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The Cyrano Craze
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# : |
17015 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1990 |
1,640 Words |
| Author
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Curtis Cate
Historian and biographer Curtis Cate was greatly aided in the
preparation of this article by Liane Villemont and Jacques
Deschamps of l'Institut national de l'audiovisuel. |
The tradition of French gallantry is still very much alive in France - at least on the stage and screen these days, what with the country's two leading actors both performing the role of the Gascon poet-swashbuckler Cyrano de Bergerac.
For six months this year, Jean-Paul Belmondo delighted capacity audiences at the Theatre Marigny in Paris with his agile, athletic interpretation of the heroic, tragicomic hero of Edmond Rostand. Then Gerard Depardieu hit the screen in the same role in one of the top box office hits of the season and won the Best Actor award at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival this May.
Cyrano de Bergerac, whose wittiest verse almost every French lycee student can recite from memory with relish, is perhaps the most poignant piece of drama in the Vast French theatrical repertory. Written close to one hundred years ago by Edmond Rostand, this five-act melodrama is built around the plight of a seventeenth-century musketeer who is quick to take offense at anyone daring to make fun of his most distinctive feature - a nose so grotesquely prominent that Cyrano himself compares it to a rock, to a promontory, even to a "peninsula."
This formidable swordsman is hopelessly in love with his beautiful young cousin Roxane. But she is enamored of a youthful musketeer, Christian de Neuvillette. Cyrano finds himself helping tongue-tied Christian in his wooing by writing love letters for him to Roxane, which shortly results in their marriage. A frustrated admirer, the Comte de Guiche, orders the bridegroom off to war. Christian dies in a skirmish with Spanish soldiers during the siege of Arras (1640). The widowed Roxane retires to a
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