Over the last few weeks, I have come up with a couple of new designs for my "Nose Stuck in a Book" range of bookmarks. As the most prominent thing about them is the large nose applied to the top of them, it didn't take me long to return again and again to the image of Hercule Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, from Edmond Rostand's play, or the French film I remember watching as a sixteen year old girl, alone and in the dark.
The image of the wonderful Gérard Depardieu as he stood under Roxanne’s balcony is an enduring one for me. Even if now I am more wizened, slightly more cynical and a tad less whimsical, I can still recall how I loved the moment when Cyrano finds he can speak to Roxanne from the heart and she, thinking he is the dashing Christian, falls completely in love. Cyrano speaks on Christian’s behalf, who, although beautiful does not have a poet’s soul. Cyrano, has a large nose, a metaphor for his cripplingly low self-esteem in matters of the heart and society’s focus on outer beauty.
Cyrano’s character is clever, witty, bombastic to the point of verbosity, which, ironically is an outer show of his wit and intellect. It is his emotions that are hidden, except as he stands in the dark, able to enjoy a moment of truth with the woman he loves: “Yes, the feeling which fills me is true love! Fierce and jealous and sad, yet never selfish. I would gladly lay down my own happiness for yours, even if you were never to know it. And even if I end up far away from you and lonely, I will be content just to hear a happy echo of the joy I once brought you! Each glance from you makes me virtuous and brave in new and unknown ways. Do you begin to understand me? Now, after all this time, have you begun to understand? Do you feel my soul climbing up to you through the darkness of this night? Oh, it is too sweet, too incredible, that I should speak this way and that you should listen! Even in moments when my hopes rose so high, I never could have hoped for this much! I could die peacefully right now. My words have had the power to make you tremble! You are trembling, I can feel it! I can feel the quivering of your hand echoing down through the jasmine branches!”
It is his words she falls for, but Christian’s beauty. They marry in secret before both Cyrano and Christian go to war. Of course, Christian dies and Roxanne mourns him. Due to Cyrano’s initial deception, he cannot then sully Christian’s memory with the truth. Christian dies the romantic hero. It is only later, as Cyrano is dying in Roxanne’s arms, Roxanne having lived in a convent for ten years, she realises that it was Cyrano, the great poet, whom she loved all those years earlier. Ever unpopular , some lackeys dropped a piece of wood in his head, smashing his skull.
He asks her about the last letter Christian sent to her before he died and she tells him that she keeps it with her always, that it is stained with Christian’s blood and tears. Cyrano, in the dusky light says that he would like to read it; he reads it aloud, even as it grows too dark to see. Roxanne realises that the voice she is hearing is the voice she heard under the balcony all those years before. Cyrano denies it because the blood on the letter is Christian’s. When Cyrano dies, Roxanne loses the man she loves for a second time. Despite being a decorated war hero he dies unfulfilled because he could not emerge from out of the darkness under the balcony.
I read it in English. I read it in French. I watched the film again and again. Two years ago, I went to Bergerac in France to visit the statue of Cyrano, despite the fact the actual Cyrano never lived there. The statue is pretty, and as it was our wooden anniversary, my husband acquired a wooden Cyrano head with the pervasive “prize turnip” protruding from the centre of his carved face. It was rather lovely to return to those adolescent feelings of romance: to the tragedy of unrequited love. I don’t think I’ve seen the film or read the play in ten years, but sometimes I fear returning to something so of its time in case it becomes tarnished by a new perspective.
