The volume known as Lettres d’amour gathers the love letters attributed to Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, published from a seventeenth-century manuscript held at the Bibliothèque nationale, in an edition prepared with an introduction by G. Capon and R. Yve-Plessis. The book pairs the letters themselves with a substantial scholarly apparatus: an archival inquiry into Cyrano’s family and a critical study of his style. What emerges is less a conventional correspondence than a set of virtuoso exercises in wit, and the editors are candid that whether the letters ever reached real women remains an open question.
The Exhibitionist in the Chapel
The introduction opens not with love but with scandal. On 7 September 1703 the suisse of Notre-Dame de Paris dragged a man by the collar to the office of commissaire Delamarre; the prisoner immediately admitted the charge. He was an exhibitionist—the word did not yet exist in medical vocabulary—who haunted chapels and suddenly exposed himself to devout women. Given the rarity of the case, the sacrilegious setting, and the man’s name, Delamarre handed him to exempt Simonnet and sought special instructions. Minister Pontchartrain answered that the King wanted him in the Bastille, interrogated thoroughly about his birth and his disorders. He entered the Bastille on 20 September, and on 6 October M. d’Argenson questioned him personally in the castle’s great hall.
The prisoner declared himself Pierre de Cyrano, fifty-one years old, Catholic, a Parisian bourgeois by birth, arrested by order of the King. His father had been a Paris bourgeois living on his means; Cyrano de Bergerac was his uncle, the author of the tragedy Agrippine, the Lettres satiriques et amoureuses, the États de l’Empire de la Lune et du Soleil, and the comedy Le Pédant joué, whose works were collected and printed by sieur Le Bret and dedicated to Abel Cyrano de Mauvières, the respondent’s father. The uncle came from Paris, son of Abel Cyrano, the prisoner’s grandfather; the name Bergerac derived from a small property near Chevreuse, as did Mauvières, both sold by the grandfather in 1636. The family’s origins ran back through Paris to a great-grandfather from Sardinia. The uncle’s wife was Espérance Bélanger. Pierre himself had studied to the seconde class at the Jesuit college, served as cadet in the régiment de Navarre for two years, then in the régiment Colonel-Général de la cavalerie for three campaigns, then in the gendarmerie, compagnie des gendarmes de Flandres, for ten campaigns, at the battles of Steenkerque, La Marsaille, and Fleurus, where a shot to the head dangerously wounded him. Falling ill in 1698, he obtained leave from the marquis de Beauvau. He had one sister married to a clerk in the salt tax at Saint-Quentin, and drew 400 livres of rent from the Hôtel de Ville. Provoked by wine and eau-de-vie, he confessed, repented, and begged pardon of God and the King. He left the Bastille on 19 October 1707, bound for another place of detention.
What the Genealogy Proves
The editors call the genealogy the capital point of this unpublished archival piece. It confirms what biographers had argued against the legend of a Gascon Cyrano: the author of the Lettres d’amour was Parisian, son of a Parisian, attested by his own nephew, and his name came from land near Chevreuse. Noble homme Abel de Cyrano, écuyer, seigneur de Mauvières et de Bergerac, held the land called Sous-Forêt, later Bergerac, in full fief from Charles de Lorraine, duc de Chevreuse.
Savinien de Cyrano, fifth son of Abel and Espérance Bélanger—married in 1612 at Saint-Gervais—was baptized on 10 March 1619 at Saint-Sauveur. All his elder brothers died young except the second, named Abel like his father; on the father’s death Abel took the name Cyrano de Mauvières and Savinien that of Cyrano de Bergerac. Two daughters, Marie and Anne, were born after Savinien, but their baptismal records were not found in Paris, so the editors presume the family left its lodgings in the rue des Prouvaires after 1619 for the country, perhaps Bergerac or Mauvières, since those domains were not sold until 1636. Probably after the sale the Cyranos returned to the capital; certainly the father’s death record of 1645 gives his address as Paris, again the rue des Prouvaires.
Savinien was raised in the country. His future panegyrist Le Bret, who knew and loved him from childhood, was raised by the same master, a village priest—a “good priest” whose lessons and corrections Savinien little valued, dismissing him as an “Aristotelian donkey.” The child obtained from his father permission to go to Paris for his humanities at the collège de D——, where the fragment breaks off.
The Anatomy of a Conceit
The editors then turn to criticism, and their analysis of Cyrano’s wit is the intellectual heart of the volume. When he writes, “I gave you my heart; I have none left, and you have two; one cannot trust a double heart,” he plays on the duplicity implied in the word “double.” But he reaches the pun only by positing a physical absurdity as premise—that the lady has two hearts. This deliberate yet irrational pursuit of the physical aspect of a moral situation is what makes his point original. In the same way, “Should I weep, should I write, should I die? Better that I write; my inkwell will lend me more ink than my eyes will furnish tears” provokes a smile through a physical contingency outside the reader’s attention—a burlesque effect achieved through realism, a sentence elevated by the unforeseen spice of premeditated triviality.
His burlesque would be no better or worse than that of Sorel, Dassoucy, or Scarron were it not for a constant scruple of observation that makes his comparisons ingenious and pretty. Before Pascal’s famous “walking path,” he sees an aqueduct as “bones whose marrow travels”; before Flaubert’s “green obelisk,” he sees the cypress as “a pike lit at the green flame.” The lily appears as “a giant of curdled milk,” and clouds as “great watering-cans” walking the sky. Yet he is not a descriptive writer to excess—he is sober, almost dry, painting in small touches, planting impressions here and there like flowers pinned on a moss carpet. Bergerac, the editors conclude, first opened the vein later exploited by many modern writers; dead young, he could only be misunderstood by the classics of his own time, who took him for a madman because of his outward airs of a literary bravo. He was merely a lover of gentle nature born in the rough skin of a refractory spirit.
The Manuscript and Its Editor
The Lettres d’amour, the editors explain, cannot be called unpublished, but they were never faithfully edited; the printed editions differ importantly from the manuscript they used, written in a large seventeenth-century hand and owned by the late scholar Monmerqué, who bought it in 1839 near Saint-Sulpice. In 1856 Monmerqué wrote to the bibliophile Paul Lacroix that the manuscript was of Bergerac’s time and that he was inclined to believe 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 in 1890 belonged to M. Deullin of Epernay, who offered it to the Bibliothèque nationale. From its forty-one letters the editors extracted eleven; some are formally labeled “d’amour,” others bear special titles reproduced here. They respected the spelling scrupulously, modifying punctuation only for intelligibility. Whether the letters were addressed to real correspondents or are pure rhetorical exercises they decline to resolve: Cyrano’s private life is too unknown, and that question must be left to poets and dramatists.
The Letters Themselves
The correspondence opens with a letter to Mademoiselle de S. Denis—beginning, oddly, “Monsieur”—complaining of an insolent “idea” left behind. Others follow: a letter to “Madame” on being caught at fishing; one declaring “I die of love”; one arguing that he lost no heart but became more honest; “Regret d’un éloignement,” which asks whether he should weep, write, or die; “Contre une femme intéressée,” on money opening a woman’s understanding; “Effets amoureux d’une absence,” which figures his eyes as alembics; and “Éloge d’une rousse,” a mock-panegyric on red hair.
A fragmentary opening asks that his life be no longer than his servitude, a wish he does not dare entreat. He reasons that he is neither the lady’s friend—fortune never gave him occasion to merit it—nor her servant, lacking permission to call himself so; yet he will be “your I-know-not-what.”
Bracelets of Hair and a Heart for Three Brushstrokes
“Sur des bracelets de cheveu” answers a gift of bracelets woven from the lady’s hair and marked with her ciphers. A prisoner arrested by “the bonds and by the heart” need no longer fear escape. He confesses that, were she not too beautiful to be a sorceress, her gift would have been suspect, since charms usually involve hair and characters. Since she can kill with impunity, poison is useless to her; he suspects she has worked a ligature on him. His death would be more glorious by supernatural means, he argues, then jokes that she may take this for mockery, before asking seriously whether a heart bought for three brushstrokes comes cheap—advising her to take many at that price, since hair returns to the head but hearts do not return to the breast. He wonders whether she sent the most insensible part of her person, and concludes that whether her intentions are good or ill, he confuses sympathy with antipathy, finding the hands that strike or caress him equally desirable when they are hers. He signs “your slave.”
The next letter to Madame describes his malady: he dies since seeing her, burns, trembles, his pulse disordered. He calls it fever, but it is not, since fever is a “quarrelsome disproportion” of qualities, whereas the perfect harmony of their temperaments is what made him ill. On seeing her he seemed to find the beautiful that nature pushes all men to seek; on her speaking he cried out that this was what he had wanted to say so often. His heart, “that little sovereign,” angry at not being absolute in its empire, refuses its functions and sends fire everywhere; in three days his body may ignite in the streets. He begs her to come to it, calling it a Samson content to die crushed under his palace’s ruins if he crushes those preventing him from embracing her. Nature, having made her capable of wounding him, tied one of her legs lest she carry away the remedy she owes him; he asks where on her body no invisible arrow has struck him, calls her an agreeable hedgehog, notes that her forehead flatters, her eyes promise, her mouth smiles, but that “my ill fortune” forbids hope. He urges her to oppress “this barbarian,” asks whether it would make her lie, and says he would rather be obliged to her than to his enemy. He threatens recourse to death, the physician of great evils, hoping her disaster will then soften her; he will complain of her barbarity and ask God for justice, who will condemn her to burn under the Earth since he burned above. Better that they burn with love instead.
Blood, Ink, and a Heteroclite Sun
“Reproche à une cruelle” says he writes with blood so that she may bathe her eyes in the source of his life, wishing she could drink it; he would have obtained more from her cruelty in an hour than in ten years of her affection. He asks her to figure his ideas painted with his blood, his blood still imprinted with ideas received from pain; he felt his heart distilling through his pen, having no tears left. He contrasts the Sun, “more billious than you,” which consumes nothing while it finds a tear, with her, a “heteroclite Sun”: the sun lodges only a month in a house, while her host complains she has been at “Gemini” three months. He jokes that he cannot see her because saints are hidden during Lent, and asks her to make Easter arrive before Holy Week.
Here an editorial note intervenes: the manuscript Monmerqué found is incomplete in several leaves and does not contain all of Cyrano’s love letters. To present the whole correspondence the editors borrow from Le Bret’s edition the text of the following epistles. Some of these partly reproduce letters already read—proof, the editors remark, that Cyrano, having sharpened happy points, did not hesitate to reuse them, “willingly drawing several grist from the same sack.”
The Inaccessible Lady and the Unbeliever
The letter “À Madame *” tells the lady that for a person as beautiful as “Aleidiane” an inaccessible dwelling was needed, like that heroine’s; since her Province can only be approached by hazard, he thinks her charms have enchanted it elsewhere, making it a second floating isle pushed back by the wind of his sighs. His letters, despite the messengers’ art, cannot reach her; he fears that seeking her County on the map he will find in its place a land where ice prevents approach. The Sun, whom she resembles, fixed itself in the heavens to illuminate a victory of little interest, while she stays to illuminate the most beautiful of hers. He protests that his silent, discreet conversation will express only vows, homages, adorations; he asks why she fears conversation with a thing that never spoke, suspects she refuses him her sight to avoid communicating a miracle more than once to a profane man, and argues that the conversion of an unbeliever like him requires seeing the miracle more than once. The gods receive incense smoke, he notes, and something would be missing from their glory if they were not adored; she should not refuse adoration, since she possesses Wisdom and Beauty.
The final letter to Madame begins by insisting that the fire she burns him with has so little smoke that the severest Capuchin could not blacken his conscience or his humor with it—and there the notes end.
Wit as a Way of Seeing
Read together, the letters and the editors’ commentary make a case about what kind of writer Cyrano was. The love letter, in his hands, is not a vehicle of feeling so much as a machine for producing astonishment: a heart stolen and counted, hair turned into a charm, eyes turned into alembics, the beloved addressed as a sun, a hedgehog, a miracle. The editors’ term for the method is the pursuit of the physical aspect of a moral situation—taking a metaphor literally and then reasoning it out to its absurd conclusion. The result can look like madness to a classical taste, and the editors say as much: his contemporaries took him for a literary bravo, when in fact his precision of observation, his sober small touches, anticipate the imagery of far later writers. The question of sincerity hovers over everything. The editors refuse to decide whether these letters were sent to living women or composed as rhetorical exercises, and their refusal is itself a reading: the private life is too dark to settle it, and the letters must stand on their wit.
A Reputation Corrected
The edition’s lasting contribution is documentary. The Bastille interrogation, recovered from the archives, dismantles the legend of the Gascon Cyrano by showing that the family came from Paris and took its name from a property near Chevreuse. The manuscript history—Monmerqué’s purchase near Saint-Sulpice in 1839, its sale in 1861, its arrival with M. Deullin of Epernay and his offer to the Bibliothèque nationale—explains why the letters circulated in unreliable printed versions and why a faithful text mattered. And the editorial decision to supplement the defective manuscript from Le Bret’s edition, while noting Cyrano’s habit of recycling his best points, gives a rare glimpse of a seventeenth-century writer at work, sharpening a conceit and then spending it more than once.
