The Real Cyrano?  By Richard Allen Cave

      The nose, Cyrano’s curse in life, has become the means to his immortality.  In Rostand’s imagination it becomes the spur to his daring, his eloquence, his romantic ardour, his chivalry.  Everything that is finest in Cyrano is inspired by a wish to transcend that physical deformity; cultivating greatness of soul is his one means of escaping the fate of appearing always ridiculous.  And yet the nose is something of a Romantic myth.
      Much of the action of Rostand’s play is rooted in historical fact:  Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-55), dramatist, free-thinker, soldier and philosopher, did, singlehanded, rout an ambush at the Porte de Nesle designed to assassinate a fellow-poet; he did fight at Arras where he was savagely wounded in the neck; did mount an abusive attack on the actor Montfleury and did write fantasies about cosmonauts visiting the Sun and the Moon.  However, portraits included in early editions of his writings show him sporting a generous and impressive, but not outrageous, nose and he was judged handsome in his youth.  It was Theophile Gautier in Les Grotesques (1835) who exalted the nose to legendary proportions.
      In Savinien Cyrano’s Comic History of the States and Empires of the Moon, a satirical fable akin to Gullivar’s Travels, Gautier noted that true merit amongst the moonfolk is always gauged in relation to the length of the nose; everything that is best in a man—courage, intellect, wit, passion—exists in exact proportion to the size of his nasal member.  Suspecting that a degree of self-consciousness in the author inspired this detail, together with a wish to seek consolation in art from a personal misfortune, Gautier worked the whole idea up into a vigorous rhetorical defense of the large nose as the index of a superior consciousness.  What Rostand brought to the legend in the making was poetry and pathos.  For him a further exciting factor about Savinien Cyrano was his belonging to the age of Richelieu, the era romanticized by Dumas in The Three Muskateers (D’Artagnan actually makes a brief appearance in the play to pay his respects to an illustrious contemporary), a world of the imagination shared by Victor Hugo’s characters, Hernani and Ruy Blas, men of passion and the highest principles who were yet social outsiders.
      It was the pathos inherent in this approach to Cyrano that appealed to the actor Coquelin who worked with Rostand on its composition and eventually created the role in December 1897.  Coquelin’s gift as for sustaining fiery, rhetorical tirades and the play abounds in possibilities for such displays of virtuosity; but so sure is Rostand’s psychological portrayal of Cyrano that every one of these is undercut by a tragi-comic irony:  the bravura delivery is the projection of an imagined self bitterly at odds with the physical reality, a triumphant effort of will to inspire awe and not ridicule.