He was the son of Abel de Cyrano, lord of Mauvières and Bergerac, and Espérance Bellanger. He received his first education from a country priest and had for a fellow pupil his friend and future biographer Henri Lebret. He then proceeded to Paris and the heart of the
Latin Quarter, to the college de Dormans-Beauvais, As a minor nobleman and officer he was notorious for his dueling and boasting. His unique past allowed him to make unique contributions to French art. One author, Ishbel Addyman, varies from other biographers and claims that he was not a Gascon
aristocrat, but a descendant of a Sardinian fishmonger, and that the appellation Bergerac stemmed from a small estate near Paris where he was born, not in Gascony, and that he may have suffered tertiary
syphilis. She also claims that he may have been
homosexual and around 1640 became the lover of
Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy, a writer and musician, until around 1653, when they became engaged in a bitter rivalry. This led to Bergerac sending d'Assoucy
death threats that compelled him to leave Paris. The quarrel extended to a series of
satirical texts by both men. One of his confrères in the battle was the Baron Christian of Neuvillette, who married Cyrano's cousin. However, the plotline of Rostand's play involving Roxane and Christian is entirely fictional. Cyrano was a pupil of the French
polymath Pierre Gassendi, a
canon of the
Catholic Church who tried to reconcile
Epicurean atomism with
Christianity. (Place de la Myrpe) Cyrano de Bergerac's works ''L'Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune
("Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon", published posthumously, 1657) and Les États et Empires du Soleil
(The States and Empires of the Sun'', 1662) are classics of early modern
science fiction. In the former, Cyrano travels to the Moon using rockets powered by fireworks (it may be the earliest description of a space flight by use of a vessel that has rockets attached) and meets the inhabitants. The Moon-men have four legs, firearms that shoot game and cook it, and talking earrings used to educate children. His mixture of science and romance in the last two works furnished a model for many subsequent writers, among them
Jonathan Swift,
Edgar Allan Poe and probably
Voltaire.
Corneille and
Molière freely borrowed ideas from
Le Pédant joué.
Death The play suggests that he was injured by a falling wooden beam in 1654 while entering the house of his patron, the Duc D'Arpajon. However the academic and editor of Cyrano's works Madeleine Alcover uncovered a contemporary text which suggests an attack on the Duke's carriage in which a member of his household was injured. It is as yet inconclusive whether or not Cyrano's death was a result of the injury, or an unspecified disease. Cyrano died over a year later on July 28, 1655, aged 36, at the house of his cousin, Pierre de Cyrano, in
Sannois. He was buried in a
church in Sannois. However, there is strong evidence to support the theory that his death was a result of a botched assassination attempt as well as further damage to his health caused by a period of confinement in a private asylum, orchestrated by his enemies, who succeeded in enlisting the help of his own brother Abel de Cyrano. == In fiction and media ==