When, after his exertions on behalf of the love-struck Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie Wooster hears himself compared to Cyrano de Bergerac, his literary knowledge rises to the occasion: ‘the chap with the nose’. It was Edmund Rostand’s play of 1897 that brought Cyrano and his protuberance their modern fame. The 17th-century soldier and writer who gave Rostand his model, and who has been overshadowed by his theatrical counterpart for more than a century, would have lain beyond Bertie’s range of reference. Rostand’s drama belongs to a 19th-century French tradition which romanticised the nation’s involvement in the brutal conflict of the Thirty Years War. In 1834 Théophile Gautier, attempting to revive interest in the original Cyrano’s writings, placed them in ‘the good old days of beautiful, poetic courtesans, the time of balconies climbed, of silken rope-ladders’. In the 1840s Alexandre Dumas anticipated Rostand’s feat by sensationalising the exploits of Count d’Artagnan, who fought with the true Cyrano at the siege of Arras — and who duly appears in Rostand’s play.
Ishbel Addyman remarks that, while the original Cyrano sported quite a snout, the noses of his fictional equivalents, of whom Rostand’s is only the most famous, have grown with the authors’ imaginations: ‘the longer the nose, the larger the lie’.
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