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Cyrano

Winner by a nose

Ishbel Addyman
Simon & Schuster, 307pp, £16.99,

Blair Worden

Wednesday, 13th February 2008

Blair Worden on the new book by Ishbel Addyman

When, after his exertions on behalf of the love-struck Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie Wooster hears himself compared to Cyrano de Bergerac, his literary knowledge rises to the occasion: ‘the chap with the nose’. It was Edmund Rostand’s play of 1897 that brought Cyrano and his protuberance their modern fame. The 17th-century soldier and writer who gave Rostand his model, and who has been overshadowed by his theatrical counterpart for more than a century, would have lain beyond Bertie’s range of reference. Rostand’s drama belongs to a 19th-century French tradition which romanticised the nation’s involvement in the brutal conflict of the Thirty Years War. In 1834 Théophile Gautier, attempting to revive interest in the original Cyrano’s writings, placed them in ‘the good old days of beautiful, poetic courtesans, the time of balconies climbed, of silken rope-ladders’. In the 1840s Alexandre Dumas anticipated Rostand’s feat by sensationalising the exploits of Count d’Artagnan, who fought with the true Cyrano at the siege of Arras — and who duly appears in Rostand’s play.

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