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CYRANO DE BERGERAC.

In the Paris of the days of the Fronde a young provincial of family wins a pretty reputation for wit and duelling, and, before his early death, manages to labour under suspicion as a dangerous thinker. Legend presently seizes upon him, and offers him to the neglect or scorn of his correct and courtly successors in letters as an extravagant representative of a ruder age-a mere buffoon of sword and pen. The slender bulk of his works is reissued from time to time during the eighteenth century without comment. At intervals, since 1835, attention is sought for him by investigators of literary curiosities. This last year a French poet sets him on the stage for wide admiration as a hero of love and renunciation. Thus, in the whirligig of fame Cyrano the bugbear has become for the moment an object of sympathetic tears. to idealisation, to lively imagination, that the Cyrano of either extreme is owing. Would you come nearer to the truth of things ? His few hundreds of written pages are not directly autobiographical. The sole authentic record of him is couched by a friend in the form of a brief apology. He readily lends himself to picturesque portraiture. Something, or much, may

be expressed of his character and way of thought; but the whole man and his secret it is not possible to attain.

I. The birthplace of Savinien de Cyrano is unknown, unless we make inference from that Bergerac in Périgord which he added to his patronymic. His name as we have it is due to the titlepage of his posthumous works. In his lifetime he, or his printer, hesitated between M. de Bergerac, M. Bergerac de Cyrano, and M. de Cyrano Bergerac, thus affording a jest to his friend and enemy Scarron, the husband of the future precisian, Mme. de Maintenon. However, his father, 'an old gentleman, careless enough about the education of his children,' entrusts him to the care of a country priest, among whose boarders Cyrano finds the Henri Lebret who was to be his biographer. But Cyrano is not slow in conceiving schoolmaster a synonym for pedant. He asks, or demands, better instruction, and is sent by his easy-going father to the College of Beauvais, in Paris, where he is left at his

own discretion till the age of nineteen. In Jean Grangier, the principal—notorious for erudition and eloquence and castigation, for violence and avarice and ancillary affections—he thinks to see the Pedant in perfection, and discovers the subject of his satirical and revengeful comedy, which he writes, as it is reported in the Menagiana,' while yet upon the school-bench. Says the sage and moderate Lebret of this youth of nineteen : ‘This time of life, in which nature is corrupted most easily, and the great liberty he had to do as he pleased, led him down a dangerous slope, on which I dare to say that I arrested him; for, having finished my studies, and my father wishing me to serve in the Guards, I obliged him to enter with me the corps of M. de Carbon Castel-Jaloux.'

Cyrano, then, the turbulent lover of liberty, is a volunteer in a regiment composed almost exclusively of Gascons. Another D'Artagnan, he knows what is the readiest method of acquiring distinction. 'I should have lost all knowledge of paper,' he writes in his ‘Lettres Diverses,' 'if cartels were written on anything else. Truly, you would be very wrong now to call me the first of men, for I protest that for the last few weeks I am everybody's second. Not that his temper was other than amiable, Lebret would have us know; crossing swords a hundred times as a second, he had no quarrel on his own account. Anecdote, on the contrary, has it that it was enough to be caught looking at his nose, which he wore of a huge pattern, and scarred with sword-cuts. Ten men must lick dust for such an offence. One may credit both reports. The swift-tempered youth would have his hours of pleasant calm. And, if there be no smoke without a flame, it is the task of anecdote to fan this flame. At

At any rate, he counts about as many combats as days of service, and is speedily styled the Demon of Courage.'

Most celebrated of all was that exploit of his in the ditch of the Porte de Nesle. He hears that a hundred men are lying there in wait to insult a friend of his in broad daylight. Hastening up, he leaves two of them dead, and wounds seven others grievously. The exploit, performed in the sight of several 'persons of quality,' henceforth his admirers, was too well attested ever to pass into the region of the fabulous. So, and simply, reports Henri Lebret. Anecdote helps you to a picture of this friend as the Court poet Linière, richer in epigrams than in good actions, hiding at Cyrano's house to escape a noble who threatened to repay a witticism with the loss of his ears. At news of the

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ambuscade, Cyrano bids him bear the lantern and follow, and invites his supper-guests to be witnesses. Of course, he drives headlong before him the remaining ninety-one that are capable of flight. Nor is he any less 'The Intrepid' against the foreigner. By his twentieth year he had seen two campaigns in Flanders, had been shot through the body at the siege of Mouzon, and received a sword-cut in the throat at that of Arras. But all this, however, did not divert him from his studies. You might see him working in barracks at an elegy much as if he were in the greatest solitude. The lover of peaceful study, the man who was incapable of subjection to any patron—and yet must find that, without a patron requiring subjection, there was no chance of promotionwithdraws, weary of combats and wounds, at the age of twenty

He 'quits Mars to give himself up to Minerva,' as Lebret puts it. It is his third conversion. He has passed from debauchery to militant action, and from the camp and duelling-ground to the shady retirement of learned leisure.

Or is conversion too precise a name? And do not Cyrano's periods overlap, so to speak ? Cyrano the warrior was none the less the student; Cyrano the student was also, on occasion, the literary swash-buckler. We do not know how or where he lived after 1641, nor the time of his admission to the private lessons of Gassendi, the theologian and philosopher. Of the result of this admission later. For the present we have Cyrano the fantastic and fashionable wit, the writer of the · Lettres Diverses.'

Now this was the time of Italo-Spanish influence upon French literature; and the readiest way to distinction lay in the composition of formal rhetorical epistles to be passed from hand to hand, and finally to the press. Balzac was the father of the

grave and harmonious style, a reformer of French prose, and must eke out want of thought by Spanish hyperbole. Voiture, on the other hand, leaning towards the Italians, was the ingenious trifler, the

agreeable Rattle,' who could write you the most piquant nothings, and adorn the most sterile subjects. Both were mannerists and shapers of concetti, the reign of which had been European these last fifty years. Cyrano left it to Saint-Amand and Théophile de Viau to essay rivalry with Gongora and Marini in lengthy poetical embroidery; he can out-Gongora Gongora within the limits of a letter, in any and every line of a letter. He is acknowledged at once as the master of the 'équivoque,' the 'allusion,' the pointe,' the last of which he explains and defends as an agreeable play of wit in which the brilliancy of the thing said supersedes attention

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to the subject-matter. As Théophile Gautier says in his playful study of Cyrano, included in his gallery of the Grotesques, the victims of Boileau, each phrase was to be a duel with Reason.' Let us turn to the two plays. Did the scholars of Jean Grangier have the delight to perform the Pédant Joué' themselves in the lifetime of Grangier? However that may be, Cyrano, in this farce, has employed the Pedant, the Braggadocio, the knavish Lackey, of the Italian commedia dell' arte. The amorous pedant is the rival of his son, and is further embarrassed by three suitors for the hand of his daughter. Cyrano not only laughs down scholastic pedantry, but also, consciously or unconsciously, furnishes by parody a sufficient criticism of his own frigid 'Lettres Amoureuses.' And when his Genevote takes occasion to ridicule at length the style of the bygone romances of chivalry, now dethroned by the sentimental-gallant romances of La Calprenède and Mlle. de Scudéry, was he self-conscious that the jargon of the antique gaulois literature was more amusing and picturesque than his own jargon of pointes and concetti? As for the play itself, the peasant suitor is the first example of dialect used on the French stage; and Molière, besides availing himself of the final intrigue in the composition of his 'L'Amour Médecin,' transfers a whole scene almost word for word—the famous scene of the 'Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère?'-to his 'Fourberies de Scapin.'

'La Mort d'Agrippine' presents the widow of Germanicus conspiring with Sejanus against the tyranny of Tiberius. It is a matter throughout of simulation and dissimulation; each character, high-pitched to the point of bombast without relief, treading the tragic buskin in a circle and without progression, plots with 'confidents' against each and all. Cyrano, the unruly lover of liberty, has bowed submissively to the yoke of the dramatic three unities. You have couplets and tirades that give the true ring of Corneille's verse; but Cyrano must find that his dramatic eloquence furnishes arms to the enemies he has won, unknown enemies who are watching opportunity. For any disciple of Gassendi was to be held suspect of libertinage, of free-thinking. In what did Cyrano offend? In this, and no more. His Sejanus fears not the heathen gods which man has made.' Now the prudent Racine, later, will avoid arraignment of the heathen gods, though the appropriate occasion offers itself to him more than once. But Cyrano's Sejanus is guilty in still greater degree; condemned to death, he rises to Stoic dignity, and scorns death as no more than a return to pre-natal nothingness. Whereupon Cyrano is straight

way convicted of impiety out of his own mouth. La Monnoye informs us that, at one performance, a set of gapers (badaude), eager to discover where they ought to be scandalised, heard these few suspicious lines without winking, and feared disappointment, till, at length, Sejanus, pointing to Tiberius, cries : ‘Let us strike ! There is the victim!' The word hostie is used in the same sense by Corneille ; but poor Cyrano has plainly blasphemed the Host, and the audience rises to its feet with shrieks and imprecations. At all events, the Duc d'Arpajon, accepting the dedication in the first printed edition, withdraws his approval from the second, although the authorities saw no cause to prevent reimpression.

Cyrano was of the household of this Duc d'Arpajon when the Plays and the Letters appeared in 1654. Cyrano at last-reluctantly, as 'an idolater of freedom, but at last—had taken the advice of his friends about the need of a patron to back him at court; Cyrano who, after his exploit of the one against a hundred, had refused the advances of the Maréchal de Gassion, preferring his liberty to his worldly fortune. He was presently to die at the age of thirty-five. One day, in entering his patron's mansion, he receives a dangerous wound in the head from a billet of wood. By accident, or of malice ? Anecdote scrupled not to state that, three parts mad already, he now was in a condition attend mass in shirt and nightcap, and must be removed, penniless, to die in the hospital. Yet Lebret had previously put the true facts upon record. Cyrano had languished for many months in the house of one of his warm admirers, the Grand Provost of Burgundy, not without complaints, indeed, against the patron who had abandoned him. A week before his death, desiring change of air, after the manner of dying men, he had himself borne to the house of a cousin, M. de Cyrano. And during his illness, according to the worthy Lebret, a great change had taken place in his sentiments. He was attended by a relative, the pious Baroness of Neuvilette, and the Reverend Mother Marguerite, who had ever esteemed him highly. These gave their solace. He manifests the aversion he has conceived against that libertinage of which young people for the most part are suspected. Had he not told his friend one day, when he was reproached with his new and unaccustomed melancholy, that at length he had come to know the world and its vanity; and that, serious of mind and sure of coming death, he regretted in chief the ill employment of his days ? And did he not quote Tibullus to this effect, declaring that Tibullus had prophesied of him?

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