Archibald Lovell - A Voyage to the Moon

For he had always been a student and a poet. It is probable that the Pédant joué was in part composed during his college days. Lebret pictures him to us as studying between two duels, and working at an Elegy in all the noise of the regimental barracks, "as undistractedly as if he had been in a quiet study." He now joined a group of independents in thought and life, naturalists in ethics and empiricists in philosophy, and forced his way into a private class of the philosopher Gassendi, where he had for fellow-students Hesnaut, Chapelle, Bernier, and almost certainly a young Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, who was very soon to take the name of Molière, found the "Illustre Théâtre," and after its failure start on a fifteen years' tour of the provinces.

Cyrano was an earnest and capable student of philosophy, and came to it with the fresh interest not only of his own personality, but of a young man of barely twenty-two; he naturally imposed himself as a sort of leader in the group of young "libertins" or free-thinkers, just as he had done among the Guards. He knew well not only Gassendi, but also Campanella, and of course Descartes, in his works at least. He even seems to have read widely among the half-philosophers, half-occultists of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, such as Cornelius Agrippa, Jerome Cardan, Abbot Tritheim, César de Nostradamus, etc. Among the ancients, his first favorites were Lucretius and Pyrrho: Pyrrho whom he especially admired, "because he was so nobly free, that no thinker of his age had been able to enslave his opinions; and so modest, that he would never give final decision on any point." There is much of Cyrano in this phrase, both in the half-bold modesty and in the half-timid fierceness of independence. Cyrano shuddered at the thought of having even a single one of his ideas enslaved to those of another thinker. Just as he had refused the Maréchal de Gassion for patron when he was in the Guards, so he would accept no one's magister dixit , no patron of his thought, not even the Aristotle of the Schools.

The period of his life from 1643 to 1653 is a very obscure one. Yet probably almost all of his works were composed during this time. He may have travelled; there are traditions and suggestions that he visited England, Italy, even Poland. He probably stood in danger of persecution from the Jesuits on account of his philosophical ideas, and may have suffered it, as did his contemporaries Campanella and Galileo, or, to mention a French poet only a little older than he, Théophile de Viau , who was even condemned to death for less independence than Cyrano's; though the sentence was fortunately commuted. He probably mingled somewhat in the society of the "Précieuses" of the time as well as in that of the "libertins"; for he has left a series of "Love-Letters" which must almost exactly have suited the taste of those who prepared Discourses on the Tender Passion. He probably had many duels still, for Lebret tells us that he served a hundred times as second – the round number is to be taken as such – and any one acquainted with the epoch, or with the Three Musketeers of Dumas, knows that the seconds fought as well as the principals. Lebret adds, to be sure, that he never had a quarrel on his own account, but we may perhaps take this as a bit of the conscientious "white-washing" which Lebret could not refrain from in speaking of his friend's reputation; for we know enough of his character even from Lebret, and of his life from other sources, to make a gentle peacefulness, so out of keeping with the epoch, somewhat doubtful; and then there was his nose.

The Nose is authentic also. It appears in all the portraits, of which there are four. And in all of these it is the same: not a little ugly nose, flat at the top and projecting at the bottom in a little long gable turned up at the end; but a large, generous, well-shaped nose, hooked rather than retroussé, and planted squarely in the symmetrical middle of the face; not ridiculous, but monumental! The anecdotes of the duels it caused are so many, that one comes in spite of oneself to believe some of them. It is said that this nose brought death upon more than ten persons; that one could not look upon it, but he must unsheathe; if one looked away, it was worse; and as for speaking of Noses, that was a subject which Cyrano reserved for himself, to do it fitting honor. Listen to his treatment of it in the Pédant joué : "This veridic nose arrives everywhere a quarter of an hour before its master. Ten shoemakers, good round fat ones too, go and sit down to work under it out of the rain." As for defending large noses, as the index of valor, intelligence, and all high qualities, it will appear in the Voyage to the Moon that he could do it as well with his pen as with his sword.

The end of his life was difficult and sad. He was finally compelled to accept the patronage of the Duc d'Arpajon, for no man could live or even exist by literature at that period, except as literature brought patronage or pensions. The great Corneille himself, than whom no one could be more simply sturdy and high of character, wrote begging letters to the great minister who controlled the pensions of literature. Cyrano dedicated the edition of his "Miscellaneous Works" in 1654 to the Duc d'Arpajon, in an epistle which fulfils, but with dignity and independence, the laws of the genre , and accompanied it with a sonnet addressed to the Duke's daughter, which is in the taste of the time, yet considerably better than the taste of the time. Things went well till Agrippine appeared, which had a "succès de scandale"; but its "belles impiétés," as the happy book-seller called them, seem to have pleased the timidly orthodox Duke less. In the meantime Cyrano had received a wound from a falling beam whether by mere accident or not, will never be known; but Cyrano had many enemies, and it has generally been thought that there was purpose behind the accident. For whatever reason, the Duc d'Arpajon seems to have advised Cyrano to leave him, and Cyrano was received by Regnault des Bois-Clairs, a friend of Lebret. There he was kindly cared for and lectured on the evil of his past life by Lebret and three women of the Convent of the Daughters of the Cross: Soeur Hyacinthe, an aunt of Cyrano himself; Mère Marguerite, the superior of the convent; and the Baronne de Neuvillette, a cousin of Cyrano, who was Madeleine Robineau, and had married the Baron Christophe de Neuvillette, killed at the siege of Arras in 1640. The three women persuaded themselves that they had converted Cyrano to the true Church. This is doubtful, since he dragged himself away to the country to die, at the house of the cousin whom he speaks of at the end of the Voyage to the Moon . In any case, Mère Marguerite reclaimed his body, and he was buried in holy ground at the convent.

The Voyage to the Moon was not published till 1656, the year after Cyrano's death. It was certainly written as early as 1650, probably in 1649. It had been circulated widely in manuscript, and possibly a few copies had been printed, before the author's death. The Voyage to the Sun , or, to give the title more accurately, the "Comic History of the States and Empires of the Sun," was probably written immediately after the Voyage to the Moon , but was not published till 1662. The History of the Spark has never been found, unless that be the subtitle of a part of the Voyage to the Sun, as seems fairly probable.

The Letters of Cyrano are, in part at least, his earliest work. They were probably scattered over a considerable period in point of composition, but most of them were published in 1654. It is to be remembered that like all the letters of that epoch which we have, they were meant to be read in company, in the salons, or sometimes (like that "Against Dassoucy"), in the taverns, corresponding to the modern cafés, where men of letters gathered. They were written not for the postman, but for the parlor; and not so much for the parlor as for the printer. But even with the artificiality of this method, and with the burlesque or précieuse expression that was obligatory in Letters at that time, there are touches of real sincerity and passion constantly breaking through.