The nose tirade (), also known as the tirade of the noses (), is a celebrated monologue from the five-act heroic comedy in verse Cyrano de Bergerac by the French neo-romantic playwright Edmond Rostand. The play tells of the love and fate of the poet, philosopher and duellist Cyrano de Bergerac for his cousin Roxane, who fails to appreciate in time his brave and noble character and his literary gift. The freedom-loving poet dies defying Death, having first confessed his feelings to his beloved. The drama is set during the so-called Grand Siècle of French history and literature, is rich in local colour, and features characters whose images go back to real people.
Cyrano, who has a disproportionately large nose, delivers the monologue in the first act in response to a sneer at this physical defect from the arrogant Viscount de Valvert. Answering a trite reproach about the size of his nose, Cyrano offers, in a lengthy tirade, twenty witty remarks about his own flaw. He then challenges the viscount to a duel, composing a mocking ballade as he fights, and wounds him.
For a long time the real Bergerac was little known to the general public, and the revival of interest in him is linked to essays by the romantic poets Charles Nodier and Théophile Gautier. The latter wrote a lengthy passage about Bergerac's nose and the influence of this part of the face on his character. Rostand, who knew this essay, is thought to have used it as a starting point for his monologue. Other researchers have noted that a reflection close in form and content appears in a dialogue by Erasmus, which was probably reflected in the play.
Synopsis
Edmond Rostand's heroic comedy opens in 1640 during a performance at the Parisian theatre the Hôtel de Bourgogne. It features a considerable number of historical figures, contemporaries of the real Cyrano de Bergerac, though their images, like that of the title character, were creatively reworked by the author. Over time the name of the freedom-loving poet and philosopher became a byword for a person with an enormous nose. At the start of the play Cyrano's friend, the pastry cook François Ragueneau (a real member of the bohème, died 1654), relates: "And what a nose! There is no other like it in the world! Seeing this nose sail by so majestically, anyone would exclaim: 'No, this is really too much! It must be false!' But here is the trouble: Monsieur de Cyrano has grown to it forever."
The poet himself declares that he will teach a lesson to anyone who mocks his nose, and that if the offender is a nobleman he will challenge him to a duel. The arrogant Viscount de Valvert, present at the performance, insults Cyrano and says that "Your nose… yes, yes… your nose… is very large." Such a brief and trite insult provokes Cyrano's derision, and in reply he begins to offer far wittier remarks about his nose. The tirade opens:
In sum, Cyrano protests, the affront was far too short, and a great many things might have been said by varying the tone. Each of the twenty quips that follow opens with an explanatory characterizing word: In the pedantic variation, for instance, Cyrano invents a fantastical beast that he claims Aristophanes called the . The monologue ends with Cyrano's thrust at his offender, who, in his words, possesses neither wit nor intelligence: "But if you, Viscount, rising in mind, were by some miracle to acquire a talent for barbed jokes after the fashion of mine, believe me, in that very instant I would make you hold your tongue. I am ready to laugh at myself to my heart's content, but I will not allow you, sir, to help me in it."
The enraged viscount exclaims that Cyrano is a "petty nobleman" dressed like a servant, and hurls reproaches at him: "Dolt! Blockhead! Rascal! Dullard! Lout!". In response to the insults the poet challenges his offender to a duel, during which he composes and recites on the spot a mocking ballade about their fight, then wounds de Valvert, while the theatre audience applauds the freethinker's talent and courage.
History
Reception
Edmond Rostand's heroic comedy Cyrano de Bergerac, which became one of the most famous in the history of French neo-romanticism and theatre, was staged at the Parisian Porte-Saint-Martin on 28 December 1897. The role of Cyrano was played by the theatre's director and leading actor, Coquelin the Elder, to whom the play was dedicated. It was written in classical Alexandrine verse, both as a stylization and homage to the poetic tradition of the 17th century and as testimony to the author's romantic aspirations.
At its premiere the play met with unprecedented success, comparable only to the triumphant reception of Pierre Corneille's Le Cid and Victor Hugo's Hernani; yet nothing had foreshadowed it. At the dress rehearsal the author embraced Coquelin in tears and said: "Forgive me, my friend! Forgive me for dragging you into this hopeless affair!" Rostand was also disheartened by the attitude of one close friend, who urged the poet's wife, the poet Rosemonde Gérard, to cut from the production the monologue about the nose that later became famous, on the grounds that this long speech might supposedly make the drama "a general laughing stock!" A decade and a half later the author recalled that neither Coquelin nor the other performers expected a warm reception from the public, and that he himself was "terribly oppressed; the doubts and fears of others crushed me."
However, the fears of those involved in the production proved unfounded. Already after the fifth act the audience gave an ovation, chanting "Ed-mond Ros-tand!..". After the performance the tired but happy Coquelin, finding the author, told him: "For such a work it is a pleasure even to die." The play, which revived Hugo's romantic traditions, was enthusiastically received by theatregoers and critics alike. At the same time, among supporters of realist theatre (as shown, for example, by the diary entry of the director André Antoine, who did not fail to remark on Rostand's "miracle"), this late "flare-up" of romanticism aroused fears for the fate of the aesthetic dear to them. Indeed, right-wing critics used Rostand's success to attack social, realist drama. In 1913, a few years before the playwright's death, he attended the thousandth performance of his most celebrated work. Analysing the success of this drama ("one of the most performed plays of the French theatre"), Efim Etkind noted: "Rostand managed to combine in it the most diverse principles: the pathetic and the comic, the sentimental and the heroic, the sparklingly witty and the slow and pensive, the romantically decorative and the historically authentic."
The legend of Cyrano's nose Thanks to the unprecedented success at the premiere and the play's subsequent popularity, the historical prototype, the soldier, satirist, poet, playwright and philosopher Hercule-Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655), gained additional fame, entering the ranks of the "popular heroes" of French culture. Several decades earlier, interest in the half-forgotten 17th-century freethinking poet had been revived by the romantic writers Charles Nodier (Revue de Paris; 1831) and Théophile Gautier (France littéraire; 1834). On the wave of this interest, a collected edition of Bergerac's works was published in 1858, and his personality began to attract the attention of researchers and readers. In 1876 the French writer and librettist Louis Gallet published the adventure novel Le Capitaine Satan ("Captain Satan"), in which Cyrano appears as a "magical helper" to the central characters. In this adventure-filled book Cyrano is endowed with "a huge, sharp nose almost covering the upper lip, a true heroic nose, as one of the poet's biographers called it."
Cyrano was best known for his "enormous" nose, but researchers doubt the historical accuracy of this. The spread of the legend (the "nosological mythology", in the words of the literary historian about this physical defect was apparently aided by lines from Cyrano's own fantastical novel The Other World, or the States and Empires of the Moon (1662). They are spoken by an inhabitant of the Moon in a description of the customs that prevail there: "a large nose is a sign of wit, courtesy, affability, nobility and generosity, while a small nose testifies to the opposite traits. That is why the snub-nosed are made eunuchs, for the Republic prefers to have no children at all rather than children resembling eunuchs." The legend of the great poet's large nose was expressed most clearly in Théophile Gautier's essay "Cyrano de Bergerac", included in the collection Les Grotesques (1844), which Rostand had known since his schooldays. According to Vera Milchina, this work by Gautier, written under the influence of Nodier's essay, opens with a kind of "prose poem", running "over four pages about noses in general and Cyrano's gigantic nose in particular."
It was Gautier who wrote about "nosology" and the role that the physical defect played in the fate of the Grand Siècle poet. He began with the reflection that, in the opinion of physiologists, "the length of the nose is a sure indicator of intelligence, valour and other virtues, and that a great man cannot have a small little nose." The writer gave a series of historical examples (Socrates, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Corneille) intended to prove that the shape of the nose influences a person's merits and character. "Look at the portraits, at the medals: you will see that the more illustrious the hero, the longer (though by no means the wetter!) his nose." Gautier also noted that his impression of the gascon's remarkable facial feature was based on an engraving placed in the first volume of his works: "I was so struck by his gigantic and unusually shaped nose that I dwelt on this subject longer than it deserves…".
Describing Bergerac's portrait, Gautier dwelt on its memorable features, in particular drawing attention to the following:
Paul Lacroix, in his preface "A historical note on Cyrano de Bergerac" to the 1858 edition (2nd ed. 1875) of the poet's works, wrote: "He, as Charles Nodier put it, regarded excessive attention to the numerous scars covering his nose as an insult." Nodier may have come upon this fact in the Literary Anecdotes of the abbé Raynal, where it was mentioned that Cyrano stabbed about a dozen men for mocking his maimed nose. At the same time, Lacroix did not reflect the "nosological" reasoning from Gautier's essay. In the edition of Cyrano's works chronologically closest to the appearance of Rostand's play, which came out in 1886, the preface by Eugène Müller mentioned neither Nodier and Gautier nor the poet's large nose at all.
Classical and Renaissance antecedents Gábor Petneházi, a classicist, traced the theme of the nose tirade back to ancient times and argued Rostand learned it from 16th-century writers. Petneházi relied on a 1941 essay by Otto Weinreich. The root of the nose tirade is apparently a two-line epigram attributed to the emperor Trajan in the Greek Anthology: a man with a large enough nose can tell the time like a sundial.