1676 CYRANO de BERGERAC * C17 Plays & Love * No Res

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LES OEVRES DIVERSES DE MONSIEVR DE CYRANO BERGERAC. [IN TWO VOLUMES,COMPLETE] A RO�EN,CHEZ LOVIS BEHOVRT, dansla cour du Palais.MDCLXXVI[1676] *** Bound with ***LE PEDANT IOVE', COMEDIE. PAR MONSIEYR CYRANO DE BERGERAC. A RO�EN,CHEZ LOVIS BEHOVRT, dansla cour du Palais.MDCLXXVI[1676] Handsome seventeenth century full calf, gilt tooled spine, text lightly age browned, very light damp staining to a few leaves and some spots, marginal repairs to two leaves, one leaf torn along fore edge with small loss of text (see pictures), overall good original condition. A duodecimo volume, it measures � approximately 14cm (5�") x 9cm (3�") x 4cm (1�"). Pagination pp. [8], 284, [4, blanks]; 177, [7, blanks]; 128, collated and complete with the engraved portrait frontispiece� Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655), famous French dramatist and duellist who is now best remembered for the many works of fiction which have been woven around his life story. In these fictional works he is featured with an overly large nose; portraits suggest that he did have a big nose, though not nearly as large as described in Edmond Rostand's play and the subsequent works about him. In real life de Bergerac was at first a soldier (and like his literary counterpart, an expert swordsman and duellist). Later he became a student of the philosopher Pierre Gassendi and then the author of fiction and political satire. Descended from a Sardinian fishmonger, Savinien Cyrano was born in Sens, Paris. Young Savinien, a rebel in school and at home, left Sens as soon as he could for Paris, successfully reinventing himself as an aristocrat and following his friend Henri Le Bret into the army. Joining Castel-Jaloux's Gascon cadets, he could easily pass for one of them by dropping 'Savinien' and becoming Cyrano de Bergerac, with a reputation to sustain as a duellist (over a hundred 'affairs of honour', according to the admiring Le Bret). Meanwhile he gained celebrity by his pen. A tragedy appeared, 'La Mort d'Agrippine', followed by a melange of letters satirical and amorous, and two remarkable works of science fiction, describing voyages to the sun and moon, made him a forerunner of sci-fi authors like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke. The Church, not a little bruised from its recent attempts, however successful, at muzzling Galileo, fingered Cyrano as a dangerous free-thinker who derided belief in witches, questioned the doctrine of Real Presence and mocked the Jesuits for their hypocrisy. As a libertine in the seventeenth-century sense, that is one who scorns conformity for its own sake, Cyrano was hardly orthodox in his private life. Though he may have dallied with his cousin Madeleine, she was emphatically not a Roxane, irradiating his tragically brief life with incandescent passion. Instead Addyman convincingly demonstrates that he was homosexual, mingling with figures such as Théophile de Viau, the finest French poet of his generation and a suspected sodomite, or the altogether more dubious Charles Coypeau Dassoucy, self-styled 'emperor of the burlesque', who travelled with an entourage of winsome choirboys. What is more, Cyrano's 'secret illness', referred to in an IOU for medication from a Parisian barber surgeon, may well have been syphilis. In its tertiary stage the disease often attacks the brain, and Addyman suggests this as a possible reason for the various contemporary references to him as a madman. His death in 1655, however, is more likely to have been the result of a street mugging instigated by the Jesuits and subsequent harsh treatment at the hands of his brother Abel, who had him confined in a lunatic asylum out of pretended concern for his wellbeing. Cyrano as a gay anti-Catholic sci-fi writer with the pox. (Keates, Literary Review) Cyrano's use of science helped to popularize new theories; but his principal aim was to ridicule authority, particularly in religion, and to encourage freethinking materialism. He “predicted” a number of later discoveries such as the ph... read more

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