"It seems that a man who opened up so many paths to talent and who went so far in all the paths he opened, ought to have left a name in any literature....
"There was once a wooden horse which bore in its flanks all the conquerors of Ilion, yet had no part in the triumph. This begins like a fairy-tale ... and yet it is true.
"Poor wooden horse! Poor Cyrano!"[9]
But, if Charles Nodier carried on the legend, he did little more than open the way for Theophile Gautier, whose famous Grotesque is filled with every conceivable error of fact and yet is obviously one of Rostand's chief sources. Les Grotesques appeared in 1844 and contained ten pseudo-biographical sketches of "romantic" personalities in French literature chiefly of the 17th century. The book itself is an interesting by-product of the romantic movement, but here we are only concerned with the sixth sketch, Cyrano de Bergerac. This opens with a fantastic divagation upon noses, perhaps the most exaggerated development of the legendary Cyranesque appendage. If the reader will examine Cyrano's portraits, without prejudice and with particular attention to the nose, he will scarcely be prepared for this outburst:
"This incredible nose is settled in a three-quarter face [portrait], the smaller side of which it covers entirely; it forms in the middle a mountain which in my opinion must be the highest mountain in the world after the Himalayas; then it descends rapidly towards the mouth, which it largely obumbrates, like a tapir's snout or the rostrum of a bird of prey; at the extremity it is divided by a line very similar to, though more pronounced than, the furrow which cuts the cherry lip of Anne of Austria, the white queen with the long ivory hands. This makes two distinct noses in one face, which is more than custom allows, ... the portraits of Saint Vincent de Paul and the deacon Paris will show you the best characterized types of this sort of structure; but Cyrano's nose is less doughy, less puffy in contour; it has more bones and cartilage, more flats and high-lights, it is more heroic."
Cyrano de Bergerac.
We then learn that Cyrano was a wonderful duellist, that he revenged any insult to his nose with a challenge; after more disquisition on noses we read that Cyrano was "born in 1620, in the castle of Bergerac, in Périgord"[10], that he was unable to endure the pedantry of his schoolmaster and so that good country gentleman, his father, allowed him to go to Paris, where at eighteen he threw himself into fashionable life with the greatest success. Then comes a highly-coloured picture of the contrast between life in Paris in 1638 and the Bergerac family in their "tranquil and discreet house, sober and cold, well ordered and silent, almost always half-asleep in the shadow of its pallid walnut trees between the church and the cemetery." This is followed by a defence of Cyrano against the charge of atheism with a quotation from The Death of Agrippina. Next we hear that this Gascon gentleman joined the Gascon company of guards with Le Bret and of his numerous prowesses with the sword, and this slides into a description of Cyrano's early slashing style, with quotations from The Pedant Outwitted and the story of the actor whom Cyrano forbade to play. This is followed by several pages of excited panegyric, paraphrased from Le Bret; we get Cyrano's wounds, his love of study, his disinterestedness, his love of freedom and scorn of serving les grands, his subsequent service with the duc d'Arpajon, the falling timber on his head and his death; then we hear of his simple habits, his brilliant friendships and his study under Gassendi. The essay ends with several pages, dealing with Molière's famous plagiarism from The Pedant Outwitted and containing a most exaggerated account of Cyrano's writings, extremely loose in expression, showing that Gautier can have had but a superficial acquaintance with Cyrano's books.