The 1703 interrogation of a fifty-one-year-old Parisian named Pierre de Cyrano, hauled before the Bastille for exposing himself in the chapels of Notre-Dame, seems an unlikely doorway into a book of seventeenth-century love letters. Yet it is exactly where this edition begins, because the prisoner’s testimony settles an old quarrel about his famous uncle. Cyrano de Bergerac, he told the magistrate, was no Gascon swashbuckler from the town of Bergerac; he was Parisian, son of a Parisian, and the name came from a small property near Chevreuse that his grandfather had sold in 1636. What follows that archival revelation is a collection of amorous epistles, recovered from a single contemporary manuscript and printed here with their spelling intact, in which the author of the lunar voyages turns his extravagant imagination on the subject of desire.
The Gendarme in the Bastille
A Confession in the Great Hall
The editors open with a police case. On 7 September 1703 the beadle of Notre-Dame seized a man and brought him before commissioner Delamarre, and the prisoner confessed at once. His pleasure had been to wander the chapels, prowl among the pillars of the nave, and suddenly expose himself to stunned worshippers. Because the place was sacrilegious and the name was Cyrano, the case went up the chain of command until Minister Pontchartrain answered that the King wished the man lodged in the Bastille and questioned closely about his birth and the disorders that had brought him there.
The interrogation took place on 6 October, conducted by d’Argenson himself in the castle’s great hall. Pierre de Cyrano gave his age, his religion, his parentage, and a full military career: studies at the Jesuit college up to the second class, two years as a cadet in the régiment de Navarre, three campaigns with the Colonel-Général cavalry, ten more with the gendarmes of Flanders, and wounds at Stinkerque, la Marsaille and Fleurus, the last a shot to the head that eventually sent him home in 1698. He lived with his mother until her death five and a half months before his arrest, drew four hundred livres a year from the Hôtel de Ville, and blamed wine and idleness for the “infamies” he now repented. He left the Bastille in October 1707, bound for another place of detention, and there the trail goes cold.
What the Testimony Proves
The editors care little about the offenses. What matters is the genealogy. Here was a nephew, under oath, describing the family in detail: the grandfather Abel, the father Abel, the property at Mauvières and Bergerac held in fief from the duc de Chevreuse, the mother’s people in the faubourg Saint-Jacques. This testimony, they argue, demolishes the legend of the Gascon Cyrano once and for all. Savinien de Cyrano, fifth son of Abel and Espérance Bélanger, was baptized on 10 March 1619 at Saint-Sauveur in Paris. The author of the letters was a Parisian, and his own nephew said so.
The Craft of the Point
Wit Built on a Physical Absurdity
The editors then turn to criticism, and their analysis of Cyrano’s style is the most interesting writing in the volume. Take the line about the heart: “I gave you my heart; I have no more, and you have two; one cannot trust a double heart.” The pun on duplicity only works if the beloved literally owns two hearts, and that physical absurdity is the point. Cyrano’s originality, the editors argue, lies in this deliberate, irrational pursuit of the bodily side of a moral situation. The same trick appears when he weighs whether to weep, write, or die and concludes that writing is best, since his inkwell will lend him more ink than his eyes will furnish tears. The smile comes from a physical contingency the reader had not considered, a burlesque effect produced by realism, a sentence lifted by the unexpected spice of premeditated triviality.
The Scruple of Observation
What separates Cyrano from Sorel, Dassoucy, and Scarron is a constant habit of looking. His comparisons are ingenious because they are seen: an aqueduct is “bones whose marrow travels,” anticipating Pascal’s walking path; a cypress is “a pike lit with green flame,” anticipating Flaubert’s green obelisk; a lily is “a giant of curdled milk”; clouds are “great watering-cans” walking the sky. The editors are careful to insist he was no descriptive writer run wild. He is sober, almost dry, working in small touches, planting impressions here and there like flowers pinned on a moss carpet. In their summary judgment, Bergerac opened the vein that modern writers would later exploit, and dying young, he could only be misread by the classics of his own age, who took him for a madman because of the outward airs of a literary bravo, when he was merely a lover of gentle nature born in the rough skin of a refractory spirit.
The Manuscript and Its Letters
Monmerqué’s Find
The letters cannot strictly be called unpublished, but they had never been faithfully edited, and the printed versions differ substantially from the manuscript the editors worked from. It is a large seventeenth-century hand, bought in 1839 near Saint-Sulpice by the scholar Monmerqué, who wrote to the bibliophile Paul Lacroix in 1856 that he would not be far from believing it in Bergerac’s own hand, though he had never seen a letter written and signed by him. The collection was sold in 1861 and by 1890 belonged to M. Deullin of Epernay, who offered it to the Bibliothèque nationale. From its forty-one letters the editors extract eleven, keeping the spelling and repairing only the defective punctuation. Whether the letters went to real women, imaginary ones, or nobody at all is a question they refuse to settle; Cyrano’s private life is too obscure, and they leave to poets and dramatists the care of arranging or disarranging history.
The Lover’s Arguments
The letters themselves run on a few obsessive conceits. To a woman addressed as “Monsieur,” the writer complains less of the harm she did him than of the harm done in her name: on leaving, she left behind an insolent woman claiming to be her “idea,” who boasts power of life and death over him and outdoes her empire, since the absent lady wounded only by mischance and healed at once through pity, while this substitute tears open his closed wounds and digs new ones that cannot heal. Perhaps she stays away during his torture as the King withdraws from places of execution so as not to be importuned for pardons. Love, he notes, is the one disease medicine has written nothing about, having despaired of curing it. He then makes his will in mock-theological form: he is not damned since he adores her; he believed God incarnate as soon as he was told she was born of a woman; his prayers to saint Denis prove his veneration for the saints; the hope of possessing her never stirred him without his being convinced of the resurrection of the flesh. To assure himself of eternal life he orders his heirs to place his bones inside his parish church rather than the cemetery, because outside the Church there is no salvation. Dying thus, he cannot make a bad end.
Another letter thanks her for bracelets marked with her initials. He no longer fears that a prisoner bound by “les Lias et par le cœur” will escape, and playfully suspects the gift of sorcery, since hair and characters enter into charms—though a woman who can kill with impunity has no need of poison. He jests that a heart costing only “trois coups de brosses” is cheap, and advises her to collect such hearts, since hair returns to the head but hearts do not return to the breast.
Fevers, Suns, and Alcidiane
Elsewhere the suffering is not death though he dies from seeing her; he calls it fever, then corrects himself—it is rather the perfect harmony of their temperaments that made him ill. His heart beats against the walls of its prison and curses Heaven for refusing it power to join its half. He warns that his body may ignite in the streets, calls himself a “Sanson” willing to be crushed, and begs her to come. He asks where on her body no invisible arrow has struck him, calls her a pleasant “hérisson,” and sets her face saying yes against cruel fortune saying no. A “Reproche à une cruelle” says he writes with blood so she may bathe her eyes in the source of his life, compares her unfavorably to the Sun as a “Soleil hétéroclite,” and jokes about her being at “gemini” three months and saints hidden in Lent.
An editorial note explains that Monmerqué’s manuscript is incomplete, missing several leaves and not containing all the love letters, so the editor borrows from Le Petit’s edition to present the whole correspondence. Some letters partly reproduce earlier ones, proof that Cyrano reused his sharp points, “tirant volontiers plusieurs moutures du même sac.” The remaining pieces compare a lady to “Alcidiane” in an inaccessible dwelling, her province a second floating isle pushed back by his sighs; describe the fire she kindles, with an invocation of Saint Xavier and the signature “de Bergerac”; tell of a heart multiplying through his arteries; threaten that he will die blind, his eyes turned to alambics distilling his life, fearing he will be taken for an “Ardent” or exhibited as “la beste à feu”; return to predestination, the fishing net, and the hooks of her letter; confess love’s malady despite his youth; and close with a short note urging her to come, counting a thousand hours since her absence. The volume ends with the printer’s mark at Laval.
Wit, Desire, and a Corrected Legend
Two things hold this book together. The first is the figure of Cyrano himself, rescued from romance. The nephew’s testimony, the parish records, the fief near Chevreuse—all of it replaces the Gascon bravo of legend with a Parisian bourgeois who wrote tragedies, satires, lunar voyages, and a comedy, and who died too young for his own century to take his measure. The second is the machinery of the letters: the double heart, the inkwell outlasting the tears, the bones laid in the church, the eyes turned to stills. These are not the effusions of a lover so much as the exercises of a man who cannot think a moral situation without giving it a body, however absurd the body turns out to be. The editors’ claim is modest and persuasive: that in these small, dry, precisely seen touches, Cyrano opened a vein later writers would work for centuries, and that the letters deserve better than the careless reprints that had stood in for them.
