The Time Cyrano de Bergerac’s Nose Ruined My English Paper

I once wrote an entire college essay about Cyrano de Bergerac’s nose. Not the idea of his nose—what it symbolized about insecurity, romance, and French societal norms—but literally just his nose. My professor, a dry woman with a passion for 17th-century satire, marked the margins in red: “You’re missing the point.” She was right. Cyrano’s nose, as it turns out, is the least interesting thing about him.

The Nose That Fooled Me

When most people think of Cyrano de Bergerac, they picture a man with a comically large nose, a tragic poet who loves Roxane but hides his face. That image comes from Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play, Cyrano de Bergerac, which turned the real Cyrano (1619–1655) into a sentimental hero. But the actual Cyrano de Bergerac was a sword-fighting atheist who wrote science fiction before the genre existed. His 1657 novel The Other World: Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon features a man propelled into space by a vial of dew, lunar “oysters” that speak philosophy, and a society where poets are executed. It’s wild.

I wish someone had told me this before I fixated on the nose. The real Cyrano is stranger, funnier, and far more subversive than the lovelorn figure in the play.

Hunting Down the Real Cyrano

After my humiliating essay incident, I went back to Cyrano’s original work. States and Empires of the Sun (1662) is even more absurd: characters ride flying vultures, debate the morality of cannibalism, and meet a god who resembles a giant, floating cod. Cyrano uses these fantasies to mock religion, class hierarchies, and scientific dogma. In one scene, he lands on the sun and discovers a society where people eat books to absorb knowledge—a literal take on “reading between the lines.”

What shocked me? How modern his humor feels. He satirizes everything from colonialism to celebrity culture. In Lettres provinciales, Pascal wrote that Cyrano’s ideas were “dangerous.” I found them exhilarating.

Why Every English Speaker Should Read the Moon Trilogy

Cyrano’s Moon and Sun novels are early examples of sci-fi, written decades before Voltaire’s Micromégas or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He predicted space travel, extraterrestrial life, and even cloning—all while cracking jokes about French aristocrats. His lunar society abandons money and war; the catch? Everyone’s forced into arranged marriages based on their astrological signs. It’s a utopia with a darkly comic twist.

If you’re new to Cyrano, skip the Rostand play for now. Start with The Moon Trilogy, translated by Richard Aldington (Dover Thrift Editions). It’s cheaper than therapy and twice as weird.

Translations Are a Minefield

Cyrano’s work is tricky in English. His prose is playful, filled with puns and 17th-century slang. Some translations sound stilted—others try too hard to be “modern,” swapping Cyrano’s wit for slang that feels forced. Avoid the 1923 Marvel translation; it smooths out his sharp edges. Instead, track down the 1962 University of North Carolina Press edition, which preserves his chaotic energy.

Read the footnotes. Cyrano’s jokes often reference political scandals of his era. One throwaway line about a “three-headed lawyer” is actually a jab at Cardinal Richelieu’s legal reforms. The footnotes are a treasure trove of context.

What I Wish Someone Told Me

Read Cyrano for the satire, not the romance. If you want heartbreak, go to the play—but if you want to see how a 17th-century Frenchman predicted Twitter, TikTok, and Elon Musk’s Mars obsession, read his actual writing. He’s not “the guy with the nose.” He’s the guy who invented a genre where anything can happen—including a duel fought with sonnets instead of swords.

And if you’ve ever wanted to ask him why he put a talking whale in The Sun, or how he’d describe today’s world in a sci-fi sequel…

Talk to Cyrano de Bergerac on HoloDream. He’ll probably start with a joke about your own nose.