Cyrano de Bergerac

Cyrano de Bergerac is a verse drama in five acts by the French writer Edmond Rostand. It reached the stage in 1897 and was printed as a book a year later, and it borrows only the name and the nose of the seventeenth-century nobleman it is named after.

The action takes place in seventeenth-century Paris and turns on the emotional troubles of Cyrano, a swashbuckling soldier and poet who has every gift except the one he believes he needs. Because of an enormous nose he is sure that no woman could ever love him, and he is secretly in love with Roxane. When he discovers that she has fallen for a young guardsman called Christian, he offers to help his tongue-tied rival by writing the letters, speeches and poems that Christian passes off as his own work.

The real Cyrano was known for his duels and his writing, and Rostand used very little of his life beyond his name. The play he wrote from it became his most noted drama and the reason the name is familiar well outside France.