Books

a good plus copy of the true 1st edition in English of Rostand's masterpiece, Cyrano de Bergerac. Famous for its two Oscar winning films. First, starring Jose Ferrer in 1948 as Cyrano, winning the Oscar and of course in French, in circa 1990, Gerard de Perdieu as Cyrano. Ma Panache, His last words as he leapt to embrace the heavens, one of the most affirmative deaths of all time. Lamson, Wolffe and Company, Boston, New York, London, 1898. Hardcover. Book Condition: Near Fine+. First Edition. First English Edition." Small 8vo: 241,[1]pp. Publisher's original red cloth lettered and decorated in silver to spine and upper board, with frontispiece portrait (tissue guard still present) of the actor Richard Mansfield in costume. Note on the front cover is the original Coat of Arms of Cyrano himself circa 1650. The original Cyrano lived between 1619 and 1655. Cyrano de Bergerac was first published in France by Charpentier et Fasquelle in 1898 (following its stage production at the Porte Saint-Martin Theater in Paris on December 28, 1897), and first translated into English by Kingsbury for Lamson, Wolffe the same year. Mansfield was the first actor to play Cyrano in the United States in an English translation. The play is based loosely on the life of Savien de Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655), Rostand?s favorite writer. "Yet the character as portrayed by Rostand ? with his excessively-enlarged nose, his almost super-human duelling skills and his ability to improvise eloquent poetic speeches ? is far from an exact portrait of the real-life Cyrano of the seventeenth century. . . . Possessed of a keen intellect with an insatiable appetite for reading and for learning, he constantly experiments with, when he is not challenging outright, the established social, scientific, political and religious ideas of his day. This questioning, satirising and ridiculing of contemporary authorities, along with an open-mindedness to new concepts that remains strikingly modern, has earned Cyrano a firm place amongst the libertin writers of seventeenth-century France." (Literary Encyclopedia.

Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. Although there was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, the play is a fictionalized account of his life and incorporates larger-than-life elements. It explores themes of inner versus outer beauty, love, and heroism.