Cyrano de Bergerac

Summary

Cyrano de Bergerac is Edmond Rostand's five-act verse play about a seventeenth-century Gascon soldier, poet and swordsman whose enormous nose convinces him that no woman could love him. Act I opens in 1640 at the Hôtel de Bourgogne theatre in Paris. Cyrano drives the fat actor Montfleury off the stage, answers the foppish Viscount de Valvert's dull joke about his nose with a dazzling list of the insults he might have made, and then fights him while composing a ballade, striking home on the last line. Alone with his friend Le Bret he admits that he loves his cousin Roxane, and that night he goes out alone to fight a hundred hired men waiting to ambush the drunken poet Lignière. In Act II, at the pastry shop of Ragueneau, the baker who feeds poets, Roxane tells Cyrano that she loves a handsome young cadet, Christian de Neuvillette, and asks him to protect Christian in his regiment, the Cadets of Gascony. Christian proves his courage by mocking Cyrano's nose, and Cyrano, instead of killing him, offers to write his love letters, since Christian fears he has no wit. Cyrano also refuses the patronage of the powerful Count de Guiche, who wants Roxane for himself. Act III is the balcony scene. When Christian's own words fail beneath Roxane's window, Cyrano speaks for him in the dark, winning her with his eloquence and finally sending Christian up to claim a kiss. A Capuchin brings a letter from de Guiche; Roxane reads it aloud as an order to marry her to Christian at once, and Cyrano delays de Guiche with a mad tale of falling from the moon until the wedding is done. In revenge, de Guiche sends the cadets to the siege of Arras. In Act IV the cadets are starving, and Cyrano crosses the Spanish lines every day to send letters to Roxane in Christian's name. Roxane drives through the lines in a coach full of food with Ragueneau, and tells Christian that she would love him now even if he were ugly, for his soul. Christian realizes that she loves Cyrano, but he is shot before the truth can be told, and Cyrano keeps silent. Act V takes place fifteen years later, in 1655, in the garden of a convent where Roxane lives in mourning. Cyrano, poor and full of enemies, visits every Saturday. On this day a lackey has dropped a heavy log on his head. He arrives anyway, asks to read Christian's last letter, and reads it in the dark, so that Roxane recognizes the voice. Dying, he fights imaginary enemies, Falsehood, Compromise, Prejudice, and goes to God keeping one thing unstained, his panache. The play opened at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin in December 1897 with Constant Coquelin as Cyrano.

Top Lessons

• Beauty of soul and beauty of face

  Roxane at first loves Christian's face and believes his words come from him. By Act IV she says she loves his soul and would love him if he were ugly. The play asks what love truly sees, and lets the audience recognize Cyrano's worth before Roxane does.

• Independence and its price

  In the No, grammercy speech of Act II, Cyrano refuses to flatter patrons or climb by creeping like ivy. He would rather mount alone. He keeps his freedom, but he ends poor, wounded and full of enemies. The play admires his integrity and lets us count its cost.

• Silence as sacrifice

  After Christian dies, Cyrano keeps the secret for fifteen years so that Roxane's memory of her husband is not spoiled. His silence is both noble and costly. Only his reading of the last letter in the dark gives him away.

• Panache

  Cyrano's last word names the white plume of gallant style and courage he refuses to lose. Even dying, he fights Falsehood, Compromise and Prejudice, knowing he will fall. The play makes a lost cause fought well into a kind of victory.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The play gives a vivid picture of a soldier's body and its limits. At the siege of Arras the cadets are starving, and Cyrano answers hunger with music and jokes, calling homesickness a nobler pain of the soul. Christian is shot in Act IV. In Act V Ragueneau reports that a lackey dropped a heavy piece of wood on Cyrano from a window; Cyrano was struck down with a large wound in his head and lost consciousness, and the doctor who came spoke of fever and meningitis and warned that he might die if he rose. Cyrano rises anyway, walks to the convent, has a moment of faintness, reads in failing light, and dies after a spell of wandering speech that Le Bret calls raving. To a modern clinician this sequence suggests a head injury with a lucid interval and later deterioration, but that is a reading of a stage death, not a diagnosis. Cyrano's nose, mocked by fools and feared by himself, shapes his whole life; the play treats it as a mark of difference that his wit and courage turn into a kind of armour.

• Act 1, Scenes 4-5

  The nose tirade answers Valvert's insult; afterwards Cyrano tells Le Bret how his profile on a wall shames him and why he will not weep.

• Act 4, Scenes 1-3

  The starving cadets at Arras complain of hunger; Cyrano has the fifer play the airs of Gascony.

• Act 4, final scenes

  Christian is brought back mortally wounded and dies in Roxane's arms as the Spanish attack.

• Act 5, Scene 3

  Ragueneau tells Le Bret of the falling wood, the head wound, the loss of consciousness and the doctor's words about fever and meningitis.

• Act 5, Scene 6

  The bandaged Cyrano grows faint, wanders in speech, stands against a tree and dies sword in hand.