Cyrano de Bergerac

On 28 December 1897, Rostand’s heroic comedy became the greatest theatrical success since Hernani: forty curtain calls, a unanimous audience, and even a visit from Félix Faure, President of the Republic, on 6 January 1898. The play ran for four hundred performances until 1900, and Coquelin — introduced to the author the previous year by Sarah Bernhardt — went on to play the title role until his death, some nine hundred and fifty times! Rostand was elected to the Académie française in 1901, at the age of thirty-three, then its youngest member.

The figure of Cyrano first appeared in the wholly literary description given by Théophile Gautier in Les Grotesques (1844): “On opening the first volume of Bergerac, where his portrait is shown in engraving, the gigantic size and singular shape of his nose struck me so forcibly that I lingered over it longer than the matter deserved, and gave myself over to these profound reflections: […] it forms, in the middle, a mountain which seems to me to be, after the Himalayas, the highest mountain in the world; then it plunges toward the mouth, which it broadly overshadows, like a tapir’s snout or a bird of prey’s beak; quite at its tip, it is divided into two portions by a groove not unlike, though more pronounced, the furrow that cuts the cherry lip of Anne of Austria, the pale queen with the long ivory hands. This makes as it were two distinct noses on a single face, which is more than custom allows.” Rostand, no doubt, would have appreciated this.

A fine copy of the first printing, without any printing statement.

Fifty copies were printed on Japanese paper, along with a few copies on colored paper.