What accounts for the success of this play, a success that has lasted now for more than a century? This is a question that has vexed literary critics and rather annoyed the intelligentsia, who have been at pains to insist that the popular appeal of Cyrano has less to do with the intrinsic artistic merits of the play than with the historical and cultural context in which it was received. For once the euphoria of opening night had died down, other, less sympathetic voices began to be heard. Some, like Jules Romains, saw Rostand as one of a group of “eloquent and vulgar poets” peddling a “degraded form of romantic drama” to the middle classes. Rostand and his ilk, according to Romains, “deserve more than scorn: reprobation. They have lowered French taste, perverted the public, compromised our national dignity.” André Ferdinand Hérold saw in Cyrano a fine exercise in “cacography” (Monsieur Rostand “knows a thousand ways to torture a line”) and a “masterpiece of vulgarity” by one who has perfected “the art of writing badly.”
Critics almost never like popular successes (if the vulgar public were able to identify good theater and literature on its own, critics would be left with nothing to do), but Rostand’s case is of more than passing interest because the divisiveness surrounding the reception of Cyrano reflects a great cultural unease, a malaise in late-nineteenth-century French society. Cyrano became an affaire, as the French say, such that writers, critics, and even ordinary theatergoers had to be either for or against it. “Claudel or Rostand,” said the novelist André Gide, “you have to choose,” meaning: One must either grapple with all the harshness and the complexities of the modem world (Paul Claudel, a contemporary of Rostand’s, was a highly original playwright influenced by symbolism), or else remain in the idealized, fanciful place depicted by Rostand and incarnated by his valiant soldier-poet Cyrano.
The Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin’s production of Cyrano provoked a new round in the old French debate between the ancients and the moderns, a debate that was intricately related to the raging political issue of the day—namely, nationalism. Rostand, rightly or wrongly, was associated with what Jehan Rictus, referring to the right-wing royalist movement, called “a form of literary Boulangism.” He was perceived by many of his contemporaries as an old guard, highly conservative figure. Rictus surely went too far—Rostand’s personal politics were quite liberal; he was a Dreyfusard and a friend of the socialist Leon Blum. But from a literary point of view, it is undeniable that Cyrano breaks no new ground. Rostand, moreover, was not bashful about his dislike for the changing times: “I wrote Cyrano... with love, with pleasure, and also with the idea of fighting against the tendencies of the times, tendencies which, in truth, irritated me, revolted me.”
While Rostand is not explicit about these “tendencies,” it is not hard to guess what he has in mind. The overall cultural mood in France during the 1890s was gloomy, joyless, and resentful. In literature, harsh forms of realism prevailed (especially Emile Zola’s doctrine of naturalism), alongside a Wagnerian-influenced decadence (as in the works of Joris Karl Huysmans and Octave Mirbeau, for example); in the theater, the psychological drama of Henrik Ibsen and Maurice Maeterlinck played in theaters that seemed ever more open to experimentation. Against this backdrop, Rostand’s play, while it draws upon the melodramatic and vaudeville-style traditions of boulevard theater, represented something very different from what was on offer in Paris. Above all, it came as a welcome release from the often rebarbative, highly cerebral avant-garde art forms, offering by contrast an intellectually undemanding spectacle full of movement and pathos (“a fanfare of red pants,” as one critic put it). “What happiness! What happiness!” wrote Francisque Sarcey. “We are at last to be rid of Scandinavian mists and overly minute psychological analyses, and of the deliberate brutalities of realist drama. Here is the joyous sun of Old Gaul which, after a long night, is rising over the horizon. This brings pleasure; it refreshes the blood!”
After Maeterlinck’s “static drama,” in which a clock chiming constitutes a major event, it must indeed have been refreshing to see Cyrano leap onto the stage and fight a duel while composing a ballad. But there are other reasons for the success of Cyrano. One explanation sometimes advanced appears paradoxical: In spite of its worldwide appeal (performed from Moscow to Tokyo to Reunion Island, the play has been adapted to fit the context of colonial India, translated into Scottish dialect, etc.), Cyrano’s appeal has a lot to do with its irreducible Frenchness. For Cyrano is a Gascon, and to the French theatergoer this evokes a particularly flattering image of French national identity. In the French imagination, the Gascon—the model is d’Artagnon in Alexandre Dumas’ Three Mousqueteers (1844)—is proud, gallant, loyal, honest (the French expression “parole de Gascon” means something like “Scout’s honor”) and, above all, courageous. This last characteristic, which is related to Gascony’s history—war was for centuries a way of life in this fiercely independent province—must have appealed to the French public in 1897 : Still in mourning after a humiliating military defeat in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War, mired in the sordid revelations of the Dreyfus Affair, the French were primed to welcome this vision of France in a sweeping cape, this story of French bravura, heroism, and panache.
Thus Cyrano was seen as a tonic for the neurasthenic French spirit (“sickly product of the North,” to cite the words used to describe Christian in the play), and Rostand was seen as upholding the endangered values of old France (that President Faure took his family along to the play is indicative of the kind of values the play was thought to impart). Rostand, in fact, belongs if not to “Old Gaul” then at least to a fairly archaic France, different from the thoroughly industrialized and modern country described minutely in the novels of Emile Zola. The contrast between the two authors is stark and instructive (Rostand’s first important piece of writing compared Zola, unfavorably, with the precious novelist Honoré d’Urfé). While Zola was down in the mines and sewers of Paris, taking notes on the daily life and mœurs of the French worker as though in a laboratory, Rostand was dreaming up Cyrano in his comfortable apartment in the rue Fortuny. In his living room stood a black-lacquered piano, a wedding gift to Rosemonde from the composer Jules Massenet, who had been the witness at the marriage; in the study hung two Fragonards; on the writing table the Countesse de Genlis, an ancestor of Rosemonde, had written love letters to the Duke of Orleans, etc., etc. Aspects of Cyrano bear the imprint of this association with the aristocracy. There is, for example, the obvious point that the subject of the play is a nobleman. There is the fact that Rostand chose to write in rhymed alexandrines (lines of twelve syllables that obey fairly rigid laws of prosody), an anachronism, to say the least, in an era that long ago had seen this tradition challenged by Charles Baudelaire (with his “prose poems”) and Stéphane Mallarmé. The seventeenth-century setting of the play seems a deliberate avoidance and implicitly a rejection of everything contemporary, suggesting Rostand’s nostalgia for a time when relations were more strictly and more hierarchically organized. The evils that Rostand chooses to fight are not the complicated social ills of alcoholism, unemployment, and destitution; in Cyrano enemies are easily identifiable (the bullies who threaten Lignière; the Prince of Spain in the siege of Arras; the inherent corruptness of the patronage system), and the absolutism of the response is accordingly simple.
There is some truth to the argument that Cyrano de Bergerac succeeded because it permitted a demoralized population to believe once again in the ideals of valor, courage, and sacrifice that recent experience had so severely challenged. At the same time, there is something inherently unsatisfying about such a line of reasoning. It seems a peculiarly negative way of assessing the worth and impact of a work of art, interesting enough from an extratextual perspective, but neglectful of the intrinsic merits of the play, which might also help explain the thralldom of spectators at the turn of the century and beyond. For a great deal of the aesthetic appeal of this play stems from within: from the ingenuity of its characterization (I refer to Cyrano, obviously,
but also to Ragueneau, Cyrano’s alter ego, in a sense), from the drama as well as the sheer unexpectedness of its plot (no one was expecting a play about a man with a big nose), from its thrilling dynamism (Rostand is superb at handling large-scale crowd scenes with lots of action; see the opening act). Moreover, in broad terms, Cyrano succeeds because it stages so well the tension between the earthly and the ethereal, between the base and the sublime, and because theatergoers recognize in it an intelligent balance of irony, realism, and fantasy. To go a step further, Cyrano stages the triumph of the ethereal over the earthly, of the sublime over the base. To put this in the language of the play, Cyrano is a staging of panache, without doubt the single most important word in the play and one we will examine here in some detail.
But first things first. As the title of the play suggests, Cyrano de Bergerac is very much about Cyrano, and Cyrano is a likable character. There is hardly a juicier role in the dramatic repertory: Cyrano is almost always on stage, and it is almost always Cyrano who does the talking (to such an extent that even when Christian is speaking, it is often in a sense still Cyrano). Rostand fully exploits the dramatic potential of a character whose physical and verbal assuredness “dominates the situation,” to use a phrase Rostand applied to panache. If Cyrano’s centrality to the play corresponds to Rostand’s dramatic vision, it stems partly also from the circumstances of composition of the play. The part of Cyrano was written for one of the leading actors of the time, Constant Coquelin, whom Rostand had met through Sarah Bernhardt. Rostand got into the habit of showing Coquelin completed sections of the play as he went along. Some of the speeches scripted for other characters so pleased the star of the Paris stage that he claimed them for himself. The famous scene (act two, scene vii) in which Cyrano presents the cadets of Gascony, for example, was originally scripted for Carbon de Castel-Jaloux. (During rehearsals, when the actor playing Le Bret complained that he had very few lines, Coquelin responded: “But you have a fine role. I talk to you all the time.”)
Theater that stages a hero allows for more immediate and arguably more gratifying forms of identification than the theater of ideas. Like the cadets in Carbon de Castel-Jaloux’s company, the spectators of this play watch and listen to see what Cyrano will do and say next. Now everything Cyrano does and says is governed by what we could call an ethics of panache. Panache is Rostand’s word, or at least a word he made his own; before him, no one had used it in quite the same sense. In its simplest and literal sense, panache refers to the feathered plume of a helmet or other type of military headgear. This is the meaning of the word as it appears in act four, scene iv, where Cyrano speaks of Henri IV, who urged his soldiers during the battle of Ivry to “rally around my white plume; you will always find it on the path of honor and glory” (cited in the Bair translation of Cyrano; see “For Further Reading”). But when Cyrano uses the word again at the end of the play—poignantly, it is his and the play’s last word—it has acquired a metaphorical dimension, and suggests at once a commitment to valor, a certain elegance, self-esteem verging on pride, and also a certain... je ne sais quoi. Such vagueness is disappointing but also inevitable: Rostand himself warned against limiting the meaning of the word to a dictionary definition, as though to do so would be to imprison a sentiment the essence of which is to insist on absolute freedom from convention.
In his speech to the Académie française in 1903, Rostand described panache, rather mystically, as “nothing more than a grace.” “It is not greatness,” he said, “but something added on to greatness, and which moves above it.” Panache is not just physical courage in the face of danger; it includes a verbal assertiveness in the face of possible death. “To joke in the face of danger is the supreme form of polite-ness,” Rostand said. Hence panache is “the wit of bravura”—not bravura alone (which might be perfectly stupid), but the expression in language of that bravura and indeed language as an expression of bravura: “It is courage that so dominates a particular situation, that it finds just what to say.”
Panache thus describes the remarkable alliance of physical courage and verbal acuity that Cyrano so dramatically displays in act one, scene iv, where he engages in a duel while simultaneously composing a ballad. There is fundamentally here no difference between the sword and the word. Nobility of action and elegance in language—this is the rather aristocratic ideal that Rostand wishes to resurrect. (To the extent that it is related to linguistic brilliance, panache, we might note in passing, is a literary-artistic ideal; Cyrano is in part a portrait of the artist, the one who struggles against the vulgarity of the world and the baseness of language, and who redeems it through a winning phrase.)
A code of ethics, dictating behavior and speech in given situations, panache is akin to the concept of honor in Golden Age Spain. Like honor, panache represents a law of conduct that must remain inviolate, “unblemished and unbent,” and that not only explains the life of sacrifice that Cyrano has lived, but redeems that life. In a period of fin-de-siècle decadence, the audience at the Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin might well have found seductive this new and rather dashing version of morality. There is evidence that Rostand envisioned Cyrano as a figure to be emulated. Invited back to his Paris secondary school, the Lycée Stanislas, he encouraged the pupils (in rhymed verse, of course) to aspire to the ideal of panache (“empanachez-vous!”). Cyrano’s sacrifices, his refusal to be morally tainted or compromised (see his famous “No thank you!” speech in act two, scene viii; pp. 68-69) make for great theater but also seem to belong to a credo, or seek to impart a lesson. And Rostand indeed conceived of the theater as a privileged space in which the spirit of the people might be lifted up, morally elevated through a collective communion in common values. In his reception speech to the Académie française, Rostand said: “It is good that once in a while a people should once again hear the sound of its own enthusiasm.... It is really only now in the theater that souls, side by side, can feel like they have wings.”
Panache is supposed to be that common value around which we can all rally. It defines Cyrano, who, to the exclusion of all else, is equal parts courage and wit. Yet as stirring as are Cyrano’s performances, in deed as in word, it is worthwhile examining the play to see just what panache—the clamor of language and the bluster of sword-play—might serve to occlude. What precisely must be sacrificed if the ideal of panache is to be always honored? In Cyrano’s case, what is sacrificed is nothing less than his sexuality. That Rostand wants us to understand this seems evident from the blaring symbolism of the last line of the play, which contains a rhetorically remarkable use of the word panache: “Mon panache,” in French: You don’t need to be a Freudian to get the point.
CYRANO: ... Spite of your worst, something will still be left me to take whither I go... and to-night when I enter God’s house, in saluting, broadly will I sweep the azure threshold with what despite of all I carry forth unblemished and unbent... [He starts forward, with lifted sword] ... and that is ... [The sword falls from his hands, he staggers, drops in the arms of Le Bret and Ragueneau.]
ROXANE: ... That is? ...
CYRANO: ... My plume!
And the point is this: The ideal in Cyrano—panache, sacrifice, wit, elegance—is shadowed at every moment by its opposite—the material, the down-to-earth, the body and its functions. For if Cyrano carries us aloft toward the difficult ideal of panache, much of the rest of the play is concerned with more earthy matters. At bottom—and this goes a long way to explaining the enduring appeal of the play—Cyrano is a reflection on two abiding and related preoccupations: food and sex. French preoccupations, or at least things the French like to think they know a lot about (it would be difficult to contest them on the former). In Cyrano, which the astute critic Patrick Besnier has called “an apology for and a gigantic reverie about food,” references to a markedly French cuisine abound (see especially act two, scene i, and act four, scene vi) : The Frenchness of the dishes here is somewhat lost in the present translation. Ragueneau is as French as T
artarin de Tarascon; he is a sort of national treasure whose role, among other things, involves assuring the high quality of French culinary productions (“You, sir, be so good as to lengthen this gravy,—it is too thick!” etc. [act two, scene i]).
The entirety of the second act (“The Cookshop of Poets”) takes place in and around Ragueneau’s kitchen, which is more than just a background for the meeting between Cyrano and Roxane. Rostand took every precaution to make sure the setting for act two seemed authentic; in particular, he deemed the fake foodstuffs unconvincing and sent a stagehand to the local butcher to buy the genuine article. Already in the first act the small but important role of the sweetmeat vendor allows Rostand to bring into play the theme of food. Simply by naming aloud the “goodies” she sells at her stand—oranges, milk, raspberry cordial, citron-wine, grapes, lacrima, macaroons—she participates in one of the great pleasures associated with food—talking about it—and anticipates the cornucopia of the “Cookshop of Poets” as well as the feast at the siege of Arras. She also makes explicit a connection in Cyrano between food and femininity.
At the end of act one, noting that Cyrano has had nothing to eat, she freely offers him her wares (“Help yourself!”). Cyrano’s response is telling; consenting to eat only for fear that to refuse to do so might grieve the sweetmeat vendor, he takes a single grape, a glass of water, and half a macaroon. His abstemiousness with regard to the pleasures of the table extends symbolically to all pleasures of the flesh; a facet of his idealism, which leads him to prefer contemplation of the stars and the moon over more earthly and earthy delights, we will see as the play progresses that this tendency toward self-denial comes close to a philosophy of life—such that he manages to reach the end of the play and the end of his life without having conquered the object of his desire.