who were paid to be nasty—hailed Cyrano as “the most beautiful dramatic poem to appear for half a century” (Emile Faguet in Le Journal des débats) and spoke of December 2 8 as “a date that will live in the annals of the theater” (Francisque Sarcey of Le Temps). The 29th started out pretty well, too: On that day the French Minister of Education nominated Rostand for the Legion d‘Honneur, France’s highest honor. Two days later, just in time for the New Year’s honors list, the decree officially naming him a chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur had found its way onto the desk of Felix Faure, president of the Republic, who, having signed it, booked a loge at the Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin for himself and his family. More laurels were to follow. Elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1898, Rostand would surely have been elected also to the Académie française were its membership not fixed at seventy (someone has to die before a new member can be elected; Rostand had to wait until 1901). Cyrano was soon being performed in New York (at the Garden Theater in 1898), in Berlin (at the Deutsches Theater in 1898), in London (in French at the Lyceum in 1898 , in English at Wyndham’s Theatre in 1900). The play was translated into the major European languages: in 1898 into English (two versions), German, Dutch, Italian, Hungarian, and Polish (two versions); in 1899 into Spanish, Czech, and, once again, into Polish.

What accounts for the success of this play, a success that has lasted now for more than a century? This is a question that has vexed literary critics and rather annoyed the intelligentsia, who have been at pains to insist that the popular appeal of Cyrano has less to do with the intrinsic artistic merits of the play than with the historical and cultural context in which it was received. For once the euphoria of opening night had died down, other, less sympathetic voices began to be heard. Some, like Jules Romains, saw Rostand as one of a group of “eloquent and vulgar poets” peddling a “degraded form of romantic drama” to the middle classes. Rostand and his ilk, according to Romains, “deserve more than scorn: reprobation. They have lowered French taste, perverted the public, compromised our national dignity.” André Ferdinand Hérold saw in Cyrano a fine exercise in “cacography” (Monsieur Rostand “knows a thousand ways to torture a line”) and a “masterpiece of vulgarity” by one who has perfected “the art of writing badly.”

Critics almost never like popular successes (if the vulgar public were able to identify good theater and literature on its own, critics would be left with nothing to do), but Rostand’s case is of more than passing interest because the divisiveness surrounding the reception of Cyrano reflects a great cultural unease, a malaise in late-nineteenth-century French society. Cyrano became an affaire, as the French say, such that writers, critics, and even ordinary theatergoers had to be either for or against it. “Claudel or Rostand,” said the novelist André Gide, “you have to choose,” meaning: One must either grapple with all the harshness and the complexities of the modem world (Paul Claudel, a contemporary of Rostand’s, was a highly original playwright influenced by symbolism), or else remain in the idealized, fanciful place depicted by Rostand and incarnated by his valiant soldier-poet Cyrano.

The Theatre de la Porte-Saint-Martin’s production of Cyrano provoked a new round in the old French debate between the ancients and the moderns, a debate that was intricately related to the raging political issue of the day—namely, nationalism. Rostand, rightly or wrongly, was associated with what Jehan Rictus, referring to the right-wing royalist movement, called “a form of literary Boulangism.” He was perceived by many of his contemporaries as an old guard, highly conservative figure. Rictus surely went too far—Rostand’s personal politics were quite liberal; he was a Dreyfusard and a friend of the socialist Leon Blum. But from a literary point of view, it is undeniable that Cyrano breaks no new ground. Rostand, moreover, was not bashful about his dislike for the changing times: “I wrote Cyrano... with love, with pleasure, and also with the idea of fighting against the tendencies of the times, tendencies which, in truth, irritated me, revolted me.”

While Rostand is not explicit about these “tendencies,” it is not hard to guess what he has in mind. The overall cultural mood in France during the 1890s was gloomy, joyless, and resentful. In