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Hector Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (6 March 1619 – 28 July 1655) was a French dramatist and duelist who is now best remembered for the many works of fiction which have been woven around his life story. In these fictional works he is featured with an overly large nose; portraits suggest that he did have a big nose, though not nearly as large as described in Edmond Rostand's play and the subsequent works about him.
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Quotations
I think the Moon is a world like this one, and the Earth is its moon.
My friends greeted this with a burst of laughter. "And maybe," I told them, "someone on the Moon is even now making fun of someone else who says that our globe is a world."
After a while the press of business in the province put an end to our philosophizing, and I returned with increased determination to my plans to fly to the Moon.
I am not from your world or this one; I was born on the Sun. Sometimes our world becomes overcrowded because our people live so long. Our people are almost free of wars and illness, and sometimes our government officials send colonies to neighboring worlds.
Sun-being to Cyrano
To make myself visible as I am now, when I sense that the cadaver that I occupy is almost worn out or that the organs are no longer working very well, I breathe myself into a young body that has just died.
Sun-being to Cyrano
One day, my male companion (they took me for the female) told me what had really caused him to wander about the world and finally to leave it for the Moon. He had not been able to find a single country where the imagination was free.
A man contains all that is needed to make up a tree; likewise, a tree contains all that is needed to make up a man. Thus, finally, all things meet in all things, but we need a Prometheus to distill it.
Encyclopedia
Hector Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (6 March 1619 – 28 July 1655) was a French dramatist and duelist who is now best remembered for the many works of fiction which have been woven around his life story. In these fictional works he is featured with an overly large nose; portraits suggest that he did have a big nose, though not nearly as large as described in Edmond Rostand's play and the subsequent works about him. A statue of him stands in the town of Bergerac, Dordogne.
Life and works
Cyrano de Bergerac — born Savinien de Cyrano — was born into an old Parisian family and spent much of his childhood in Saint-Forget (now Yvelines). He went to school in Paris and spent his adult life there when he was not on a military campaign. He was not, therefore, a Gascon. Many of his fellow soldiers would have been Gascons, and their swashbuckling manner was much admired; so he may have cultivated a myth of Gascon origins. Although it is true that he was a popular poet and a fine swordsman who fought many duels, his abilities were embellished by Rostand, the playwright of Cyrano de Bergerac. Cyrano de Bergerac's writings do, in fact, indicate that he had an unusually large nose, of which he was quite proud.
Though not as famous as his classical contemporaries, Bergerac was a successful writer. The playwright Molière even borrowed a scene from Le Pédant Joué. Bergerac's most prominent works are his duo of proto-science fiction novels, The Other World: The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon (1657) and "The Comical History of the States and the Empires of the Sun" (unfinished at his death) which describe fictional journeys to the Moon and Sun. The methods of space travel he described are inventive, often ingenious, and sometimes rooted in science. They reflect the materialist philosophy of which Bergerac was a devotee. Bergerac's primary purpose in writing those early science fiction novels was to criticize subtly the anthropocentric view of man's place in creation, as well as the social injustices of the 17th century. The Other World was subjected to censorship.
Modern scholars contend that de Bergerac was homosexual. It is believed that around 1640 he became the lover of Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy, a writer and musician, until around 1653, when they became engaged in a bitter rivalry. This led to Bergerac sending d'Assoucy death threats that compelled him to leave Paris. The quarrel extended to a series of satirical texts by both men. Bergerac wrote Contre Soucidas (an anagram of his enemy's name) and Contre un ingrat ("Against an Ingrate"), while D’Assoucy counterattacked with Le Combat de Cyrano de Bergerac avec le singe de Brioché au bout du Pont-Neuf ("The Battle of Cyrano de Bergerac with the Monkey of Brioché on the Pont Neuf").
The model of the Roxane who appears in the Rostand play was Bergerac's cousin, who lived with his aunt Catherine de Cyrano at the Convent of the Daughter of the Cross, where he was tended for injuries sustained from a falling beam. As in the play, he did fight at the siege of Arras (1640), a battle of the Thirty Years' War between French and Spanish forces in France (though this was not the more famous final Battle of Arras, fought fourteen years later). One of his confreres in the battle was the Baron of Neuvillette, who married Cyrano's cousin. However, the play's plotline involving Roxane and Christian is almost entirely fictional — the real Cyrano did not write the Baron's love letters for him.
Cyrano was a freethinker and a pupil of Pierre Gassendi, a canon of the Catholic Church who tried to reconcile Epicurean atomism with Christianity. Cyrano's insistence on reason was rare in his time, and he would have been at home in the Enlightenment that came a century after his death.
He was injured by a falling wooden beam in 1654 while entering the house of his patron, the Duc D'Arpajon. Whether it was a deliberate attempt on his life or merely an accident is unknown. It is also inconclusive as to whether or not his death was a result of the injury, or an unspecified disease. He passed away over a year later on July 28, 1655, aged 36. His place of death was the house of his cousin, Pierre De Cyrano, in Sannois. He was buried in a Church in Sannois.
In fiction
See also
External links
- (French)—Biography
- (French)—Information on fictional portrayals versus real person
- —annotated English language edition
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