Cyrano de Bergerac

Hercule-Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) was a French author, dramatist, soldier, and freethinker, best remembered today through the largely fictional version of his life in Edmond Rostand's 1897 verse play of the same title. He was born in Paris into a family of minor gentry whose country property at Bergerac in the Chevreuse valley near Paris gave him the territorial name; he had no connection to the town of Bergerac in the Dordogne.

He was educated in Paris and at the Collège de Beauvais and around 1638 enlisted in a guards company drawn from the gentry of Gascony, where he gained a reputation as a duelist and a sharp-tongued companion. Wounds received at the sieges of Mouzon (1639) and Arras (1640) ended his military career, and he turned to study, taking lessons from the philosopher Pierre Gassendi alongside Molière and others.

His writings combine satire, libertine philosophy, and proto-science fiction. His comedy Le Pédant joué and the tragedy La Mort d'Agrippine were both staged or printed in his lifetime, but he is remembered above all for the two posthumously published voyages L'Autre Monde, ou Les États et Empires de la Lune and Les États et Empires du Soleil, in which the narrator travels to the Moon and the Sun and meets philosophers who undermine orthodox Christian and Aristotelian views.

He died at Sannois in 1655 from a head injury whose origin remains disputed.

Cyrano comes from the Greek place name Cyrene through Latin, given as a masculine baptismal name; de Bergerac is the territorial particle, and he carried the masculine form.