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I found my mother’s tattered copy of Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac among the dusty Reader’s Digest Condensed Books in the family bookshelf when I was ten. I started reading it out of boredom, and I got hooked. This version was in rhyming verse and I didn’t understand much of it, but I kept on reading because the hero was magnificent. He was funny-looking— that huge nose—he was always broke, and the woman he loved was in love with some dolt, but none of these things bothered him. He was funny, he wrote wonderfully, he could turn out rhyming quatrains while vivisecting an opponent in a swordfight. He feared no one, he openly mocked the powerful, and he made grand, extravagant gestures that didn’t really get him anywhere, but what gestures they were. I learned what “panache” means.

The part that really got me was when Cyrano pretends to have fallen from the moon, and proceeds to explain how space travel is possible. (The play was written in 1897.) And he does this so that the woman he loves can marry the dolt without being interrupted.

I thought people were supposed to be like Cyrano de Bergerac, or at least aspire to be like him. Life quickly rid me of that notion. Imagine my disillusionment. Cyrano de Bergerac ruined my life.

In college I learned that the hero of Rostand’s play was based on a real person. Here’s a review of Ishbel Addyman’s biography of the real Cyrano—writer, free-thinker, science-fiction writer, probably gay (that explains so much).