1 The oldest stage in Paris, built in 1548 in the former palace of the Dukes of Burgundy.
2 Pastoral play by Balthazar Baro (1585-1650), staged at the Hotel de Bourgogne in I63I .
4 Jean de Routrou (1609-1650) and Pierre Corneille (1606-1684), playwrights and great rivals; Corneille is considered to have written some of the greatest tragedies in the French language, including Le Cid.
5 All famous actors at the Hotel de Bourgogne.
6 Important social figures who personified a style of behavior known as “preciosity” that emphasized delicacy and refinement.
7 L’Académie française, the body of distinguished French writers created by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635.
8 Names of members of l’Académie française.
9 Typically precious names taken from Antoine Baudeau de Somaize’s Dictionnaire des Précieuses (1660). ‡Poet and friend of Cyrano de Bergerac, whose writings he edited; D’ Assoucy’s real name was Charles Coypeau (1605-1677).
10 Sweet wine made in the Pyrenees. f
irst century B.C. minister under Roman emperor Augustus and great patron and protector of men of letters, especially of Horace and Virgil.
‡Poem of eight lines.
11 A character in the play La Clorise (see note on p. 7), whose name recalls Phaedo, Plato’s discourse on the immortality of the soul.
12 Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674), painter of great political figures (he painted Cardinal Richelieu) and religious scenes.
13 Jacques Callot (1592-1635), an engraver famous for the accuracy of his works as well as for a series of masques representing traditional characters of the Italian form of comedy known as commedia dell’arte. ‡The reference is to a historical character in Cléopâtre (1647), a play by Gautier des Costes, sieur de La Calprenède (1609-1663).
14 Reference to the famous cordon bleu, the insignia of the Ordre du Saint-Esprit, France’s oldest chivalric order.
15 The French, at war with the Spanish since 1622, were campaigning to retake Flanders from their control.
16 Reference to Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642), powerful prime minister of France who sometimes attended the theater incognito.
17 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, nobility (usually minor nobility) often sat on the stage, at its sides.
18 That is, full moon; a reference to Montfleury’s famous rotundity.
19 The personnel of a seventeenth-century theater included a guard charged with keeping order.
20 Final stanza of a ballad.
21 Name of an ill-bred dog in a fable (book VIII, fable 24) by the French poet Jean de La Fontaine (1621—1695).
22 One of the heroes of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers.
23 Thus passes worldly glory (Latin).
24 In Greek mythology, a satyr-like creature and follower of Dionysus, the wine god.
25 Reference to Pierre Corneille’s Tite et Bérénice (1670), the story of Titus, who succeeded his father Vespasian as Roman emperor from A.D. 79-81.
26 A sort of governess or chaperone, often advanced in years, responsible for overseeing the conduct of a young woman.
27 Humorous formation based on the Latin turdus (meaning “thrush”) and vinaticus (suggesting “drunk”).
28 Sweet Italian liqueur made of roses and orange flowers.
29 Literally, “having a pointed nose” (Italian); nickname of the Roman family Scipio.
30 The caesura is the natural pause in a line of poetry; hemistich is the term for each of the two equal halves of the line.
31 François Malherbe, French poet (1555-1628) whose theoretical writings contributed much to French classicism.
32 In Greek myth, the poet and musician Orpheus was devoured by the Maenads, female devotees of Dionysus, the wine god; they were also known as Bacchantes, after Bacchus, as the Romans called Dionysus. ‡Term of obloquy; antecedent of today’s “pissant.”
33 Name of a silly person.
34 Reference to Phoebus Apollo, god of the sun in Greek mythology.
35 In this case, the reference is to Apollo as a god associated with such civilized arts as poetry and music.
36 That is, “scorned,” but also literally “horned”: traditionally, the cuckolded husband grows horns.
37 Isaac de Benserade (1613-1691), a precious poet.
38 Antoine Girard, sieur de Saint-Amant (1594—1661), a poet and satirist. ‡Jean Chapelain (1595-1674), literary critic and poet.
39 Honoré d‘Urfé (1567-1625) was author of the pastoral novel L’Astrée, in which the heroes are handsome and noble shepherds; he was the object of an early essay by Rostand.
40 “Sandious,” along with such terms as “Mille dious!” and “Capdedious!” and “Pocapdedious!,” just below, are attempts to render the colorfully emotive language of the Gascons.
41 District of central Paris.
42 In addition to being physician to the king, Théophraste Renaudot (1586-1653) founded the Gazette, one of the first newspapers.
43 Cyrano de Bergerac in fact wrote a tragedy, La Mort d’Agrippine (The Death of Agrippine), performed in 1654 at the Hotel de Bourgogne.
44 Literally, the hide of an enemy general killed by the opposing general (Latin); figuratively, rich booty or spoils gained in battle.
45 Hero of the novel of the same name by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616). Don Quixote is an idealist who, among other exploits, fights windmills, believing them to be his enemies.
46 Leguminous herb, used medicinally.
47 A humorous reference, since Sercy was Cyrano de Bergerac’s editor.
48 The reference is to the Mercure français, a literary review founded in 1611 that molded French aesthetic taste.
49 A précieuse, someone who is extremely refined and follows the behavior known as preciosity; see note on p. 12 and discussion in the Introduction.
50 The reference is to the Carte du Tendre (Map of Tenderness) , a map that plotted in allegorical fashion the stations of love and the torturous path leading to it.
51 Large, double-necked lutes. ‡Pierre Gassendi (1592—1655) was a philosopher and libertine, under whom Cyrano de Bergerac studied.
52 Informal, endearing name for de Guiche, whose full name was Antoine de Gramont, duc de Guiche.
53 Diogenes the Cynic (413—323 B.C.), a Greek philosopher, was seen in broad daylight in the marketplace in Athens, carrying a lantern; “I am looking for an honest man,” he said, when questioned.
54 Allusion to the clandestine love between the Duke of Buckingham and Anne of Austria (wife of French King Louis XIII), related in Dumas’s The Three Musketeers.
55 In the Bible, Luke 16:21, Lazarus has only the crumbs from the table of the rich to feed on.
56 References are to Johann Müller Regiomontanus (1436—1476), a German astronomer, and Archytas (428-347 B.C.), a Greek philosopher.
57 In 1640, during the Thirty Years War, the town of Arras in northeastern France was occupied by the Spanish. The historical Cyrano fought and was wounded in this siege.
58 Type of visorless helmet, worn in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
59 Literally, “word” (French), but also a sentence, particularly one combining elegance, wit, and incisiveness.
60 In French, the word for “white plume” is panache; see the Introduction for a discussion of this word.
61 Those who follow an army and sell provisions to the officers and soldiers.
63 Spanish nobleman or gentleman by birth.
64 Sauce for fish or fowl; also a dish of various meats, boiled and served cold.
65 In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope is the virtuous wife of Ulysses who spends her days weaving a tapestry and her nights undoing it.
66 Based on angelica, an aromatic root with alleged medicinal properties that is also often candied and served as a sweet.
67 Object of devotion, often made of cloth, worn around the neck.
68 Allusion to the tapestry that Penelope, wife of Ulysses, wove day in and day out.
70 Common title for a newspaper or gazette; for example, the Pall Mall Budget.
71 Old spelling for Sète, a town in southern France on the Mediterranean. ‡Reference to Don Juan of Austria, viceroy of the Netherlands, defeated during the Thirty Years War in 1658 by the great French commander the vicomte deTurenne.
72 Les Fourberies de Scapin (The Cheats of Scapin, 1677), by the great French playwright Molière (1622-1673), contains a line that seems borrowed from Cyrano de Bergerac’s play Le Pédant joué (The Pedant Imitated).
73 In French, Qui fut tout, et qui ne fut rien, which translates literally as “Who was everything, and who was nothing”; that is, he was of no account.