Cyrano de Bergerac 2

The oldest and most exalted section of the aristocracy was the noblesse d’épée. The seventeenth century descendent of the old feudal nobility was in many ways an anachronistic survival from an earlier age.
Roughly speaking, the different sections of the noblesse d’épée can be placed in the following order. At the head of the aristocracy came the noblesse d’épée, in other words all the relatives of the King, apart from his immediate family; next to them came the princes légitimés, the illegitimate children, or descendants of illegitimate children, of French Kings. Another strange category near the summit of the hierarchy was that of the princes étrangers. Beneath these again came the families who boasted the title of prince, but whose claim had never received official recognition, and for whom the title was merely an ornament.
Legally speaking, the rank which followed immediately upon the King and the royal family was that of duc et pair: the holders of this title were honored with the appellation of cousins du roi, their wives had the right to be seated on a tabouret in the Queen’s presence. Beneath the princes du sang, princes étrangers and ducs et pairs came the mass of the French aristocracy. For them it is quite impossible to establish a hierarchy based on titles, for many of these had been usurped by nouveaux riches, so that the titles of comte, marquis and baron were often quite meaningless terms by the seventeenth century. Titles were attached to an estate, and when an estate changed hands, the new proprietor acquired the title. Thus it came about that a title such as marquis might merely serve to cover up a fortune of very recent acquisition.

The passion for duelling gradually diminished in the course of the century, not so much because of the severity of the laws, but because it was increasingly condemned by public opinion. Nevertheless, the noblesse d’épée did not lose the quality of which duelling was merely an offshoot, their military valour. Cut off from any share in the government of the country, despising a career in the church as fit only for weaklings and younger sons, holding trade and industry beneath contempt, the French nobility continued in the only profession which custom and the government permitted it to follow. It is true that for the nobleman military service was a moral obligation, not a legal duty; a certain proportion did not serve in the army, either because they found the career distasteful, or because they were too poor to purchase a commission. The great majority, however, were brought up from earliest childhood in preparation for a career in the army. After a few years at school or under a private tutor, they passed on to an Académie where the chief accomplishments acquired were fencing, riding, dancing and a smattering of mathematics, which was all the education required for an officer and a gentleman. At fifteen or sixteen their career in the army would begin. If he were poor, a nobleman would start in the ranks; if he had the necessary money, he would begin as a volunteer and finally purchase a commission. A career in the French army in the seventeenth century was, in most cases, productive of glory rather than of wealth. It is true that the higher officers who distinguished themselves could win the King’s favour and lucrative pensions, but the vast majority of officers were brought to the verge of ruin by the expenses in which their career involved them. (From An Introduction to Seventeenth Century France by John Lough)
The Gascons were famous mercenaries, proud, stiff-necked fighters. Their impetuous character and eagerness to join in battle have been immortalized by Rostand in his famous nineteenth century play. But, like Dumas before him, he chose the seventeenth century Gascon as his hero. The romantic muskateer of the King’s guard, D’Artagnan, even makes an appearance in Cyrano, just to put you in the right context.
Throughout his novel, written 50 years before Rostand’s play, Dumas gently sends up his fiery young Gascon, making constant reference to his hot-blooded nature. His father’s advice to D’Artagnan in the first chapter shows how he is imbued with Gascon pride: ‘You are young; you ought to be brave for two reasons—the first that you are a Gascon, and the second that you are my son. Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures.’

When insulted by Aramis, having only just met him, in chapter four, D’Artagnan answers characteristically: ‘Monsieur, you act wrongly in endeavouring to mortify me. I am from Gascony, it is true; and since you know it, there is no occasion to tell you that Gascons are not very enduring, so that when they have begged to be excused at once, were it even for a folly, they are convinced that they have done already at least as much again as they ought to have done.’ All this from a single Gascon. In Rostand’s play we have a whole troupe of Gascony cadets, all with the same pride and spirit, the same fiery impetuous nature. They even admit they are a little mad, when speaking of their cool Colonel:

      ‘. . . The real Gascons, us
      Are a bit mad, but he’s a bit too sane,
      Rational. A reasonable Gascon’s dangerous.’

Hence the quarrelsome, happy-go-lucky, somewhat crazy Gascon is preferable to the calm schemer, even if they are, according to him:

      ‘The mountain-hovel nobility, the beefless barons
    A la sauce béarnaise, the Perigord princes,’

for their pride stems from their impoverishment and their generosity of spirit from the lack of lands or estates.

These qualities—of being proud fighters, braggart sons, generous mountain people, who would risk their life for their lord or king in an honourable cause, touched with a bit of madness—provide interesting similarities to the Highland lairds with their code of honour and their reputation as a warrior class, also proud and impetuous. Hence in this production the director has chosen to emulate the soft Scottish brogue as an indication of Gascon dialect, to differentiate the Gascony cadets and their poet-hero Cyrano from the elegant Parisian-speaking nobles of the fashionable court.
The Gascon dialect itself developed in the fifth and sixth century. The south-western province of what eventually became Gascony was over-run by the Visigoths from Spain. They swept through the Pyrenees up to the Loire and made Aquitaine part of their kingdom. The Franks counter-attacked but their rule was opposed by the Vascones, a tribe of non-Latinized Iberians. They established themselves in the valleys of the Pyrenees imposing their own Basque language. Over the years they conquered the flat lands between the Adour River and the Garonne, and while mingling with a larger population developed the unique Gascon dialect, similar to that of the Languedoc.