Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune. English

  Produced by Marc D'Hooghe at https://www.freeliterature.org(Images generously made available by the Internet Archive)

  A VOYAGE TO THE MOON

  BY MONSIEUR

  CYRANO DE BERGERAC

  NEW YORK

  DOUBLEDAY and McCLURE Co

  M. DCCC. XCIX.

  CONTENTS

  Cyrano de Bergerac.

  Note on the Translation.

  The Translator to the Reader.

  Title-page of Lovell's Translation of The Comical History of the States and Empires of the World of the Moon: London, 1687.

  I.--Of how the Voyage was Conceived.

  II.--Of how the Author set out, and where he first arrived.

  III.--Of his Conversation with the Vice-Roy of New France; and of the system of this Universe.

  IV.--Of how at last he set out again for the Moon, tho without his own Will.

  V.--Of his Arrival there, and of the Beauty of that Country in which he fell.

  VI.--Of a Youth whom he met there, and of their Conversation: what that country was, and the Inhabitants of it.

  VII.--Being cast out from that Country, of the new Adventures which Befell him; and of the Demon of Socrates.

  VIII.--Of the Languages of the People in the Moon; of the Manner of Feeding there, and Paying the Scot; and of how the Author was taken to Court.

  IX.--Of the little Spaniard whom he met there, and of his quaint Wit; of Vacuum, Specific Weights, and sundry other Philosophical Matters.

  X.--Where the Author comes in doubt, whether he be a Man, an Ape, or an Estridge; and of the Opinion of the Lunar Philosophers concerning Aristotle.

  XI.--Of the Manner of making War in the Moon; and of how the Moon is not the Moon, nor the Earth the Earth.

  XII.--Of a Philosophical Entertainment.

  XIII.--Of the little Animals that make up our Life, and likewise cause our Diseases; and of the Disposition of the Towns in the Moon.

  XIV.--Of the Original of All Things; of Atomes; and of the Operation of the Senses.

  XV.--Of the Books in the Moon, and their Fashion; of Death, Burial, and Burning; of the Manner of telling the Time; and of Noses,

  XVI.--Of Miracles; and of Curing by the Imagination.

  XVII.--Of the Author's Return to the Earth.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

  CYRANO DE BERGERAC, Frontispiece CYRANO IN HIS STUDY CYRANO EN ROUTE FOR THE MOON THE "LITTLE SPANIARD'S" TRIP TO THE MOON THE AUTHOR'S FLYING MACHINE

  frontispiece--Cyrano de Bergerac.

  La terre me fut importune Le pris mon essort vers les Cieux. l'y vis le soleil, et la lune. Et maintenant J'y vois les Dieux

  ("All weary with the earth too soon, I took my flight into the skies, Beholding there the sun and moon Where now the Gods confront my eyes.")

  From a 17th Century Engraving of the original portraitby Zacharie Heince.]

  CYRANO DE BERGERAC.

  Savinien Hercule de Cyrano Bergerac, swashbuckler, hero, poet, andphilosopher, came of an old and noble family, richer in titles than inestates. His grandfather still kept most of the titles, and was calledSavinien de Cyrano Mauvieres Bergerac Saint-Laurent. He was secretaryto the King in 1571, and held other important offices. Since therewas no absolute right of primo-geniture in those matters, the names,as well as what was left of the properties they had represented, weredistributed among his descendants. Our hero seems to have received afair share of the titles; but of the property, nothing.

  He was the fifth among seven children, and was born on the 6th ofMarch, 1619; not in 1620, as has been usually stated. He was born,moreover, at Paris, not in Gascony; we must, alas, admit that he wasnot a Gascon. He ought to have been one, he certainly deserved to beone. But Fortune, who seems to have taken pleasure in always making himjust miss his destiny, began by doing him this first and greatest wrongof not letting him be born a Gascon. The family was not even of distantGascon origin, but was Perigourdin; Bergerac itself is a small townnear Perigueux. Cyrano, however, did his best to repair this as well asthe other wrongs of Destiny; he acquired the Gascon accent, and oftenmade himself pass for a Gascon.

  The fortune of his early education made him fall into the hands of acountry curate, who was an insufferable pedant (the species seems tohave been common at that time), and who had no real scholarship (thetwo things are by no means contradictory). Cyrano dubbed his master an"Aristotelic Ass," and wrote to his father that he preferred Paris.

  This period of exile had one very important result, however: theformation of his first and most lasting friendship, that with Lebret,who shared in the instruction of the country curate, but with a moredocile acceptance of his teachings. Here again Fortune seems to haveplayed tricks with Cyrano, in giving him by accident for lifelongfriend one who just missed being what a real friend should be; who wastrue and loyal, but who was always seeking to reform Cyrano or to pushhim forward in the world; who admired him, who loved him, but who wasof such opposite nature that he understood him not at all.

  Back at Paris, Cyrano was sent to the College de Beauvais afterwardRacine's college where he completed the course, under the principalshipof another pedant named Grangier, who was a little more scholarly,but no less ridiculous than the first, and who figures in the leadingrole of Cyrano's comedy _Le Pedant joue_. He lived the Paris student'slife, burning honest tradesmen's signs and "doing other crazy things,"as his contemporary Tallemant des Reaux tells us. On leaving collegehe started upon a downward track, according to Lebret; "on which,"says the same good Lebret, "I dare to boast that I stopped him ... bycompelling him to enter the company of the Guards with me." It may bedoubted whether a temporary suspension of the paternal allowance hadnothing to do with the matter; and whether, after all, Cyrano felt somuch repugnance to entering this company of the Guards.

  For this company was the famous regiment of the "garde-nobles,"commanded by Carbon de Castel-Jaloux, a "triple Gascon" and a "triplebrave." And his men were hardly a step behind him, all of them noblesthat was an essential condition of entrance and almost all of themGascons. Cyrano, at first in the position rather of the Christian thanof the Cyrano of M. Rostand's play, by his gallantry and wit compelledthem to accept him, and even won among these "braves" the title of"_demon de la bravoure_." Unable to be the most Gascon of the Gascons,he made it up by being more Gascon than the Gascons.

  Among his exploits the most famous is that of the fight with thehundred ruffians; for this appears to be not a dramatic creation ora legend, but history. One of his poet-friends, Liniere (the nameis sometimes spelt Ligniere) a writer of epigram and contributorto the "Recueils" or "Keep-sakes" of the epoch, had wounded thesusceptibilities of a certain "grand seigneur," who planned to avengehimself by the same method which another noble lord, in the eighteenthcentury, actually used against Voltaire. He posted his hundred men atthe Porte de Nesle, to waylay Liniere. Liniere, hearing of it, came totake refuge with Cyrano for the night. But Cyrano would not receivehim. "No, you shall sleep at home," said he. "Here, take this lantern"(this is M. Brun's version), "walk behind me and hold the light, andI'll make bed-quilts of them for you!" And the next morning there werefound scattered about the Porte de Nesle two dead men, seven wounded,and many hats, sticks, and pikes.

  According to Lebret's account, the battle took place in broad daylight,and had several
witnesses. For the rest, his story coincides with thatabove. And all versions agree in saying that M. de Cuigy and M. deBrissailles both men of the time fairly well known: one the son of anAdvocate of the Parliament of Paris, the other Mestre de Camp of thePrince de Conti's regiment bore witness to the facts; and that thestory became generally known, and was never denied. Perhaps it will notbe well to guarantee the exactness of the number one hundred; but thestory must be for the most part true.

  Another exploit, less magnificent, but perhaps as characteristic of thewild temper of Cyrano, is his battle with Fagotin. A mountebank namedBrioche had a theatre of marionnettes, near the Pont-Neuf, and usedan ape called Fagotin, fantastically dressed, to attract spectators.Some enemy of Cyrano, perhaps Dassoucy, one day persuaded Brioche todress his ape up in imitation of Cyrano, with long sword and nose aslong. Cyrano, arriving and seeing this parody of himself exalted on aplatform, unsheathes in blind rage, drives the crowd of lackeys andloafers right and left with the flat of his sword, and impales thepoor ape who was holding out his sword in a posture of self-defence.According to the contemporary pamphlet, partly in prose and partly inverse, which was made upon this marvellous adventure, Brioche broughtsuit for damages against Bergerac. But even in these ridiculouscircumstances Cyrano managed to get the laughers on his side; andclaiming that in the country of art there was no such thing as gold andsilver, and that he had a right to pay in the money of the country,he promised to eternize the dead ape in Apollinic verse; and so wasacquitted.

  The story of Montfleury, the fat actor whom Cyrano detested, is hardlyless fantastic; and in connection with it we have the witness ofCyrano's own letter "Against Montfleury the Fat, bad Actor and badAuthor," the tenth of the _Satiric Letters_. According to all the booksof theatrical anecdotes, Cyrano one evening ordered him off the stage,and forbade him to reappear for a month; and when two days later hedid reappear, Cyrano once more drove him in disgrace to the wings. Theaudience protesting, Cyrano challenged them each and all to meet himin duel, and carried his point. Whether he offered to take down theirnames in order or not, does not appear.

  In the meantime, more serious work turned up. The regiment of thecadets was sent against the Germans, entered Mouzon, was besiegedthere. In a sortie, Cyrano was seriously wounded, a musket-ball passingthrough his body. Hardly recovered from his wound, he rejoined the armyat the siege of Arras, in 1640; unfortunately for the story, he wasprobably no longer with the cadets there, but in the regiment of thePrince de Conti. Again he was wounded, this time even more seriously,with a sword-cut in the throat. And compelled to abandon the militarycareer, he returned to Paris and took up his studies and his writing.

  For he had always been a student and a poet. It is probable thatthe _Pedant joue_ was in part composed during his college days.Lebret pictures him to us as studying between two duels, and workingat an Elegy in all the noise of the regimental barracks, "asundistractedly as if he had been in a quiet study." He now joined agroup of independents in thought and life, naturalists in ethics andempiricists in philosophy, and forced his way into a private class ofthe philosopher Gassendi, where he had for fellow-students Hesnaut,Chapelle, Bernier, and almost certainly a young Jean-BaptistePoquelin, who was very soon to take the name of Moliere, found the"Illustre Theatre," and after its failure start on a fifteen years'tour of the provinces.

  Cyrano was an earnest and capable student of philosophy, and came toit with the fresh interest not only of his own personality, but of ayoung man of barely twenty-two; he naturally imposed himself as a sortof leader in the group of young "libertins" or free-thinkers, just ashe had done among the Guards. He knew well not only Gassendi, but alsoCampanella, and of course Descartes, in his works at least. He evenseems to have read widely among the half-philosophers, half-occultistsof the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, such as CorneliusAgrippa, Jerome Cardan, Abbot Tritheim, Cesar de Nostradamus, etc.Among the ancients, his first favorites were Lucretius and Pyrrho:Pyrrho whom he especially admired, "because he was so nobly free, thatno thinker of his age had been able to enslave his opinions; and somodest, that he would never give final decision on any point." There ismuch of Cyrano in this phrase, both in the half-bold modesty and in thehalf-timid fierceness of independence. Cyrano shuddered at the thoughtof having even a single one of his ideas enslaved to those of anotherthinker. Just as he had refused the Marechal de Gassion for patron whenhe was in the Guards, so he would accept no one's _magister dixit_, nopatron of his thought, not even the Aristotle of the Schools.

  The period of his life from 1643 to 1653 is a very obscure one. Yetprobably almost all of his works were composed during this time. He mayhave travelled; there are traditions and suggestions that he visitedEngland, Italy, even Poland. He probably stood in danger of persecutionfrom the Jesuits on account of his philosophical ideas, and may havesuffered it, as did his contemporaries Campanella and Galileo, or, tomention a French poet only a little older than he, _Theophile de Viau_,who was even condemned to death for less independence than Cyrano's;though the sentence was fortunately commuted. He probably mingledsomewhat in the society of the "Precieuses" of the time as well as inthat of the "libertins"; for he has left a series of "Love-Letters"which must almost exactly have suited the taste of those who preparedDiscourses on the Tender Passion. He probably had many duels still, forLebret tells us that he served a hundred times as second--the roundnumber is to be taken as such--and any one acquainted with the epoch,or with the _Three Musketeers_ of Dumas, knows that the seconds foughtas well as the principals. Lebret adds, to be sure, that he never hada quarrel on his own account, but we may perhaps take this as a bitof the conscientious "white-washing" which Lebret could not refrainfrom in speaking of his friend's reputation; for we know enough of hischaracter even from Lebret, and of his life from other sources, tomake a gentle peacefulness, so out of keeping with the epoch, somewhatdoubtful; and then there was his nose.

  The Nose is authentic also. It appears in all the portraits, of whichthere are four. And in all of these it is the same: not a little uglynose, flat at the top and projecting at the bottom in a little longgable turned up at the end; but a large, generous, well-shaped nose,hooked rather than retrousse, and planted squarely in the symmetricalmiddle of the face; not ridiculous, but monumental! The anecdotes ofthe duels it caused are so many, that one comes in spite of oneselfto believe some of them. It is said that this nose brought death uponmore than ten persons; that one could not look upon it, but he mustunsheathe; if one looked away, it was worse; and as for speaking ofNoses, that was a subject which Cyrano reserved for himself, to do itfitting honor. Listen to his treatment of it in the _Pedant joue_: "Thisveridic nose arrives everywhere a quarter of an hour before its master.Ten shoemakers, good round fat ones too, go and sit down to work underit out of the rain." As for defending large noses, as the index ofvalor, intelligence, and all high qualities, it will appear in the_Voyage to the Moon_ that he could do it as well with his pen as withhis sword.

  The end of his life was difficult and sad. He was finally compelledto accept the patronage of the Duc d'Arpajon, for no man could liveor even exist by literature at that period, except as literaturebrought patronage or pensions. The great Corneille himself, thanwhom no one could be more simply sturdy and high of character, wrotebegging letters to the great minister who controlled the pensions ofliterature. Cyrano dedicated the edition of his "Miscellaneous Works"in 1654 to the Duc d'Arpajon, in an epistle which fulfils, but withdignity and independence, the laws of the _genre_, and accompanied itwith a sonnet addressed to the Duke's daughter, which is in the tasteof the time, yet considerably better than the taste of the time. Thingswent well till _Agrippine_ appeared, which had a "succes de scandale";but its "belles impietes," as the happy book-seller called them, seemto have pleased the timidly orthodox Duke less. In the meantime Cyranohad received a wound from a falling beam whether by mere accident ornot, will never be known; but Cyrano had many enemies, and it hasgenerally been thought that there was purpose behind the acciden
t.For whatever reason, the Duc d'Arpajon seems to have advised Cyranoto leave him, and Cyrano was received by Regnault des Bois-Clairs,a friend of Lebret. There he was kindly cared for and lectured onthe evil of his past life by Lebret and three women of the Conventof the Daughters of the Cross: Soeur Hyacinthe, an aunt of Cyranohimself; Mere Marguerite, the superior of the convent; and the Baronnede Neuvillette, a cousin of Cyrano, who was Madeleine Robineau, andhad married the Baron Christophe de Neuvillette, killed at the siegeof Arras in 1640. The three women persuaded themselves that they hadconverted Cyrano to the true Church. This is doubtful, since he draggedhimself away to the country to die, at the house of the cousin whom hespeaks of at the end of the _Voyage to the Moon_. In any case, MereMarguerite reclaimed his body, and he was buried in holy ground at theconvent.

  _The Voyage to the Moon_ was not published till 1656, the year afterCyrano's death. It was certainly written as early as 1650, probably in1649. It had been circulated widely in manuscript, and possibly a fewcopies had been printed, before the author's death. _The Voyage to theSun_, or, to give the title more accurately, the "Comic History of theStates and Empires of the Sun," was probably written immediately afterthe _Voyage to the Moon_, but was not published till 1662. The _Historyof the Spark_ has never been found, unless that be the subtitle of apart of the Voyage to the Sun, as seems fairly probable.

  The _Letters_ of Cyrano are, in part at least, his earliest work.They were probably scattered over a considerable period in point ofcomposition, but most of them were published in 1654. It is to beremembered that like all the letters of that epoch which we have, theywere meant to be read in company, in the salons, or sometimes (likethat "Against Dassoucy"), in the taverns, corresponding to the moderncafes, where men of letters gathered. They were written not for thepostman, but for the parlor; and not so much for the parlor as for theprinter. But even with the artificiality of this method, and with theburlesque or precieuse expression that was obligatory in Letters atthat time, there are touches of real sincerity and passion constantlybreaking through.

  The _Pedant joue_ is a prose-comedy in five acts, made almost entirelyon the model of the Italian "commedia dell' arte," a form in whichMoliere's early work is written, and which was practically the onlyform known at the time when Cyrano wrote for the play is certainlyanterior to Corneille's _Menteur_. We have the almost obligatory twopairs of young lovers; the old father who is tyrannical but easilydeceived in this particular case combined with the pedant-doctor type;the valet who does the deceiving, in the service of the young lovers;and the terrible captain, who takes flight at the shadow of danger.Cyrano has, however, introduced one new type a peasant with his dialectand local characteristics: a type that Moliere used to great advantagelater, but hardly so very much better than Cyrano uses it here;witness the fact that a number of this peasant's phrases have becomeproverbs. The famous scene of "qu'allait-il faire dans cette galere"(despairingly repeated by the father who is compelled to give up hischerished money for the ransom of a son held in captivity supposedly ona Turkish galley) is exceedingly well imagined, and Moliere did wellto use it, sixteen years after Cyrano's death, for the two best scenesof his _Fourberies de Scapin_. It is not a matter to reproach Molierewith, but it is a case in which Cyrano should receive due credit.

  The only serious poetical work of Cyrano is his tragedy of _Agrippine,veuve de Germanicus_, written at some time in the forties, played in1653, and published in 1654. The statement, repeated categoricallyby Mr. Sidney Lee in his recent Life of Shakespeare, that "Cyranode Bergerac plagiarized 'Cymbeline,' 'Hamlet,' and 'The Merchantof Venice' in his 'Agrippina,'" has not the slightest foundation.There are no resemblances, either superficial or essential, on whichto base it, and it is altogether improbable that Cyrano even knew ofShakespeare's existence. The subject of Agrippine is similar to thatof Corneille's _Cinna_--a conspiracy under the Roman Empire. There areno resemblances to Corneille's work in the details of the plot, butin general spirit the play is what we call Cornelian, partly becauseCorneille was the only one who possessed this spirit of the epoch withsufficient creative and individual power to compel the attention ofposterity. Cyrano, once more, just missed this. But his play is worthynot only to be ranked with the best dramas of any of his contemporariesexcept Corneille, but even to be at least compared with Corneille'sbetter work (except perhaps the _Cid_ and _Polyeucte_). The play isnot thoroughly well constructed, and so misses something of dramaticeffectiveness, though by no means missing it entirely; but it is aswell constructed as Corneille's _Cinna_, and better than his Horace totake examples only among his greatest plays. It has no scene to comparewith that of the clemency of Augustus in _Cinna_, no character-studyso fine as that of the different sentiments of Augustus. But itapproaches, though it does not quite attain, the heroics of _Horace_.It is full of exaggeration so is Corneille; and of an exaggeration thatsometimes becomes burlesque as in Corneille; but it is an exaggerationthat is high and heroic, like Corneille's. And the high and heroicsometimes as in a line like this:

  Et puis, mourir n'est rien; c'est achever de naitre--

  sometimes, but too rarely, drops its exaggeration to become simple assimple as real heroism, which is the simplest thing in the world.

  Except real genius. Real genius is, finally, the essential thing, whichCyrano once more just missed attaining missed just by the lack ofthat simplicity, perhaps. But exaggeration, sometimes carried to theburlesque, is the essential trait which makes him what he is; and wecannot wish it away.

  CURTIS HIDDEN PAGE.