SOURCE: Introduction to Cyrano de Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun, translated by Richard Aldington, George Routledge & Sons, 1923, pp. 1-46.

[In the following essay, Aldington attempts to distinguish between myth and fact in regard to Cyrano's life and career.]

I. THE LEGEND OF CYRANO

The legend of Cyrano de Bergerac began, one might say, during his life; but it was strongly founded by his friend Henry Le Bret who edited The Voyage to the Moon with an introduction, in 1657, two years after Cyrano's death. The ‘Préface’ of Le Bret is one of the chief sources of information about Cyrano. It is no discredit to Le Bret that he drew as favourable a portrait of his friend as he could, but we cannot accept literally everything he says and we are forced to read between the lines of his panegyric. Le Bret is largely responsible for the moral legend of Cyrano. He says:

In fine, Reader, he always passed for a man of singular rare wit; to which he added such good fortune on the side of the senses that he always controlled them as he willed; in so much that he rarely drank wine because (said he) excess of drink brutalizes, and as much care is needed with it as with arsenic (with this he was wont to compare it) for everything is to be feared from this poison, whatever care is used; even if nothing were to be dreaded but what the vulgar call qui pro quo, which makes it always dangerous. He was no less moderate in his eating, from which he banished ragoûts as much as he could in the belief that the simplest and least complicated living is the best; which he supported by the example of modern men, who live so short a time compared with those of the earliest ages, who appear to have lived so long because of the simplicity of their food.

He added to these two qualities so great a restraint towards the fair sex that it may be said he never departed from the respect owed it by ours; and with all this he had so great an aversion from self-interest that he could never imagine what it was to possess private property, his own belonging less to him than to such of his acquaintance as needed it. And so Heaven, which is not unmindful, willed that among the large number of friends he had during his life some should love him until death and a few even beyond death.¹

It will be seen later that many of these virtues were probably necessities arising from an unheroic cause; but this moral character given by Le Bret was very useful to the 19th-century builders of the Cyrano legend.

Other 17th-century writers give a very different impression of Cyrano de Bergerac: where Le Bret saw a noble, almost austere genius, they went to the opposite extreme and saw a madman. An anecdote in the Historiettes of Tallemant des Réaux gives us another Cyrano:

A madman named Cyrano wrote a play called The Death of Agrippina where Sejanus says horrible things against the Gods. The play was pure balderdash (un vray galimathias).² Sercy, who published it, told Boisrobert that he sold out the edition in a twinkling. “You surprise me”, said Boisrobert. “Ah, Monsieur”, replied the bookseller, “it has such splendid impieties”.³

The implication that the success of the play was due to its “impieties” is repeated in an anecdote of the Menagiana quoted by Lacroix, to the following effect: When the pious people heard there were impieties in The Death of Agrippina, they went prepared to hiss it; they passed over in silence all the tirades against the Gods which had caused the rumour, but when Sejanus said:

Frappons, voilà l'hostie,⁴

they interrupted the actor with whistling, booing and shouts of:

Ah! the rascal! Ah! The atheist! Hear how he speaks of the holy sacrament!

I cannot find this anecdote in my own copy of the Menagiana, but since my edition is 1693 and Lacroix quotes that of 1715, I presume his is an addition. In my edition I find another anecdote of Cyrano which I give here both for its rarity and because it shows 17th-century contempt for Cyrano at its most virulent:

What wretched works are those of Cyrano de Bergerac! He studied at the College de Beauvais in the time of Principal Grangier. They say he was still in his “rhetoric” when he wrote The Pedant Outwitted against his head-master. There are a few passable things in this play but all the rest is very flat. When he wrote his Voyage to the Moon I think he had one quarter of the moon in his head. The first public sign he gave of his madness was to go to mass in the morning in trunk hose and a night cap without his doublet. He had not one sou when he fell ill of the disease from which he died and if M. de Sainte-Marthe had not charitably supplied all his necessities he would have died in the poor-house.⁵

More 17th-century anecdotes of Cyrano will be found in the Life; those cited will at least show the early tendency to attach anecdotes to him and the curious conflict of contemporary opinion. During the second half of the 17th century Cyrano remained popular and his works were frequently reprinted. The 18th century saw a great decline in reputation and in editions; Voltaire repeated the accusation: “A madman!” No edition of Cyrano's works appeared in Paris between 1699 and 1855; the last of them before the revival of the 19th century was the Amsterdam edition of 1761. For a century there was no edition of Cyrano. He dropped out of sight almost entirely; but in the 19th century he was destined to be revived as an increasingly legendary figure, culminating in the heroic apotheosis of Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac.

Strangely enough the revival began in England in 1820 with an article in the Retrospective Review.⁶ This article shows some acquaintance with Cyrano's originals as well as with the translation reviewed. The anonymous writer says:

Cyrano de Bergerac is a marvellously strange writer—his character, too, was out of the common way. His chief passion appears to have been duelling; and, from the numerous affairs of honour in which he was concerned in a very short life and the bravery he displayed on those occasions, he acquired the cognomen of “The Intrepid”. His friend Le Bret says he was engaged in no less than one hundred duels for his friends, and not one on his own account. Others however say, that, happening to have a nose somewhat awry, whoever was so unfortunate or so rash as to laugh at it, was sure to be called upon to answer its intrepid owner in the field. But however this may be, it is indisputable that Cyrano was a distinguished monomachist and a most eccentric writer.⁷

Seventeen years later that amiable man of letters, Charles Nodier, resuscitated Cyrano in his Bonaventure Desperiers et Cyrano de Bergerac. Before this Nodier had incidentally defended Cyrano in his Bibliographie des Fous:

As to this book (The Voyage to the Moon), which he wrote when he was already mad (according to Voltaire), would you not be astonished if you were told that it contained more profound perceptions, more ingenious foresight, more anticipations in that science whose confused elements Descartes scarcely sorted out, than the large volume written by Voltaire under the supervision of the Marquis du Châtelet? Cyrano used his genius like a hot-head, but there is nothing in it which resembles a madman.⁸

Nodier is responsible for that portion of the Cyrano legend which makes him an innovator, plagiarized from, and persecuted to an early grave.

It seems that a man who opened up so many paths to talent and who went so far in all the paths he opened, ought to have left a name in any literature. …

There was once a wooden horse which bore in its flanks all the conquerors of Ilion, yet had no part in the triumph. This begins like a fairy-tale … and yet it is true.

Poor wooden horse! Poor Cyrano!⁹

But, if Charles Nodier carried on the legend, he did little more than open the way for Theophile Gautier, whose famous Grotesque is filled with every conceivable error of fact and yet is obviously one of Rostand's chief sources. Les Grotesques appeared in 1844 and contained ten pseudo-biographical sketches of “romantic” personalities in French literature chiefly of the 17th century. The book itself is an interesting by-product of the romantic movement, but here we are only concerned with the sixth sketch, Cyrano de Bergerac. This opens with a fantastic divagation upon noses, perhaps the most exaggerated development of the legendary Cyranesque appendage. If the reader will examine Cyrano's portraits, without prejudice and with particular attention to the nose, he will scarcely be prepared for this outburst:

This incredible nose is settled in a three-quarter face [portrait], the smaller side of which it covers entirely; it forms in the middle a mountain which in my opinion must be the highest mountain in the world after the Himalayas; then it descends rapidly towards the mouth, which it largely obumbrates, like a tapir's snout or the rostrum of a bird of prey; at the extremity it is divided by a line very similar to, though more pronounced than, the furrow which cuts the cherry lip of Anne of Austria, the white queen with the long ivory hands. This makes two distinct noses in one face, which is more than custom allows, … the portraits of Saint Vincent de Paul and the deacon Paris will show you the best characterized types of this sort of structure; but Cyrano's nose is less doughy, less puffy in contour; it has more bones and cartilage, more flats and high-lights, it is more heroic.

We then learn that Cyrano was a wonderful duellist, that he revenged any insult to his nose with a challenge; after more disquisition on noses we read that Cyrano was “born in 1620, in the castle of Bergerac, in Périgord”,¹⁰ that he was unable to endure the pedantry of his schoolmaster and so that good country gentleman, his father, allowed him to go to Paris, where at eighteen he threw himself into fashionable life with the greatest success. Then comes a highly-coloured picture of the contrast between life in Paris in 1638 and the Bergerac family in their “tranquil and discreet house, sober and cold, well ordered and silent, almost always half-asleep in the shadow of its pallid walnut trees between the church and the cemetery.” This is followed by a defence of Cyrano against the charge of atheism with a quotation from The Death of Agrippina. Next we hear that this Gascon gentleman joined the Gascon company of guards with Le Bret and of his numerous prowesses with the sword, and this slides into a description of Cyrano's early slashing style, with quotations from The Pedant Outwitted and the story of the actor whom Cyrano forbade to play. This is followed by several pages of excited panegyric, paraphrased from Le Bret; we get Cyrano's wounds, his love of study, his disinterestedness, his love of freedom and scorn of serving les grands, his subsequent service with the duc d'Arpajon, the falling timber on his head and his death; then we hear of his simple habits, his brilliant friendships and his study under Gassendi. The essay ends with several pages, dealing with Molière's famous plagiarism from The Pedant Outwitted and containing a most exaggerated account of Cyrano's writings, extremely loose in expression, showing that Gautier can have had but a superficial acquaintance with Cyrano's books.

If this essay of Gautier's were meant as biography and criticism, one can only say that it is likely to be misleading; if as fiction, that the form is not well chosen. Nevertheless, this and Nodier's article stimulated curiosity in Cyrano sufficiently to cause his works to be reprinted in 1855. Lacroix in 1858 issued another edition and wrote an enthusiastic preface (from the point of view of an ardent free-thinker), making Cyrano a great predecessor of the 18th-century philosophes and adding more legend.

After this, the legend of Cyrano smouldered for some forty years and then broke out in a final conflagration in 1897, with Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. Everything picturesque which fancy and rumour had attached to the name of Cyrano during the centuries was taken up by Rostand, exaggerated, idealised almost to infinity—and the world believed, and doubtless still believes, that this is the “real” Cyrano de Bergerac. Strangely, Rostand apparently shared this illusion; for a French savant, M. Emile Magne, wrote a pamphlet pointing out some of Rostand's worst errors, and Rostand replied with a letter, claiming that his play was historically correct.

Rostand's play is a pleasing, if belated, specimen of the French romantic drama; its dramatic quality is undeniable, its appeal to the sentiments irresistible, its verse skilfully handled; it is characteristically, delightfully, absurdly French; it deserved its popularity. A man who cannot enjoy Rostand's Cyrano has taste too fastidious for his own good. But when he has watched the heroic lover of Roxanne fight his duels to the accompaniment of a ballade, promenade his huge nose about the stage, exhibit the remarkable delicacy of his sentiments and finally die a Gascon death—“mon Panache!”—this imaginary spectator must not tell us that this is “the real” Cyrano de Bergerac. It is an amusing Cyrano one would prefer not to lose; but Rostand's invention has nothing to do with the man who wrote the tragedy of The Death of Agrippina and The Voyages to the Sun and Moon; this is not the young man who enlisted in M. de Casteljaloux's company of guards; this is not the follower of Gassendi and Rohault; and this delicate lover is—alas!—not that Savinien de Cyrano, self-styled de Bergerac, who died miserably in the prime of his age not so much from the effects of the falling piece of timber as probably of venereal disease.

II. THE LIFE OF CYRANO DE BERGERAC

The family of Cyrano was not Gascon and was not noble. The first Cyrano of whom anything was known in France is Savinien I de Cyrano, of Sardinian origin, bourgeois of Paris and a merchant of fish. Doubtless the prejudice of noble birth is antiquated, yet when one has been brought up on Rostand's Cyrano the discovery is a shock, rather like finding that Sir Philip Sidney's grandfather was a London fishmonger. But this is only the first of the disagreeable surprises modern investigators prepare for us.

This Savinien, grandfather of the poet, became notary and ‘secrétaire du Roy’ in 1571. He was wealthy, he owned a large house in the rue des Prouvaires, various annuities, the fiefs of Boiboisseaux, Mauvières, and Bergerac, the last two bought in 1582. These purchases represent a familiar scene in the eternal social comedy of the rise and fall of families; the genuine old de Bergerac family had disappeared but their memory lingered on and no member of the Cyrano family ventured to call himself de Bergerac at Bergerac. Indeed the poet was the only member of the family who used the name either during the fifty-four years they possessed the fief or afterwards. In any case this Bergerac is not the Dordogne or Gascon Bergerac but a little estate not very far from Paris in the modern department of Seine et Oise.¹¹ So much for the noble Gascon of Gautier and Rostand.

This Savinien I de Cyrano married Anne Le Maire; their eldest son, Abel I de Cyrano, ‘avocat au Parlement de Paris,’ married Espérance Bellenger on the third of September 1612.¹² An inventory of their goods shows that Cyrano's father was an educated man who read Greek, Latin, and Italian. Abel de Cyrano had six children; the eldest surviving son was Savinien II, the poet, baptised on the sixth of March 1619 in Paris.

In 1622 Abel de Cyrano left Paris for his house at Mauvières, where young Savinien de Cyrano remained “until he was old enough to read”. He was then sent to a small private school kept by a country parson, where he met his lifelong friend and posthumous panegyrist, Henry Le Bret. Savinien did not like his tutor; and this is not the first or the last time in history when there has existed a mutual hatred between a pert boy of talent and some plodding pedagogue. The boy complained so continually to his father that he was taken away from the parson and sent to the Collège de Beauvais in Paris.

These meagre details are all we know positively of Cyrano's childhood except that his godmother left him six hundred livres in 1628. How much of the rebelliousness of his temper in later years was due to hatred of this pedagogical parson is a matter of pure conjecture, but Cyrano's dislike of pedants and priests might plausibly be attributed at least in part to this man's clumsy usage. We may also surmise that access to his father's extensive library gave him that precocity for which he was remarkable, and that the years of childhood spent at Mauvières created in him a genuine love of nature. Numerous passages might be quoted from his writings to show that he really liked out-of-doors life, enjoyed the beauty of the country, and felt that kinship with wild living things—animals, birds, plants—which is supposed to be a wholly modern sentiment. This sentiment may be seen in the Letters, expressed with a good deal of affectation; but unmistakably in those pages of The Voyage to the Sun which describe the talking birds and trees.

The head-master of Beauvais was at that time Jean Grangier, described by some as an excellent pedagogue, by others as brutal, superstitious, violent, and vicious. Apparently he was one of those pedagogues who, in Ben Jonson's words, “swept their livings from the posteriors of little children”; and therefore was very unpopular with Cyrano, who made him the hero of The Pedant Outwitted. Flogging will always drive a sensitive and high-spirited boy to revolt; and when we find a truculent and sometimes offensive mood of revolt a main feature of Cyrano's work, we should remember before condemning him that a large portion of his childhood was passed under the birch of two bigoted pedants.

Cyrano left Beauvais in 1637, when he was eighteen. In the preceding year Abel de Cyrano had sold the fiefs of Mauvières, and Bergerac and had returned to Paris. This sale of land only fifty-four years after the purchase by the first Savinien de Cyrano shows how rapidly the affairs of the family declined financially. It would be interesting to know more of Cyrano's life in the period between his leaving school and joining the guards. Le Bret tells us that “at the age when nature is most easily corrupted”, and when Cyrano “had liberty to do as he chose”, he (Le Bret) stopped him “on a dangerous incline”. It will easily be conjectured that the change from a flogging school to complete liberty in the Paris of 1637 would not incline a precocious youth to the monastic virtues. Many fantastic pictures of Paris under Louis XIII have been drawn by novelists and essayists; whether it were quite as picturesque as they make out may be doubted, but that its taverns were filled with riot, excitement and debauch is certain; and Cyrano frequented the taverns. The famous Pomme de Pin, the Croix de Lorraine, the Boisselière, the Pressoir d'Or, and a dozen other taverns were crowded with heterogeneous sets of courtiers, gentlemen, gossips, poets, atheists, duellists, rogues of all sorts, talking, laughing, drinking, writing, whoring, gambling and brawling. From Gaston d'Orléans, the King's brother, downwards, the greater part of the nobility, gentry and the learned at some time of their lives frequented these commodious taverns, rubbed shoulders with knaves and bawds and poets and held high carouse.

Morbieu! comme il pleut là dehors!
Faisons pleuvoir dans nostre corps
Du vin, tu l'entens sans le dire,
Et c'est là le vray mot pour rire;
Chantons, rions, menons du bruit,
Beuvons ici toute la nuit,
Tant que demain la belle Aurore
Nous trouve tous à table encore.(13)

Into that society of revellers, unscrupulous, heedless, coarse, irreligious, but brave, witty, chivalrous, talented and merry, came a young man of eighteen, the owner of a curious nose “shaped like a parrot's beak”, talented, witty and brave himself, already a brilliant swordsman, scatter-brained, vain with all the vanity of young men in Latin countries, eager for knowledge but filled with hatred for the theology and pedantry of his early masters. Imagine the London of James the First's reign so vividly and delightfully sketched in The Fortunes of Nigel, adding to it that freedom of speech, morals and speculation which Scott largely left out; transfer it to the turbulent Paris of 1637 and throw into that milieu not a sober Scotch laird, but a hot-headed young Frenchman. Is it not almost hypocritical to expect that he would do anything different from what he apparently did do: Drink, gamble, blaspheme, whore, talk atheism, play mad pranks and slit men's throats in duels?

From this wild cabaret life Cyrano was rescued by Le Bret just about the time when Abel de Cyrano threatened seriously to cut off supplies. At nineteen Cyrano entered the company of guards commanded by the “triple Gascon”, M. de Carbon de Casteljaloux.

Cyrano de Bergerac was a good soldier, but that does not mean he was free from the ordinary vices of soldiers. If the “dangerous incline” from which Le Bret rescued his friend was gambling, he chose a curious remedy; for gambling is inevitably one means of dispelling the crushing ennui of military life. Another, almost universal, military amusement is drinking; one would not expect to find teetotallers among the Gascon guard. It seems probable that the “dangerous incline” was atheism or a serious love affair; for the military life is dulling to the affections and fatal to thought. Certainly, the mess and guard-room of M. de Carbon de Casteljaloux's company would not greatly differ from a noisy cabaret. One hardly sees what moral advantages were gained by the change, except that military discipline and comradeship probably steadied Cyrano if they failed to correct the extravagance of his character and behaviour. Casteljaloux's company consisted almost entirely of Gascons, and this fact has helped to propagate the myth of Cyrano's noble birth; and doubtless he assumed the Gascon-sounding name of de Bergerac to increase the illusion. But he must have possessed some other merit than that of an assumed name to enable him to enter the guards; this was of course his swordsmanship.

Duelling in France in the first half of the 17th century was more than a fashionable mania, it was a real danger to the state. The fashion was at its height in the reigns of Henry IV and Louis XIII. During eight years of the former reign no less than two thousand gentlemen lost their lives in duels. Even the great Cardinal Richelieu only succeeded in diminishing, not in crushing the habit. The duelling in Rostand's Cyrano is the most accurate part of the play; indeed it would be difficult to exaggerate the fantastic nature of these duels. Men fought for the merest trifles; not so much for honour as for the love of fighting, of prestige and notoriety. Successful duelling was then a sure means to those commonly desired ends. The thirst for “monomachy” was so ardent that the seconds were not content to regulate the combat but must needs take part in it; so that a girl's ribbon might be the pretext for six men to pull out their rapiers in mortal combat, with the result perhaps of several wounds and more than one death. Cyrano de Bergerac was a brilliant swordsman, a talent which gave him a position comparable to that of an aeroplane “ace” during the European war. The stories told of his duelling sound fabulous and are probably exaggerated, but certainly have a foundation in fact. Le Bret tells us:

Duels, which at that time seemed the unique and most rapid means of becoming known, in a few days rendered him so famous that the Gascons, who composed nearly the whole company, considered him the demon of courage and credited him with as many duels as he had been with them days.

The most remarkable thing about these duels, and a point very much in Cyrano's favour, was that he fought over a hundred as second to other men and not on his own account. He was no Bobadil. Brun tries to argue that Cyrano must have fought on his own account, but even M. Lachèvre, who is hostile to Cyrano, denies it. Moreover, we have Cyrano's own declaration: “I have been everybody's second.”

Casteljaloux's company was ordered for active service in 1639. The company was besieged in Mouzon by the Croats of the Imperial Army. Cyrano has described part of the siege in the twenty-fourth of his Lettres Diverses. The garrison was short of provisions and during one of the numerous sorties Cyrano was shot through the body. He had not recovered when the garrison was relieved by Chatillon on the twenty-first of June 1639. Next year Cyrano was again on active service. He was wounded a second time by a sword-thrust in the throat at the siege of Arras, sometime before the ninth of August 1640. He had served this campaign in Conti's gendarmes.

Two severe wounds in fourteen months are “cooling cards” even to a pseudo-Gascon. Cyrano determined to retire from the service.

“The hardships he suffered during these two sieges,” says Le Bret, “the inconveniences resulting from two severe wounds, the frequent duels forced upon him by his reputation for courage and skill, which compelled him to act as second more than one hundred times (for he never had a quarrel on his own account), the small hope he had of preferment, from the lack of a patron, to whom his free genius was incapable of submitting, and finally his great love of learning, caused him to renounce the occupation of war which demands everything of a man and makes him as much an enemy of literature as literature makes him a lover of peace.”

Cyrano, then, returned to his studies. Hitherto he had been unfortunate in his instructors, but he now made the acquaintance of several scholars and men of letters who had a strong influence on him, whose ideas he adopted and copied in his works. The celebrated Gassendi, who revived the philosophy of Epicurus and opposed both the Aristotelians and Descartes, came to Paris and lectured to a small number of selected students. Niceron makes the unlikely assertion that Cyrano forced his way into this learned society at the sword's point. It is certain that Cyrano sat at Gassendi's feet and picked up from his lectures those fragments of Epicurean physics he afterwards scattered through his works. There most probably he met Molière, Rohault, Bernier, Chapelle and the younger La Mothe Le Vayer. Cyrano was therefore a member of a distinguished literary group which contained one eminent philosopher and a dramatist of supreme genius.

Philosophy and the society of men of letters did not cause Cyrano to abandon his sword. Two documents are extant, dated October 1641, showing Cyrano's arrangements to take lessons in dancing and fencing. It is in these years 1641-43 that he began seriously to write and at the same time performed his most famous feats with the sword.

The battle of the Porte de Nesle, more authentic and even more heroic than the feats of Horatius celebrated by Lord Macaulay, has been related by every writer on Cyrano, from Le Bret to Rostand, from Gautier to M. Emile Magne. What happened, as far as one can make out, was this. A friend of Cyrano's, the Chevalier de Lignières, had been rash enough to banter the conjugal infelicities of a great lord who, sensible of the affront to his person and rank, hired a set of fellows to fall upon Lignières and to crop his ears in the public highway. Lignières heard of this, took refuge with Cyrano and remained with him until night, when they set out together for Lignières's home with Cyrano as escort and two officers of Conti's regiment as witnesses, in the rear. At the Porte de Nesle the bravi were ambushed to catch Lignières on his way to the Faubourg Saint-Germain; Le Bret says there were a hundred of them. In any event there was a crowd. Incredible as it seems, the fact is well attested that Cyrano attacked them all single-handed, killed two, wounded seven and put the rest to flight.¹⁴

The battle of Brioché's monkey is less creditable to Cyrano and far less authentic. The evidence is the unreliable one of an anonymous work, Combat de Cyrano de Bergerac avec le Singe de Broiché, au Bout du Pont-Neuf, almost certainly written by Dassoucy, a friend with whom Cyrano had quarrelled. Dassoucy fled to Italy when the pamphlet was published. The gist of the pamphlet is as follows:

One Brioché exhibited a marionette show near one end of the Pont-Neuf. Among the troup was a live monkey.

Cyrano came along, and some thirty or forty lackeys, waiting for the puppet show, began to hustle him and to make fun of his singular appearance; one of them actually flipped him on the end of his nose. Out came that deadly rapier in a flash, and the intrepid little “fiery whoreson,” rushed at them, driving the whole mob of them before him. Brioché's monkey, “making a leg” for a sou, got in Cyrano's way and the gallant swordsman, not unnaturally mistaking it for one of the rabble, pierced it effectually with his rapier. Brioché brought an action against Cyrano to recover fifty pistoles damages.

Bergerac defended himself like Bergerac, that is, with facetious writings and grotesque jokes. He told the judge he would pay Brioché like a poet, or “with monkey's money” (i.e. laugh at him); that coins were an article of furniture unknown to Phœbus. He vowed he would immortalise the dead beast in an Apollonian epitaph.

It is possible that Dassoucy was merely parodying the battle of the Porte de Nesle; none of the facetious writings referred to is extant; but they may have perished with the elegy Le Bret saw Cyrano writing in the guard-room and the Story of the Spark and Cyrano's Lyric Poems.

The third anecdote attached to this period relates to the actor Mondory or Montfleury, the latter of whom is satirised in Cyrano's letter Against a Fat Man. The 1695 edition of the Menagiana gives the story as follows:

Bergerac was a great sword-clanker. His nose, which was very ugly, was the cause of his killing at least ten people. He quarrelled with Montdory, the comedian, and strictly forbade him to appear on the stage. “I forbid you to appear for a month”, said he. Two days later Bergerac was at the play. Montdory appeared and began to act his part as usual; Bergerac shouted to him from the middle of the pit, with threats if he did not leave, and for fear of worse Montdory retired.¹⁵

The year 1645 in several respects opens a new phase in Cyrano's life. His mother was dead, he began to suffer from poverty—due to gambling it is said—and contracted a disease. There is a mystery about the death of Cyrano de Bergerac and the “maladie” which preceded it. M. Lachèvre has discovered a document showing the payment of four hundred livres to a barber-chirurgeon by Cyrano and, from circumstantial evidence we need not repeat, M. Lachèvre asserts that this was venereal disease. If so, the moral philosopher created by Le Bret disappears as completely as the delicate lover invented by Rostand.

It is a remarkable fact that Cyrano did not make a serious appearance in print until the year before his death, 1654. He wrote earlier and published prefaces and commendatory poems; he scribbled a few pamphlets and libels during the Fronde; but his reputation as a writer during his lifetime must have been based on the circulation of his writings in manuscript. The letters were not published until 1654, but they must have been written much earlier; The Pedant Outwitted does not seem to have been played, and The Voyage to the Moon was circulated in manuscript for some years before it was published.

The fact is we know very little about the last ten years of Cyrano's life. Abel de Cyrano died in January 1648 and the poet's share of the inheritance rescued him at least for a time from the poverty into which he had fallen. In February 1649 there appeared an anti-Mazarin pamphlet in verse, entitled Le Ministre d'Etat Flambé, signed D. B. This was followed by several prose pamphlets directed against Mazarin: Le Gazetier des Interressé, La Sybille Moderne ou l'Oracle du Temps, Le Conseiller fidèle. Some have denied that these were Cyrano's work; others are convinced to the contrary. If he did write them he soon changed his political opinions; for in 1651 he published his pro-Mazarin Contre les Frondeurs. One biographer thinks Cyrano was bribed by Mazarin to change his politics; another biographer thinks that since Cyrano undoubtedly wrote for Mazarin he could never have written against him.

There is a legend that about this time Cyrano visited England, but there is no confirmation of this.

Hitherto Cyrano had been too independent to enter the service of any nobleman. We have noticed his refusal of the offers made him by Marshal Gassion. Subjection to the whims of some wealthy person of note was a misery endured by many authors of the 17th century; Cyrano de Bergerac avoided it as long as he could, but about the end of 1652 he entered the service of the duc d'Arpajon. Saint-Simon in his usual contemptuous way calls this nobleman “Un bonhomme”; he was a good soldier, religious, vain and probably not very intelligent. Under his patronage Cyrano's works were printed in two handsome quartos in 1654. They contained The Death of Agrippina, The Pedant Outwitted, and The Letters. There was a dedication to the duke and a charming sonnet to his daughter. The success of these writings was considerable and their popular vogue lasted at least half a century.

The death of Cyrano de Bergerac is surrounded with mystery. He was only thirty-five when he died. Was this early death the result of a disease, as M. Lachèvre asserts; or was it, as other commentators say, the result of a blow on the head from a falling beam? If he were hit by a piece of timber, was this an accident, or was it revenge? Had Cyrano's very free philosophical speculations anything to do with it? It is impossible to answer these questions definitely; each commentator has replied to them according to his own prejudices.

The accident, if there were an accident, happened early in 1654. For some unknown reason Cyrano was turned out of the Hôtel d'Arpajon about this time. In June 1654 Cyrano was received into the house of M. des Bois Clairs, with whom he remained for fourteen months until a few days before his death. He then begged to be moved to a house at Sannois, belonging to his cousin Pierre de Cyrano, where he died on the 28th of July 1655. He was not buried in the convent of the Filles de la Croix as the reference books say (this was his brother Abel), but in the church of Sannois. He was converted to Christianity on his death-bed, presumably by his sister, who was a nun, and his friend Le Bret, the canon. A document is in existence stating that “Savinien de Cyrano, escuier, sieur de Bergerac,” died a good Christian; it is dated the 28th of July 1655, and signed by the parish priest, who owned the curious name of Cochon. That Cyrano, like most of his contemporaries, yielded to a death-bed repentance is probably true; it is equally true that he spent most of his life as a freethinker.

III. CYRANO'S FRIENDS

Among Cyrano's military friends were two senior officers, M. de Bourgogne (mestre de camp of the Prince de Conti's infantry) and Marshal Gassion. They of course would know him simply as a brave soldier in a company of dare-devils. More intimate soldier friends, of a rank approaching his own, were Cavoye, brother of the celebrated Cavoye killed at Lens; Hector de Brisailles, ensign in the Gendarmes de Son Altesse Royale; Saint Gilles, captain in the same regiment; Chasteaufort, whom Cyrano may have parodied in The Pedant Outwitted. He also knew Le Bret's brother, a captain in Conti's regiment; Duret de Montchenin and de Zeddé “braves de la plus haute classe”, and de Chavagne.

Le Bret also mentions the Comte de Brienne, M. des Billettes, M. de Morlière.

The Comte de Brienne was the son of Louis XIII's minister; he was a secretary of state, then an Oratorian; and he died mad. Gilles Fileau des Billettes, brother of the Abbé de la Chaise, was “one of the most learned men of his day.” Adrien de Morlière was a famous genealogist. Longueville-Gontier, also mentioned by Le Bret, was a “Conseiller au Parlement”. Cyrano appears to have been friendly with the translator, Michel de Marolles, who has recorded in his Mémoires the fact that Cyrano sent him copies of The Death of Agrippina and The Voyage to the Moon.

After these respectable gentlemen we come to a more varied group of Cyrano's friends, most of whom are not mentioned by Le Bret, but who interest us more. Some of them were perhaps picked up in taverns; others he met in the course of his studies; others were congenial men of letters.

Three especially influenced Cyrano in his serious studies, particularly in philosophy and physics, and confirmed his natural tendency towards rationalism and scepticism by furnishing him with the knowledge and arguments he lacked. Chief among these was the celebrated Gassendi, who was born in 1592 and died in the same year as Cyrano, 1655. Gassendi was trained as an Aristotelian, but drew away from the school and followed with special interest the researches of Galileo and Kepler. He opposed Descartes. He is principally remembered for his revival of Epicurus, of the Epicurean physics and morals, and of Lucretius. Three translations of Lucretius were made as a result of his influence, one by Molière, one by Chapelle, one by Dehénault (all three friends of Cyrano) and, remarkably enough, all three of these translations have disappeared. Gassendi exerted a considerable influence over all the intellectual freethinkers of his age, and Cyrano de Bergerac was especially indebted to him. Gassendi's exposition of the Epicurean theory of atoms, his own ideas about “calor vitalis” and “anima mundi”, will be found freely copied in The Voyages; while Gassendi's favourite principle “nihil in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu” made a deep impression upon Cyrano's mind.

Gassendi's lessons in physics were supported in Cyrano's memory by his friendship with Jacques Rohault (1620-75). Rohault was a mathematician, a pupil of Gassendi, but strongly influenced by Descartes. He wrote a treatise on physics which has so much in common with the fragments of Cyrano's treatise and the ideas expressed in The Voyages that at one time Rohault was supposed to have plagiarised from Cyrano. It is now almost conclusively proved that the opposite is true.

It is difficult to say what relations Cyrano had with the elder La Mothe Le Vayer (1583-1672). We know that he met his son at Gassendi's lectures. Old Le Vayer was a famous sceptic and in many ways a remarkable personality. Like many sceptics he lived to be immensely old, was highly respected for his erudition and, though he never seems to have been worried by the clergy, was the reverse of orthodox. His position in 17th-century Paris is interesting; he was one of the very few survivors of the great Humanist movement of the 16th century, and, as such, carried with him an air of enthusiasm, learning and freedom which must have been very stimulating in days when learning had been interrupted by civil disturbances and the stifling influence of the Catholic reaction was increasing.

A learned controversy has shaken a large amount of dust over the “problem” of Molière's relations with Cyrano. It has been denied that Molière studied under Gassendi, that he plagiarized two scenes from Cyrano's Comedy. It seems more probable that both are true.

Jean Dehénault (1611-1682), another literary friend of Cyrano's, was a melancholy sceptic, consistently unsuccessful in life; he wrote a certain amount of verse and a prose piece, which had the honour of being attributed to Saint-Evremond.

Bernier, Chapelle, Lignières, Dassoucy, Tristan l'Hermite, Royer de Prade were also among Cyrano's friends.

François Bernier (?-1688) became a doctor, travelled in the East and is remembered by his still readable Philosophie de Gassendi. Chapelle (1626-1686) wrote a Voyage in collaboration with Bachaumont and furnished Sainte-Beuve with material for a delightful Lundi. François Payot, Chevalier des Lignières (1628-1704), was chiefly concerned in the Porte de Nesle episode. He was a minor poet of the epigrammatic kind; Boileau called him “le poète idiot de Senlis.” There is a book on him by M. Magne. Dassoucy was one of the innumerable burlesque poets of the time, for whom Cyrano wrote a preface and a madrigal; later they quarrelled and libelled each other. Tristan l'Hermite (1601-1655) was “an epicure of the cabarets, a hare-brained duellist, a gambler, a libertin, a beggar”; as a youth he was exiled for killing a man. Cyrano praises him as the greatest man of the age! Finally, Royer de Prade and Henry Le Bret were Cyrano's oldest and most faithful friends. Henry Le Bret was the son of Nicholas Le Bret; born 1617; soldier, lawyer, then priest; canon in 1659. He lived to be ninety-three. De Prade was a historian and tragic poet, known to his friends as “le Corneille Tacite des Français”. Cyrano wrote a preface to the 1650 edition of de Prade's works and the latter wrote a sonnet on The Voyage to the Moon.

IV. THE LIBERTIN QUESTION

To write of Cyrano de Bergerac and not to mention the “libertin question” is to shirk a difficulty. A “libertin” in French means a freethinker in religion, generally but not necessarily, a man of free or even criminal morals. It is particularly applied to a whole mass of sceptical or at any rate non-Christian French writers of the 17th century. To draw an English parallel: Marlowe, Greene in his unregenerate days, Rochester, Sedley, even Wycherley and Hobbes would be libertins; but Hume and Gibbon would be philosophes.

The father of the libertins was Montaigne; great, adorable Montaigne, whose divine commonsense emerges from the churning floods of metaphysical quiddities and the gross clouds of popular errors like a glittering marble rock. Super hanc petram the French libertins founded their temple of incredulity, but from lack of unanimity the edifice remains incomplete. It is the habit of official commentators to insist upon the Stoic element in Montaigne. It is there, because Montaigne had absorbed the wisdom of the Ancients; but one might as legitimately insist upon the Epicurean or the Sceptical aspect of his book. That, at least, is what the libertins did. They took the sceptical wisdom of Montaigne and tempered it with the mirth of Rabelais. Sometimes the wisdom was not very apparent and the mirth was very Rabelaisian. Sometimes the mixture was happy. Molière was a libertin; so were Saint-Evremond and his friend Ninon de L'Enclos and the cardinal de Retz and Théophile and Saint-Amant and Boisrobert and Cyrano and Chapelle and scores more. The degree of “libertinism” runs from the mere sparkle and freedom from cant of Molière and the fastidiousness of Saint-Evremond to the brutal orgies of the “goinfres” and the criminality of Claude le Petit, who was burned for blasphemy, murder and sodomy. Cyrano began towards the brutal end and developed towards the gentler standard.

There are two current theories of libertinism. One is particularly espoused by M. Frédéric Lachèvre, the erudite editor of the Libertins, whose work is indispensable to a correct understanding of this period of French literature. This theory refuses the libertins coherence of thought or any real intellectual importance. It puts aside as “sceptiques” those writers whose polite manners and respectable morals make it difficult to disparage them, and concentrates upon those whose lives show dubious or even criminal episodes. From an immense mass of facts and skilfully arranged historical conjectures this critic argues that the libertins are not to be considered as honourable and talented men seeking truth, but as undisciplined egotists, lacking coherence of thought and seriousness of purpose; who attacked institutions from vanity, who cultivated sedition and irreligion because by proclaiming such ideas they became involved in that stir of publicity for which paltry vanity craves.

The other theory regards the libertins as expressing more or less coherently a great trend of thought in French intellectual life, as the heterodox tradition of France, as an exuberant product of the French critical spirit. This spirit shows itself not in works of formal criticism alone, but in a general temper of the mind, a disposition to examine institutions and ideas critically, a readiness to laugh at what had seemed terrible or oppressive, to jest down tyranny with a bawdy song; a spirit co-existent with French literature, already strong in the 13th century, when England intellectually was a mere Norman province. The chansons de geste and the tales of chivalry are parodied in satirical fabliaux; courteous love is mocked by innumerable voices; the crusades are barely over and the great cathedrals still unfinished when Rutebeuf writes:

Papelart et Béguin
Ont le siècle honni.

We see a Louis IX set off by a Joinville—don Quixote and Sancho Panza 350 years before Cervantes. François Villon follows Charles d'Orléans; Rabelais is the contemporary of Calvin; Racine is followed by Voltaire. The précieux movement is followed by the burlesque; the hard thought of Voltaire by the softness of Bernadin de Saint-Pierre; the Romantics by the Naturalistes. The heterodox tradition from Le Roman de Renart (12th century) and the Fabliaux (13th century) can be traced throughout French literature to Anatole France and Remy de Gourmont. French literature is like a great double stream which constantly winds and branches out and reabsorbs side channels. We can see the 17th-century libertins as an episode in a great intellectual struggle and Cyrano de Bergerac as a minor, but not unimportant, actor, in that episode. In any case Cyrano is not an exception in French literature in spite of a few eccentricities; he is one example of a perfectly recognizable intellectual type and so far from being the complete “original” he is made out to be, he has little to offer which cannot be found in his contemporaries and immediate predecessors.¹⁶

V. THE WORKS OF CYRANO DE BERGERAC

The extant writings of Cyrano de Bergerac are: (1) A few poems, including the libel on Mazarin; (2) Three or four political pamphlets (doubtful); (3) Entretiens Pointus, a set of quibbling jokes; (4) Three sets of Letters; (5) A prose comedy, Le Pédant Joué; (6) A verse tragedy, La Mort d'Agrippine; (7) Les Estats et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil; (8) Traité de Physique, fragmentary.

The first three are unimportant. The best of Cyrano's few short poems is the sonnet to Jacqueline d'Arpajon. The political pamphlets interest the researcher and are not certainly Cyrano's. The Entretiens Pointus, or Merry Conceited Jests are verbal quibbles and jokes, supposedly memories of conversation in the Gassendi group.

With the Letters we come to the first of Cyrano's works of literary value and are at once met with a difficulty which makes the study of Cyrano's work so troublesome. Whenever there exists a MS. of any of his writings the differences between this and all the printed editions before that of Gourmont (1908) is so considerable that in many cases the whole intention of the work is different. Most of the passages omitted in the printed editions are philosophical or satirical arguments or sarcasms directed against the Church and religion and were omitted in the 17th century for obvious reasons. No editions of Cyrano show the MSS. texts prior to 1908; the editions of Gourmont and particularly of Lachèvre have shown us a different Cyrano.

The Cyrano created by Gautier and Rostand was, of course, a chimera; but there was something curious in his work which gave some support to the theory that he was mad or at least very eccentric. He was not mad, he was simply heavily censored. Essential words, sentences, paragraphs, whole pages were omitted; always modifying the meaning, sometimes making it absurd.

These Letters belong to a confused period of French literature, a sort of interregnum between the age of Rabelais and Montaigne and the age of Louis XIV. The literary influences in Cyrano's time were the précieux, the satyriques and the burlesques. The letters of Guez de Balzac (1594-1654) and Voiture (1598-1648) made polite letter-writing fashionable. The libels of the Fronde, the satire of Regnier's disciples, the burlesque of Sorel and Scarron formed, in the first half of the century, the opposition to the Italianated schools of preciosity and politeness—Marini, the Scudérys, Voiture, the Rambouillet salon. Cyrano's Letters are a curious hotch-potch of these conflicting styles. These fifty odd letters are Amorous, Descriptive and Satirical, sometimes at the expense of real persons. Most of them are rhetorical exercises; a few are serious. Nothing could be more creditable to Cyrano than his letter Against Sorcerers. It is a vigorous and well-expressed protest against the stupid belief in sorcery, the grotesque legal proceedings and the barbarous sentences carried out upon nervously hallucinated or innocent people. It is a wonderfully just attack upon ignorance and superstition and contains his famous saying:

Not the name of Aristotle (more learned than I), not that of Plato, nor that of Socrates, shall ever convince me if my judgment is not convinced by reason that what they say is true.

The Love-Letters are made of clever and wholly frigid conceits, which glitter and clink like chains of icicles; nothing could be farther from the language of genuine feeling. The Satirical Letters are abusive and filled with “clenches.” They do not denounce types, they blackguard individuals. The Lettres Diverses are mostly descriptive pieces on themes like the seasons, a lady with red hair, a country house; written in the highly conceited vein then affected by Cyrano. Some of them are vigorous and well-expressed. They are well translated as to style by the anonymous person who published Bergerac's Satyrical Characters in 1658. The first edition of these Letters is dated 1654, but one of them was published as early as 1648; others may have been written earlier. They were probably rewritten before publication and were certainly censored.

Cyrano de Bergerac is the author of a comedy, Le Pédant Joué, written 1645, published 1654, probably never played; and of a tragedy, La Mort d'Agrippine, written in 1646, published 1654, played in 1653 or 1654 and revived for one performance on the 10th November 1872.

These plays alone would provide a theme for a very long essay; but here I must necessarily be brief.

Corneille, Racine, and Molière were not isolated literary phenomena without predecessors and contemporaries; any more than Shakespeare. There is a large pre-Corneille and pre-Molière drama.¹⁷ Du Ryer, Rotrou, Gombaud, Scudéry, Hardy, Théophile de Viau, Boisrobert, are some of the best known dramatists of the thirties and forties of the seventeenth century. Among them was Cyrano de Bergerac. I cannot wholly share the contempt expressed by official French criticism for early French drama, though my acquaintance with it is superficial; I certainly cannot agree with the contemptuous estimates of Cyrano's plays. The fact that the plot of The Pedant Outwitted is taken from Lope de Vega seems very unimportant, when one considers the amazing gusto and energy Cyrano put into his uncouth comedy. Here his curious fustian style of ranting hyperbole serves him admirably; in The Pedant Outwitted bombast, exaggeration and caricature are carried to a superlative degree. Nothing could be more pedantic than Granger, the pedant, or more bombastic than the bragging poltroon, Chasteaufort. Some of the best scenes, situations and scraps of dialogue in The Pedant Outwitted have been appropriated by more famous dramatists, particularly by Molière. This may be seen in Le Dépit Amoureux, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, and particularly in Les Fourberies de Scapin, where the whole of the famous “Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère” scene is imitated from Cyrano.

The theme of the comedy is the outwitting of Granger by his son, Charlot. Both wish to marry Genevotte; Granger attempts to send his son away from Paris, and on various pretexts Charlot remains; by the device of a play within a play Charlot marries Genevotte before Granger's eyes. The whole is quite incredible, but amusing. The character Cyrano most enjoyed was Granger, a caricature of his old schoolmaster. It must be admitted that the long speeches of Granger and Chasteaufort, ingenious and fertile as they are, grow somewhat tedious in a play; all the characters, even the heroine, are infected with preciosity and burlesque. Extraordinary hyperbolical epithets are piled one upon another until the whole heap topples to absurdity; as for the rant of Chasteaufort, it leaves that of Tamburlaine a mild understatement; Bobadil and Bessus are realistic sketches in comparison with this. With all its faults the play is a remarkable piece of work and ought to interest anyone who likes Elizabethan drama.

The tragedy The Death of Agrippina provides us with another surprise. Whereas The Pedant Outwitted seems extremely archaic for 1645, The Death of Agrippina has been compared favourably with Corneille's minor tragedies. All the “precious” affectations of style, the recondite allusions which make The Pedant Outwitted a test of one's knowledge of old French, all the oddities, the quiddities, the “humours”, disappear and we have a formal French tragedy written in good Alexandrines, moving according to the rules and containing a well-concerted action as well as good subsidiary scenes. Nothing could better illustrate the versatility of Cyrano's literary personality; the plays seem to have been written by two totally different persons. The subject of the tragedy is the conspiracy of Sejanus against Tiberius; Sejanus is in love with Agrippina, Livilla with Sejanus; Agrippina takes part in the conspiracy to avenge herself upon Tiberius with the hope of destroying Sejanus afterwards; the conspiracy is revealed by Livilla and both Sejanus and Agrippina lose their lives. There is one very fine scene at the end, where Sejanus is taunted by Agrippina; this contains the “horrible impieties” complained of by Tallemant; but why Sejanus should have talked like a Christian not even Cyrano's severest censurers have yet explained. The play is well-written and impressive.

Cyrano's fragmentary treatise on Physics needs only the remark that it is almost identical with Rohault's similar work and was either derived from it or from a common source. It was in part to popularize these studies and the sceptical ideas they inspired in him that Cyrano wrote his famous Voyages to the Moon and Sun, so often reprinted in France.

The Moon is supposed to have been written as early as 1648; The Sun was begun about 1650 and was left unfinished. Two versions of The Moon exist. One is contained in the MSS. of Paris and Munich and the other in the first edition, on the last of which all editions before Gourmont's incomplete reprint were founded. The MSS. undoubtedly contain the work as Cyrano wrote it and privily circulated it. The 1657 edition was heavily censored by Henry Le Bret, who was afraid to publish many passages reflecting upon the Church, of which he was a comfortably settled pillar. The early editions—and consequently all previous English translations—mark the places of some of these omissions with dots or the word “hiatus”. The effect of this expurgation was in some cases to make nonsense; in most to destroy the point of Cyrano's sarcasm. Apart from merely variant readings and single words or phrases (which often, by the way, greatly alter the point of a passage), there are no less than fourteen out of a total of ninety-six pages in M. Lachèvre's edition omitted by Le Bret, and these are precisely the most daring and satirical parts of the whole work. The last four pages are different in MSS. and in the printed editions; I have given the MSS. These MSS. have only been recently available in France and have never before been translated into English. Thus, if the reader were familiar with Lovell's (1687) version and had also read the French Bibliothèque Elzivirienne or Garnier editions, he would yet find that about one-seventh of the matter given in this translation of The Moon would be new to him.

The MS. of The Sun has disappeared; were it ever discovered we should no doubt find that the printed editions had been mutilated, while if the lost Story of the Spark were recovered, we might find a still more daring satire on Christianity. The first printed edition of The Voyage to the Sun appeared in 1662.

These imaginary voyages are often described by French writers as ‘Utopias’; they are no more Utopias than Pantagruel and Gulliver's Travels. They lack the political system of the Utopian romance, whose purpose is to recommend speciously some abominable form of tyranny under the pretext of making everybody happy. At different times I have read the Republic of Plato, the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, Campanella's Città del Sole, William Morris's News from Nowhere, and Hudson's A Crystal Age; and I am bound to say, with all reverence to these great men, that Morris's Nowhere sounded least unendurable, while the rest were nightmares, visions of meddlesome cranks. I have a deep reverence for Plato so far as I am able to comprehend him, but I think I would rather die than be enslaved by his ideal state.

Now, Cyrano de Bergerac had no intention of creating one of these ideally unpleasant tyrannies. His purpose was similar to that of Rabelais and Swift. He wanted to satirise existing institutions, humbugs and prejudices; he wanted to mock at a literal belief in the Old Testament; he wanted to hold up to odium the fundamental villainy of man; and he wanted to convey amusingly a number of quasi-scientific and philosophical ideas which it was highly dangerous then to publish and still more dangerous to try to popularise. Even then Cyrano dared not publish the book in his lifetime; and it was mutilated when it appeared after his death. The censorship of the ancien régime was almost exactly the antithesis to the police interference of to-day; great licence in morals and personalities was allowed, obscenities and even blasphemies were tolerated, but when an author, however eminent and serious, trenched upon the authority of the Church or the State, or offered new ideas which seemed likely to prove subversive, he was certain of persecution and punishment. Both systems have their defects. The tremendous hubbub raised against Tartuffe, the self-exile of Descartes,¹⁸ the prosecution of Théophile de Viau, the outcry against Cyrano, the fact that Gassendi's Syntagma did not appear in print until after his death; all show the working of the ancient censorship and the prejudices it appealed to in the populace. One feels that many of the deplorable traits in Cyrano's character are the result of a deliberate and high-spirited revolt against what he thought was oppressive. He attacked the Church and war and paternal authority as fiercely and recklessly as he attacked the bravi at the Porte de Nesle.

Even in Cyrano's time there was nothing original in a fanciful voyage to the Moon. Brun quotes a formidable list of predecessors—most of whom one has never heard of—whose work Cyrano may or may not have known. All probably derive directly or indirectly from Lucian of Samosate. It is certain that Cyrano copied Rabelais, that he took whole paragraphs and many ideas from Sorel's Francion and several hints from Bishop Godwin's Man in the Moon. Campanella furnished him with numerous hints. The philosophic and quasi-scientific passages came from Descartes, Gassendi, and Rohault. Cyrano is a Gassendist in The Moon and a Cartesian towards the end of The Sun. To trace these in detail would be laborious; it is sufficient to say that the theory which made Cyrano the predecessor of Rohault is now wholly disproved, while those who have compared Cyrano with Gassendi and Rohault declare that the author of The Voyages advances little that cannot be found in their works. M. Juppont's endeavour to prove that Cyrano was a marvellous scientific genius anticipating modern discoveries will hardly bear investigation; to make his points he has to attribute to Cyrano ideas derived from others and to wrest his language from the scientific jargon of one period into the worse jargon of another. After translating The Voyages, which implies a certain familiarity with them, I conclude that when Cyrano attempts to be scientific he often fails to understand thoroughly what he is talking about. As soon as he begins to discourse of atoms, or attraction, or the magnet, his language becomes vague, involved and hesitating; he is metaphorical at the moment he should not be, and the thought obviously is not his own; the lack of clarity in his speech suggests that he failed to comprehend the ideas he pretends to expound, that he did not think them for himself but was indoctrinated with them by others. He makes use of the anacoluthon too often for a translator's comfort; for though the practice may be defended in poetry, sermons and other inspired works, it is unsuitable to the logical exposition of science. Finally, a certain lack of common-sense often precipitates him into absurdity; he chooses grotesque illustrations, wrecks ingenious ideas by some incongruity he might easily have avoided. It is significant that when great men like Molière and Swift have borrowed from Cyrano they improve on him chiefly by purging him of what is grotesque and absurd.

I must confess I view Cyrano's plagiarisms more coolly than recent French commentators; for Cyrano criticism has violently revolted from the theory that he was a perfect, beplumed hero, the most original man of his age, to the other extreme of a theory that he had no originality whatever, that he was affected, vain, debauched, dirty, hypocritical; ending up with a sort of Johnsonian “let us hear no more on't”. Cyrano deserves some severity in the matter of plagiarism on account of his own stupid boast that he only read books to detect the plagiarisms of the authors. We are all plagiarists; every word we use is the creation of a poet; and a completely original author would probably be completely incomprehensible. This scientists' prejudice about priority of ideas is out of place in literature; we are engaged in creating a temper of the mind, in civilizing, not in riding an intellectual steeplechase. In works intended for amusement what matters plagiarism? Cyrano took an idea, say, from Sorel; Cyrano amuses us, Sorel bores us; are we not to read Cyrano because he plagiarized? And, in any event, these sarcasms of his which are merely amusing to-day were perilous matters then; if Cyrano had published an unexpurgated Moon in 1650, exile, imprisonment or some other torture might easily have been his lot. The ideas in The Voyages are derived indeed, but they were then new and worth circulating. Cyrano has been sneered at because, when he had written these dangerous matters, he evaded the possibility of martyrdom by refraining from publication; I confess I think he was wise; Naaman bowed himself in the house of Rimmon, and there is no obligation upon any man to sacrifice his life for his opinions.

Moreover, when we read an author whose purpose is “to instruct by entertaining” we care little for the origins of the instruction so long as the entertainment be there. Examined from this point of view The Voyages emerge very well. In spite of all their faults, real and alleged, they are entertaining. One would certainly rather spend an evening with Cyrano than with his enemy, Father Garasse, that terrific old bore, the “flail of the libertins”. Moreover, the dullest passages in The Voyages are those he stole from his scientific friends and the most entertaining those he took from Rabelais or Godwin or Sorel or invented himself. By far the best part of The Voyages is contained in the early pages of The Sun, where Cyrano relates the persecutions and inconveniences supposed to arise from the publication of The Moon, together with his adventures with the police. The whole thing bustles along admirably, reminding one of the adventures of the boys in the Satyricon, and it is a dismal moment when Cyrano produces an “icosahedron mirror” and we know we are in for some more quasi-science. The satire on mankind in the story of the birds is very happy and furnished Tom d'Urfey with an opera. The talking trees are quite good until they get on to loadstones and iron filings and the poles and such trash.

A large part of the opening of The Moon is occupied with a parody of the Old Testament, which Cyrano and his friends probably found more amusing than we do. The influence of the burlesque school on Cyrano has been noticed. Travesties then were a kind of craze; Virgil, Ovid, all the classics were burlesqued. There was one book it was dangerous to parody and Cyrano with his usual impetuosity rushed into a burlesque of the Old Testament. Here indeed he may claim to have given Voltaire several hints for his wickedly witty Romans.

It is not my intention to discuss The Voyages at greater length. The reader has here the full text before him and will form his own opinion. He has in the introduction sufficient information to understand at least in outline the writer of the book and his work, the milieu in which it was produced, the intellectual movement which helped to create it and its historical position.

Notes

1. Le Bret, Préface, 1657.

2. “Nothing could be clearer or better in style, and it is less archaic than Corneille.” (Remy de Gourmont).

3. Tallemant des Réaux, Historiettes, 1858. Vol. 7: “Suite des Naifvetez, Bons Mots, etc.”

4. Which means “Strike, there is the enemy”, but might also mean “Strike, there is the sacrament.”

5. Menagiana, Amsterdam, 1693, page 199.

6. Retrospective Review, 1820. Vol. I. Part 2. Art. viii. Satyrical Characters and Handsome Descriptions in Letters, written to several Persons of Quality, by Monsieur de Cyrano Bergerac. Translated from the French by a Person of Honour. London, 1658.

7. The critic proceeds to sum up Cyrano's writing in the same Corinthian style. French commentators, quoting this passage, often make the mistake of dating it 1658 instead of 1820.

8. Charles Nodier, Bibliographie des Fous. Quoted by F. Lachèvre.

9. Charles Nodier, Bonaventure Desperiers et Cyrano de Bergerac. Quoted by Remy de Gourmont.

10. Three errors in ten words!

11. In Périgord there is no castle called De Bergerac. (Brun). Mauvières and Bergerac, often known as Sous-Forest, are in the commune of Saint-Forgeux, canton of Chevreuse, arrondissement of Rambouillet. (Frédy de Coubertin).

12. The genealogical tree of the Cyrano family will be found in Appendix III.

13. From Saint-Amant's Le Débauche. In English it means roughly: “'Sdeath! how it rains outside! Let us make it rain wine in our bellies—you understand that without a word spoken and that's the real jest; sing, laugh, make a row, drink here all night, and to-morrow let the fair Aurora find us all here still at table.”

14. See M. Magne's Chevalier de Lignières (1920) for an elaborate and highly-coloured account of this affair. Marshal Gassion is said to have offered Cyrano his protection when he heard of it, which Cyrano refused.

15. Menagiana. 1695. Quoted by Remy de Gourmont. The reader will remember Rostand's use of this anecdote.

16. F. T. Perrens, Les Libertins en France au XVII^e Siècle, is an interesting book.

17. See Rigal's Le Théâtre Français avant la Période classique.

18. I know Descartes was patronised by Mazarin and made a visit to Paris “to be honoured”; but he soon returned to Holland.