of communication between the philosophers. As their bodies are transparent, their expressions of love or hatred or meditation are visible, hence directly comprehensible by others. To every mental activity there is an underlying physical structure.

Throughout all nature pulsates a force. It pulsates blindly. As the second professor explains, the river which turns the mill that grinds the grain does not know that it is doing it, but that is irrelevant to the result. The universe is not just a composite of passive atoms. Though atoms are the irreducible microcosms in this macrocosm, they combine to produce an animated, malleable series of forms, capable of infinite numbers of changes yet tending towards a greater order and perfection. Sensation and sensibility pervade all matter, even the apparently most inert forms of it, based on the ubiquitous principle of heat. But heat is fire, which is wholly material. This cosmic substance, everywhere and forever the same, endlessly renews itself through its total plasticity.

It is a picture far removed from the ordered clockwork of the Newtonian universe with its watchmaker God. There could not possibly be a proof of God by the argument of design in Cyrano de Bergerac's Monde, for there is no design. Yet this universe, though it belittles man, challenges his imagination. It is up to us to sound out Nature, explore all its ways however mysterious, without settling for the lazy answers of miracle or religion. The cosmos announced by Cyrano is disconcerting; it is also endlessly fascinating, powerfully exciting. What may seem to be aspects of the occult or magical turn out, when properly examined, to be but more obscure instances of the universal dynamic principle. The infinite universe with its plurality of worlds is a matter for delight at the liberating expanses opened up. Truth must often be intuited, for the state of knowledge is still rudimentary. But the way forward is by observation along properly scientific lines. Cyrano's flights to sun and moon are not achieved by some sort of irrational levitation but through carefully described technical skills.

What conclusions, then, emerge for human conduct? The author's stance throughout is to reject all forms of dogmatism. Indeed, we have yet to consider how far even the various authoritative figures encountered by Cyrano can be taken at face value. A message of sorts may perhaps be discerned in the demon's words when he indicates his own differences with the young host's more radical opinions. Come back for support, he says to Cyrano, if the latter is shaken or scandalised in his beliefs by the host; but do not break off talking to his disputant: ‘Songez à librement vivre’ (p. 413).

It is a counsel of openness, tolerance, pursuit of knowledge and debate, an opposition to restraint; it exhorts to a naturalist way of life. This applies particularly to moral matters. The host's son rejects outright the notion that virginity is an honourable state: ‘cet honneur n'est qu'une fumée’ (p. 401). If God had wanted men to appear in the world through other means than sexual propagation, why did He not cause us to be born in the May dew like the mushrooms? God does not create eunuchs except by accident, He does not castrate monks. If He had thought sexual organs to be prejudicial to our salvation, He would have commanded them to be cut off: ‘Mais ce sont des visions trop ridicules’. No part of our body is more holy or more accursed than any other. The whole of our physical, biological nature is thereby rehabilitated. The demon's reply to these points is totally speculative and not entirely convincing:

Il est vrai qu'il [Dieu] nous a défendu l'excès de ce plaisir, mais que savez-vous s'il ne l'a point ainsi voulu afin que les difficultés que nous trouverions à combattre cette passion nous fît mériter la gloire qu'il nous prépare? Mais que savez-vous si ce n'a point été pour aiguiser l'appétit par la défense? Mais que savez-vous s'il ne prévoyait point qu'abandonnant la jeunesse aux impétuosités de la chair, le coït trop fréquent énerverait leur semence et marquerait la fin du monde aux arrières-neveux du premier homme? Mais que savez-vous s'il ne voulut point empêcher que la fertilité de la terre ne manquât aux besoins de tant d'affamés? Enfin que savez-vous s'il ne l'a point voulu faire contre toute apparence de raison afin de récompenser justement ceux qui, contre toute apparence de raison, se seront fiés en sa parole?

(p. 402)

Cyrano goes on to say that this reply did not satisfy the young host, who shook his head two or three times; and thereupon the debate ends inconclusively. But the demon's assertions are of themselves increasingly self-deflating. The repetition in the last sentence of the self-damning phrase for a rational debater, ‘contre toute apparence de raison’, serves only to enhance the ineffectuality of the demon's whole argument. The repeated phrase ‘que savez-vous’ testifies to a purely hypothetical approach, based on progressively more shaky foundations. Perhaps it is all for our greater glory (an argument which has already been anticipated by the host, who cannot see the point of any such glory). Perhaps it is to whet our appetite; perhaps the human race would otherwise have exhausted itself; perhaps there would have been starvation. But (although the final point has grown more impressive in more recent times since the threat of over-population has become a reality) all these arguments fail to answer the question as to why a providential God should have needed to arrange the world that way. Finally, the concluding sentence, with its totally fideist approach (placing faith above and indeed in opposition to all reason) and somewhat desperate repetitions, seems admirably devised by the author as a means for the demon's argument to annihilate all claims to have itself taken seriously as a rational contribution to the question of sexual morality. There is no need for the young host to do anything except shake his head; the demon's opinions are not deserving of a serious refutation.

Even so, the debate is left open-ended, with no explicit conclusions drawn. So too is it throughout both books. Many arguments are propounded of a radical nature, but it is left to the reader to evaluate them. In the debate between demon and host, as generally elsewhere, the author does not intervene directly to provide a reliable point of view.

At the end of La Lune, the increasingly subversive ideas of the young man incite a reaction in Cyrano: ‘Ces opinions diaboliques et ridicules me firent naître un frémissement par tout le corps’ (p. 422). Instead of arguing with the young host, he chooses to scrutinise him more attentively, and suddenly notices what he had not seen before: ‘ses yeux étaient petits et enfoncés, le teint basané, la bouche grande, le menton velu, les ongles noirs’. But, as Cyrano respects and even likes him, he replaces argument by angry imprecations: a strange piece of logic! This exchange is interrupted by the arrival of a devil to bear the young man off to Hell. However, this parody of the just dénouement in which vice receives its true deserts is no more a refutation of the condemned man's arguments than the rather similar ending of Molière's Dom Juan represents a belittling of the hero's courage and independence of spirit. Nor can the final lines of La Lune be taken at face value, when Cyrano expresses gratitude that the impious are banished to the moon, out of reach of the Gospel (because God knew that they would abuse it) and are therefore the more worthy of a harsher punishment. The general effect of La Lune is in fact made clear at the beginning of Le Soleil, when we learn that the former work has been condemned by the good readers of Toulouse and denounced by its Parlement. Le Soleil, for its part, is just as difficult to evaluate, since it ends before the awaited moment at which Descartes would defend his views on the void against Cyrano's attacks.

It is therefore clearly not the author's aim to convince us simply of a particular set of beliefs. Rather, he subverts conventional views of the world, the origins of our cosmos, the nature of man, the existence of God, the function and destiny of the human race. To all these questions no answer may be found in religion. As has been pointed out by various commentators, there is no conventional religious sense in Cyrano de Bergerac's work. Even when the hero momentarily comes close to something like adoration in his attitude towards the sun, it is sharply curbed by an awareness that the sun, like every other body in the universe except the totality of matter itself, is finite and mortal. Any temptation towards a religion of Nature is firmly resisted. The only hope for man lies within himself, in his imagination, in his capacity to know and to profit by his knowledge. But that knowledge must be tempered by a sense of relativity, which applies to all things. There are no certain answers.

Before leaving this discussion of the ideas expressed in L'Autre Monde, it is worth noting what does not interest the author as much as what does. His mind, particularly curious about philosophical questions, takes little account of social or political matters. As the early pages in Le Soleil show, there seem to be just two classes in society: the enlightened aristocracy, like Colignac and Cussan, with whom he consorts, and the stupid majority, be they priests, pedants or venal gaolers. Nothing can be hoped for from the common run of mankind. Nor will betterment come from the institution of any particular system of government. The solar birds, it is true, live in a republican régime where kings are weak and elected for very brief terms. But, as Campanella informs Cyrano, the sun ‘est divisé en Royaumes, Républiques, Etats et Principautés, comme la Terre’ (p. 492). Even in this best of possible worlds there is room for diversity of political institutions. What matters is the rejection of arbitrary oppression such as exists in Toulouse. For this reason, the reversal of roles whereby solar parents are punished by their sons seems more significant as a lesson about unquestioning filial obedience than as a serious proposal for social reform. There is no Utopia on sun or moon, no outline of an ideal city. It has been pointed out that work plays no part in these societies (10, p. 15). If a particular community has achieved delights of refinement, such as on the moon where poetry acts as currency and larks fall to the ground already cooked, it is a completed world. No more striving or effort towards greater justice is called for. The sense of political evolution has little meaning for Cyrano de Bergerac.

The moral responses are likewise limited. Though he pays due regard to the concept of philosophic integrity, the author does not dwell much on treachery or lying. The miseries of Cyrano's life in Toulouse, subject to vindictive assault and imprisonment, constitute a significant exception, for this is the only episode in either book that treats everyday life on this earth. By comparison, Cyrano's stay in Canada is but one more philosophical dialogue. Gentleness of feeling, too, plays little part. The author can evoke sympathy for the cut cabbage, but the idea is necessarily abstract and in any case undermined by its apparent absurdity. Man is roundly abused for his treatment of the animals, but the accent is placed on denunciation of human brutality rather than on winning sympathy for the victims, who by and large are as uncharitable in return. Kindness towards one's fellow-men is conspicuous by its absence. The people encountered are, except for Colignac and Cussan (once again, significantly earth-bound), two-dimensional caricatures or talking heads, not autonomous beings of flesh and blood. Cyrano's Monde does not set out to praise virtue but to attack human folly and aggressiveness and to remind us of our pathetic unworthiness, as also to show us where true wisdom may be found. The work creates a natural aristocracy, the thinkers who rise above normal mediocrity. In their world the author feels himself at home.

Note

1. Cf. La Mettrie's similar affirmation a hundred years later: ‘ayant fait, sans voir, des yeux qui voient, elle [la nature] a fait sans penser une machine qui pense’, Système d'Epicure (1750), Sec. XXVII, p. 14. The common inspiration for both authors is Lucretius.