The first of the two parts of this work was made public in truncated form by the author's friend Le Bret in 1657. A falling beam, dislodged by accident -or perhaps intentionally -brought death a year later.Ĭyrano's reputation as an intellectual libertine, propagator of subversive ideas, satirist of man and his foibles, and as a figure in the vanguard of scientific thought -already firmly established before 1655 -received increased notoriety with the posthumous appearance of L'autre monde, ou les états et empires de la lune et du soleil, which described imaginary voyages to the moon and the sun, respectively. In 1654 Cyrano also published an intellectually challenging and ideologically daring tragedy, La mort d'agrippine. In 1652 he entered the service of the Duc d'Arpajon under whose protection he brought out in 1654 his Oeuvres diverses, which included the boldly rational Lettre contre les sorciers and a farcical comedy, Le p édant jou é, from which Moli ère borrowed two passages for Les fourberies de Scapin. At the same time he was emerging as a burlesque poet of consequence and a redoubtable political writer who first attacked and then defended the Machiavellian statecraft of Cardinal Mazarin. Descartes's principle of methodical doubt, Gassendi's rehabilitation of Epicurus, and the attendant influence of a newly translated Lucretius were all forces providing a common philosophical denominator which drew Cyrano closer to his fellow libertins -Gabriel Naud é, Fran çois La Mothe Le Vayer, and Moli ère, among others.
Between 16 he studied philosophy assiduously, with special stress on Pierre Gassendi and Ren é Descartes, and was, according to some, a pupil of Gassendi himself. His military career came to an end when he was wounded at the siege of Arras in 1640. Hostile to the formal authoritarian education to which he had been subjected at the Coll ège de Beauvais, he was persuaded to serve in the army, where he gained a considerable reputation as a duelist and writer of verses. Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, a soldier, man of letters, and freethinker, was born in Paris, where he died thirty-six years later he resembled only superficially the hero of Edmond Rostand's romanticized drama (1897).
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