Cyrano de Bergerac

by Edmond Rostand

  Cyrano’s attitude toward the sweetmeat vendor thus foreshadows his attitude toward the body in general (it is not a zone of pleasure) and the fair sex in particular. More comfortable with the gallant word (such as, “despite my Gascon pride”) or gesture (“He kisses her hand”) than with the idea of accepting her “dainties,” he settles for a mere “trifle,” for which silliness he is lambasted by his friend Le Bret. Under the guise of gallantry, Cyrano has found a way to formalize a circumspection with regard to women, a hesitancy and perhaps a fear that we see at work also in his relation to Roxane. His relation to sex is purely rhetorical. Cyrano himself attributes his unease with women to fear of being laughed at. By his own admission, the distance he imposes between himself and women is a form of self-defense: “My heart always cowers behind the defence of my wit. I set forth to capture a star... and then, for dread of laughter, I stop and pick a flower... of rhetoric” (act three, scene vii; p. 93). It is a system of defense born of his physical deformity, of course, of his “ungainliness” and the rejection to which it exposes him, to the point that one can reasonably suspect that Cyrano dies a virgin.

  In addition to the sexual symbolism of the last line (his plume remains intact, “unblemished and unbent”), Cyrano in the death scene makes the following assertion: “Woman’s sweetness I had never known. My mother... thought me unflattering. I had no sister. Later, I shunned Love’s cross-road in fear of mocking eyes” (act five, scene vi; p. 158). This key passage helps to explain what might seem an implausible element in the plot: Cyrano’s choice of the precious, capricious, and rather empty-headed Roxane as his only beloved. For in Roxane, who is his cousin, Cyrano finds both the mother (the good, maternal mother) and the sister that he has never known. It is an arrangement—a pact, I would say—in which Roxane is a knowing and willing participant. For her “almost brother,” as she calls him, Roxane fulfils both the maternal role (“So prettily, so cheeringly maternal!” says Cyrano in the same scene), bandaging his wounds, both real and psychological (act two, scene vi), and the role of a sister—that is, an intimate but nonsexual relation, an ideal of sublimated love celebrated in Romanticism (one thinks of William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy).

  The pact between the eloquent but ugly Cyrano and the handsome but dumb Christian thus seems designed to safeguard a much earlier pact signed between Cyrano and Roxane. “Eloquence I will lend you! ... And you, to me, shall lend all-conquering physical charm... and between us we will compose a hero of romance!” (act two, scene x; p. 75). An unequal exchange, as Cyrano must know, for while it advances Christian’s cause—it is he who gets “Roxane’s Kiss” in act three—it leaves Cyrano where he was to start with—that is to say, arrested in an archaic, childhood relation to Roxane.

  The sexual politics of Cyrano are thus more complicated than they might seem to be at first. Although it seems that in stepping aside Cyrano is sacrificing his own interests in order to further Roxane’s happiness, we also get the sense that this pact is not a disagreeable arrangement for Cyrano. In order to avoid conscription into the King’s army, it was once customary for those in a position to do so to “buy a man”—that is, to pay someone to go in their stead. Cyrano has managed something similar in the zone of sexual relations. Christian will serve as his sexual surrogate, which shelters him from the possibility of rejection but also more generally absolves him of the messy business of physical entanglements, while at the same time (this is the genius of the pact) allowing him to indulge in the flowery rhetorical exercises on safe ground. “Let us profit a little by this chance of talking softly together without seeing each other,” says Cyrano in the balcony scene (p. ooo). Is this not his most ardent desire? To limit the appetitive drive to language alone? No looking, no seeing, just talking. Hence Cyrano ends up literally pushing Christian into the arms of Roxane: “CYRANO [pushing CHRISTIAN]: Scale the balcony, you donkey!” (act three, scene x; see p. 98).

  The body (the donkey) is there in Cyrano, but it is oddly stifled, reticent. To call Christian a donkey is a deft way of recalling his stupidity and at the same time drawing attention to his animality (“Monte done, animal!” in French): Cyrano is the blithe spirit (“I am a shadow merely...” act three, scene vii; p. 92), while Christian is the lusty beast. Both of them in the end get what they want: Christian gets to kiss Roxane, and Cyrano gets to pluck lots of rhetorical flowers while keeping his precious plume unblemished.

  In this reading of the play, Roxane appeals to Cyrano precisely because she is a précieuse. Cyrano and Roxane share a disdain for banality, be it in language or in deed. Wit and courage—panache, in a word—are Cyrano’s weapons against everything that is ordinary, dull, pedestrian, stupid (for example, Valvert in act one, scene iv); both his sword and his word are sharp, dazzling, and unexpected, as we see in the duel-ballad scene. Preciosity, which emerged in the seventeenth century, thus in the time in which Cyrano is set, began as a reaction against the vulgarity of the times, seeking through elegance and refinement (in dress, in language, in manners) to rise above the common and the cliched. Regrettably, it is remembered today (largely on account of Molière’s satire Les Précieuses ridicules) more for its excesses and its extravagances than for the philosophy behind the movement or the literary changes that resulted from it. The salon of Madame de Rambouillet, the gathering place for a host of talented writers (François de la Rochefoucauld, Madeleine de Scudéry, Voiture, Paul Scarron, Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac) who would not have disputed their allegiance to the esprit précieux, significantly influenced literary developments in France, notably by popularizing the pastoral novel and by establishing the letter as a legitimate literary form (see Cyrano, edited by Aziza). In any case, Cyrano seems to belong to the tradition of preciosity not so much because Roxane is herself a précieuse (like Molière’s characters, she is fairly ridiculous) but because Rostand’s aesthetic philosophy turns on the precious premise that language counts for more than action. This is especially true in the realm of love. From a sexual point of view, Cyrano is a play in which nothing happens. The consummation of Christian and Roxane’s marriage is artfully avoided thanks to a theatrical device (Christian is called to war on their wedding night and is killed at Arras minutes after Roxane shows up there), so we may presume that Roxane, like Cyrano, dies a virgin. Cyrano thus stages the power of rhetoric as an instrument of seduction, while skillfully avoiding the passage a l’acte.

  So although Cyrano de Bergerac seems at first to adhere to traditional gender roles, staging burly Gascon soldiers against dainty precious women, these gender assignments become more complicated as the play progresses and we begin to sense that it is constructed around a hole: One way or another, all the principal characters miss the encounter with their apparent desire. In this heftily physical play (the antithesis of intellectual theater), the body is engaged in three ways: militarily, which includes dueling as an expression of the Gascon spirit; gastronomically, which includes the famine as well as the feast; and, especially, discursively, as in the way Cyrano’s nose engenders language (poetry, puns, jokes), the need to detain de Guiche (act three, scene viii) provokes Cyrano’s meditations on traveling to the moon, and the famine at the siege of Arras leads to all kinds of “meaty remarks.” The body, like Cyrano, is “everything and nothing” (see the final scene): It is an engine of discourse (and so is “everything,” the sine qua non of the play), and is also peculiarly absent, denied (it is “nothing”). It is never truly engaged erotically, except for the famous kiss (act three, “Roxane’s Kiss”); even then, as we have pointed out, Christian has to be pushed into it (“Now I feel as if I ought not!”), and the kiss is interrupted almost before it has begun.

  Is such prudery gallantry carried to its logical conclusion? Or is the true alliance—the explicit one in which no one is duped—that between Christian and Cyrano? “Will you complete me, and let me in exchange complete you?” says Cyrano to Christian, “with rapture” according to the scene indication (act two, scene x; see p. 76). Earlier in
the same scene, Cyrano says of Christian: “It is true that he is handsome, the rascal.” Which leads us to question Cyrano’s motive for entering into the pact with Christian. Repressed homosexuality? Possibly. Or more generally a denial of the body (a mere extension of the extreme protectiveness of his nose)? The wonderful thing about Rostand’s theater is that he does not ask us to decide. In the end, what we find in Cyrano is a group of characters whose alliances and pacts suggest unconscious arrangements with their own uncertain sexuality as much as strategic moves in a classical game of heterosexual seduction.

  Cyrano de Bergerac is a work of the imagination; Rostand’s admirers and even some of his critics agree that he has a flair for the picturesque detail, for colorful language and dress, for poetic inventiveness. But what of the historical Cyrano? Rostand knew of the real Cyrano—Savinien de Cyrano (1619-1655), later known as de Bergerac—from the testimony of Cyrano’s faithful companion Henri Le Bret, whose preface to Cyrano’s Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657) he read carefully, as well as from the portrait of Cyrano by the nineteenth-century writer Théophile Gautier, whose book Les Grotesques (The Grotesque Ones) was apparently Rostand’s favorite in high school (see Ripert, Edmond Rostand, p. 78). Cyrano, along with Le Bret, had been a soldier in the regiment of Captain Carbon de Castel-Jaloux. This regiment was composed almost entirely of Gascons, and it was in his early days in the field that he distinguished himself as a duelist (if Le Bret is to be believed, Cyrano fought one a day, quickly acquiring a reputation as “the demon of bravura”). He participated in the campaigns of Champagne (he was wounded by a bullet during the siege of Mouzon) and Picardy (1640). Like his fictional counterpart, he was present at the siege of Arras, where a blow from a sword wounded him in the throat. Unlike his fictional counterpart, he was a homosexual. Having left the army in 1641, he studied under the famous philosopher Pierre Gassendi and frequented free-thinking literary circles. In addition to the aforementioned States and Empires of the Moon, he wrote Comical History of the States and Empires of the Sun, also published posthumously (1662), and a play, La Mort d’Agrippine (The Death of Agrippine; 1654), which was performed at the Hotel de Bourgogne but was closed down on account of some lines suggesting an atheistic worldview (“These gods that man made, and which did not make man”). His death in 1655 may have been due to an aggravation of an existing illness—he had been suffering from a venereal disease since 1645—or it may have been the result of an incident in which a beam of wood fell on his head (assassination has not been ruled out).

  What did Rostand retain from his reading of Le Bret, of Gautier, and of Cyrano himself? A good number of things, many highly serviceable from a dramatic point of view—the quarrel with the actor Monfleury (act one, scene iv), the possibility that Cyrano might have known Molière (see act five, scene vi), his fanciful ideas for traveling to the moon (act three, scene xiii), the manner of his death, etc. And, of course, one other, very big thing: the nose. It was Gautier who, extrapolating on a passage in States and Empires of the Moon, insisted on the importance of the nose to Cyrano’s physiognomy and to his psychology, and developed something of a philosophy around it: “Without the nose, according to Cyrano, there can be nothing of worth, no finesse, no passion, nothing of what truly makes man: The nose is the seat of the soul.” In Rostand’s play, the “tirade of the nose” in act one (pp. 29—30) is one of the most memorable moments in French theatrical history; many French people can recite at least some of it. It is important to point out, I think, just what an enormous risk Rostand took when he decided to create a play based on a man with a very large nose (“If it wasn’t for the nose, he’d be a very handsome fellow,” writes Gautier). The risk of farce could never be very far. Ripert mentions that a friend tried to prevail upon Madame Rostand to have her husband excise the nose scene, which would obviously have required on the part of Rostand some major rewriting but which would avoid “covering the play in ridicule” (pp. 75-76).

  And it is important to note also that Rostand based most of the characters in this play on figures from Savinien de Cyrano’s life and times: Christian (based on Christophe de Champagne, baron de Neuvillette, who married Madeleine Robineau—Roxane—and who died in the siege of Arras); De Guiche (Antoine de Gramont, Richelieu’s nephew); Roxane (Madeleine Robineau, baronne de Neuvillette, Cyrano’s cousin); Le Bret (himself); Ragueneau (Cyprien Ragueneau, pastry cook, then actor and poet, and candlesnuffer for Molière); as well as many of the smaller roles, including Castel-Jaloux, Lignière, Montfleury, Cuigy, Brissaille, even Mother Margaret of the Convent of the Sisters of the Cross (for details, see Besnier, pp. 427—433). There is in Rostand an almost manic concern for precision, both in terms of historical exactitude, which contributes to the overall verisimilitude of the settings, and in the scenic indications (both concerning the decor and the attitudes and movements of the actors), which are unusually detailed. Rostand cannot be so easily divorced from naturalism, it seems. But it is Rostand’s blending of realism and fantasy that so seduces in this play, for he manages both to temper the harshness of naturalism and to avoid the emptiness of pure fantasy.

  Cyrano de Bergerac carries the subtitle “Heroic Comedy” and Cyrano, of course, is its hero. The historical Cyrano was perhaps heroic in battle, but his life, which took many turns, ending in penury and possibly with his murder, was less than romantic. His writings went virtually unknown in his lifetime. Rosemonde Gerard, Rostand’s wife, has something interesting to say about Cyrano and Rostand’s attraction to him: “Cyrano had the touching grace to be a failure—and this is above all what must have seduced the poet, for could there exist anything more paradoxically poetic than to crown with such glory a failure?” (Gerard, Edmond Rostand, p. 9). Her judgment of Savinien de Cyrano may seem harsh, but her insight into her husband’s empathy for the great losers of the world (she cites a paean to the failed [les ratés] from Rostand’s collection of verse Les Musardises: “I love you and want the world to know it ...” etc.) seems astute. For surely Rostand felt failure even in (perhaps because of) the rush of the unimaginable success he knew.

  Cyrano, after all, is a play about insecurity and vulnerability; we must assume that Rostand wrote out his own weaknesses. “We all have a nose, somewhere,” quipped the actor Jacques Weber. Crowned in real life with a glory that few have known, he became increasingly unsure of himself and his writing. It cannot be mere coincidence that a writing block struck him precisely when he had to compose an acceptance speech upon his election to the Académie. “I have already written one word of it: Gentlemen,” he wrote to a friend. The toast of Paris, he retired in I905 to the provinces, where he wasted away days in idleness, playing in the garden with his two sons, beginning but rarely finishing new projects. Although he knew further critical successes in the theater, he resembles in this period of his career the Cyrano who (in act one, scene v; p. 36) “was wandering aimlessly; too many roads were open... too many resolves, too complex, allowed of being taken.”

  Edmond Rostand died in Paris during the epidemic of Spanish flu in 1918. Of the many assessments of Cyrano de Bergerac and its creator, the most judicious is no doubt that of Leon Blum, the socialist thinker and literary critic who was later to become president of the Republic. Perhaps necessarily, it is also the most circumspect, for to judge Rostand—to imagine that we can easily classify him according to the existing protocols of literary criticism—might be simply foolish. “We should not have for Monsieur Rostand a scorn that would be all too unjust and facile,” wrote Blum (quoted in de Margerie, Edmond Rostand, p. 199). “But nor should we say that he is a poet of genius. He is not a great poet, he is a great ...—we would need to find a new word to describe such a unique concoction. But he is nonetheless something great.”

  PETER CONNOR is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is the author of Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). He has translated Bataille’s
The Tears of Eros (City Lights Press, 1989), as well as many works in the area of contemporary French philosophy, including The Inoperative Community, by Jean-Luc Nancy (Minnesota University Press, 1991) .

  CYRAN0 DE BERGERAC

  A HEROIC COMEDY IN FIVE ACTS

  DRAMATIS PERSONÆ

  CYRANO DE BERGERAC

  CHRISTIAN DE NEUVILLETTE

  COMTE DE GUICHE

  RAGUENEAU

  LE BRET

  CAPTAIN CARBON DE CASTEL-JALOUX

  LIGNIERE

  DE VALVERT

  MONTFLEURY

  BELLEROSE

  JODELET

  CUIGY

  BRISSAILLE

  A BORE

  A MOUSQUETAIRE

  OTHER MOUSQUETAIRE

  A SPANISH OFFICER

  A LIGHT-CAVALRY MAN

  A DOORKEEPER

  A BURGHER

  HIS SON

  A PICKPOCKET

  A SPECTATOR

  A WATCHMAN

  BERTRANDOU THE FIFER

  A CAPUCHIN

  TWO MUSICIANS

  SEVEN CADETS

  THREE MARQUISES

  POETS

  PASTRYCOOKS

  ROXANE

  SISTER MARTHA

  LISE

  THE SWEETMEAT VENDER

  MOTHER MARGARET

  THE DUENNA

  SISTER CLAIRE

  AN ACTRESS

  A SOUBRETTE

  A FLOWER-GIRL

  PAGES

  The crowd, bourgeois, marquises, mousquetaires, pickpockets, pastrycooks, poets, Gascony Cadets, players, fiddlers, pages, children, Spanish soldiers, spectators, précieuses, actresses, bourgeoises, nuns, etc.

  ACT ONE