A fresh look at the French classics: an excerpt from the book

Cyrano de Bergerac – Edmond Rostand

Our main weaknesses hide our strengths … Or how proud of our huge nose

I actually read Proust in the original, worked for a French-language newspaper and can conjugate almost any verb in the subjunctive mood. I can complain in French to a waiter about a mistake in my order and still be charming enough that he brings me a free dessert. And thanks to the comedian group Les Inconnus, which was popular in the 1990s, I can even read French rap very badly. (“Le rap français, plus fort que jamais / Et si tu comprends pas, c’est que t’es pas branche.” – “French rap is stronger than ever / If you don’t understand it, you’re not cool.”) But in there are gaps in my knowledge. If with Flaubert I got a false start, then with Edmond Rostand I tried to cheat. Neither Cyrano de Bergerac, nor any 17th-century man (writer and swordsman), nor the hero of a 19th-century play was mentioned in my university program. As a result, I learned about Cyrano mainly from Steve Martin*.

I didn’t watch Roxanne when it came out in 1987. I was fourteen years old, and somehow this film passed me by, as films often did in the eighties. If you didn’t have time to go to the cinema, you had to wait a long time for the film to appear on video. I learned about Roxane when I lived in Russia, where I watched the Russian production of Cyrano de Bergerac three times. This is how my attachment to French began to fade. Now I watched French plays in Russian, checked whether I understood everything, including American films, and gradually got more and more tired of the French language. Perhaps I had more personal ties to Russian, which is why I thought I was trying to get to the bottom of my family’s roots. Perhaps I thought I had mastered enough French, which I had been studying for ten years. Or maybe it’s because my heart was broken, and because of friendship, and not because of love.

Shortly after entering university, I had a fight with my French pen pal, but now I don’t even remember why. At nineteen, instead of spending the summer with her family after six or seven years of yearly visits, I took a job at a French newspaper. We quarreled even more when I sent her copies of several of my articles published in the newspaper, and she criticized me and said that she immediately saw that they were written by an Englishwoman. (That’s definitely out of spite, because they were substantially edited by a kind French journalist with whom I worked.) I quit my French studies at the university and switched to Russian. I was not interested in Gerard Depardieu’s Cyrano. I saw the Russian version (the honored comedian Konstantin Raikin played in it), and I also looked at Steve Martin. In the end, I did read the play in French, but much later, when I stopped changing my language preferences so childishly. Looking back, I understand that the described throwing and searching for myself did not hurt anyone except myself, and were needed only to freeze my nose in such a sophisticated way to spite my mother. And this, in general, is quite appropriate when applied to Cyrano, because the nose in this play is such that it is not a shame to freeze it.

Cyrano is one of the best comic characters, and the play Cyrano de Bergerac proves to me that the French know how to have fun, and in a completely stupid way. Of course, there is evidence of this also in Molière – and after all, I studied, read and watched a lot of Molière, including at the Comedie Francaise theater in Paris, in the home of a truly great French “comedy”. I put this word in quotation marks, because it is important to understand one linguistic nuance here. When we say comedy, we mean something funny. In France this is not necessarily the case, although I would say that in recent years the meaning of the French word has changed somewhat under the influence of the English language. But originally the word comédie in French was closer to the word “theater” (and the situation is similar in many European languages, hence the “commedia dell’arte”). The word comédien in French does not mean “comedian”, but “actor”. The great playwright Moliere, the author of the original concept of “French farce”, wrote “comedies” in the French sense. Moliere is quite amusing, and yet we would not always call his works “comedies” in the usual sense of the word for us.

But Cyrano is funny from start to finish. Maybe a big nose just translates best to almost any language? Steve Martin is perfect for the role of Cyrano, because he has an innate youthfulness, without which this character cannot be played. Martin once did a skit about “traveler Steve Martin who got in touch from Montreal” and said the phrases haute couture and haute cuisine in a completely ludicrous (but quite close to French) way: “See? To speak French, you need to put a hair tie on your lips,” he says, pursing his lips. And again: “I drink rare wine straight from … Chateau … du … McDonald’s.” There’s also a snippet in a restaurant where he orders while pretending to speak French, and the waiter informs him that he just asked for a massage for his grandmother. “Anything else?” “Yes, give me the phone. I will sue my French teacher.”

Having become acquainted with Cyrano as a performance and not a book, I was later surprised that Cyrano de Bergerac was not written by Cyrano de Bergerac. (Sit down if this came as a shock to you, too.) Cyrano de Bergerac was written in the 19th century by Edmond Rostand. But there was also a real person named Cyrano de Bergerac, and he lived in the 17th century. To complicate matters, this real-life de Bergerac was also a writer, but what he certainly didn’t write were plays about himself. Rostand’s play, which forms the image of the man now known to us as Cyrano de Bergerac, was written in 1897. The real Cyrano de Bergerac was born in 1619 and died in 1655. But the problem is that we don’t know how close Rostand’s version is to the true story. A huge amount of information is available to us about the first, real Cyrano, but the facts are very contradictory, and therefore there are so many versions of his life that the fictional history of Rostand can be considered no worse than any other.

The play Cyrano de Bergerac was first staged at the thousand-seat theater of the Porte Saint-Martin in Paris in December 1897 and attracted full houses for three years. Rostand also wrote plays for Sarah Bernhardt, the great actress of the era. He became the youngest writer to be elected to the Académie française, National Council of Languages. He was good-looking, he could win any competition of French writers with a lush mustache, and he would not have missed the selfie. He had a pomaded and curled mustache worthy of a ringmaster, and he looked like Neil Patrick Harris’ Count Olaf from Lemony Snicket. But even the magnificence of Rostand’s mustache did not prevent his early death at the age of fifty, when he left the city “to improve his health”, and immediately fell victim to an influenza epidemic.

The play Cyrano de Bergerac survived Rostand’s reputation and is still performed to this day. It is interesting to read, not least because Rostand was famous for his detailed remarks. From the very beginning it becomes clear that the play is very unusual. From its first lines, it is quite possible to understand that Rostand was obsessed with the idea of ​​​​controlling everything. He describes the scene in great detail. Rarely do you find such clear and detailed directions and stage directions in plays. “The hall,” writes Rostand, “is a kind of ball-game shed, adapted and furnished for theatrical performances.”* When Cyrano first appears at the end of the third scene, Rostand describes him: “Protruding mustache, formidable nose.”

Cyrano de Bergerac begins as a play within a play in Paris in 1640, when Cyrano, a poet and legendary swordsman, comes to the theater to threaten the Montfleury actor who has been banned from the stage. Montfleury intends to play that evening, with Roxane, Cyrano’s cousin, among the spectators. We learn that the Comte de Guiche wants to marry Roxanne to a certain de Valver. The aristocrat Christian is also present in the hall, who confesses to his friend Linier that he is in love with Roxanne. As you can see, this is a play in which the actors periodically enter the auditorium, and in a sense there are two halls: in one, the audience watches the play within the play (you understand?), in the other, the real audience sits.

*Steven Glenn (Steve) Martin (Steve Martin; b. 1945) is an American actor, comedian, writer, musician, and composer. In the film “Roxanne” (1987) plays the role of Cyrano de Bergerac.