Cyrano de Bergerac

It is composed of three plays. The first, Rostand's own Cyrano de Bergerac, needs no introduction: it is the masterpiece, the blazing centre around which everything else turns. It appears here in a new English verse translation that strives to honour the music of the original — its alexandrines, its speed, its sudden shifts from laughter to heartbreak — while making it breathe in English. The second, The Shadow and the Flame, is a sequel. Between Act IV and Act V of Rostand's play, there is a gap of fifteen years — dispatched in a single stage direction. Christian is dead. The cadets are scattered. And Cyrano, the loudest man in Paris, begins a long apprenticeship in silence. What does he do with those years? How does a man whose entire existence is built on speech learn to sit, every Saturday, beside the woman he loves and say nothing? The Shadow and the Flame fills that silence — not to correct Rostand, but to inhabit the space he left open. It follows Cyrano through ruin, through the slow rebuilding of a life around writing and teaching, through the mentoring of a young man who carries forward what the man himself can no longer bear to hold. It ends where Rostand's Act V begins — and where, we hope, the reader will turn back to witness that death with new eyes. The third, Before the Panache, is a prequel. It goes back to the beginning — to Mauvières, to the courtyard where a boy named Savinien reads when he should be working, argues when he should be silent, and loves when he should know better. It follows him from the fields of Gascony to the corridors of the Collège de Beauvais, from the salons of Paris to the barracks of the cadets, tracing the slow, painful forging of a man who will one day walk into the Hôtel de Bourgogne and change everything. Here, panache is not a gift. It is a scar that learned to shine. A word on the ordering. The three plays can, of course, be read chronologically: Before the Panache, then Cyrano, then The Shadow and the Flame. Each stands on its own. But this volume presents them in a different sequence — and deliberately so. We begin with the myth. Cyrano de Bergerac is the play the world knows, the story that has already entered the bloodstream of Western theatre. It is the door. One enters through it, or one does not enter at all. We then move forward into the aftermath. The Shadow and the Flame takes what Rostand built and asks: what happened next? It deepens the myth by showing its cost — the years of solitude, the weight of a secret kept too long, the slow erosion of a man who chose silence over confession. The reader who has just witnessed Cyrano at his most dazzling now sees him at his most human. And only then do we go back to the forge. Before the Panache reveals the boy behind the legend — vulnerable, unfinished, not yet armoured. The reader who already knows the man Cyrano became, and has seen the price he paid, now discovers who he was before the world forced him to become magnificent. Every wound, every humiliation, every act of defiance lands differently when you know where it leads. This is not the order of the clock. It is the order of understanding. We meet the hero, we mourn him, and then — only then — we learn why he was the way he was. The last page of the trilogy is not a death. It is a departure — a young man flinging his cape over his shoulders and striding toward the Hôtel de Bourgogne, toward a destiny the reader already knows by heart.