United States or Gibraltar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
". . . And the next place we came to was Bergerac," said he, after ten minutes of it. "Ah!" I murmured. "Bergerac!" "You know it?" "Passably well," said I. "It lies toward the edge of the claret country; but it grows astonishing claret. When I was about your age it grew a wine yet more astonishing." "Hallo!"
M. Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac is not merely Cyrano, but also Constant Coquelin; Sardou's La Tosca is not merely La Tosca, but also Mme. Sarah Bernhardt; Molière's Célimène is not merely Célimène, but also Mlle. Molière; Shakespeare's Hamlet is not merely Hamlet, but also Richard Burbage.
Harden-Hickey, in our day, was as incongruous a figure as was the American at the Court of King Arthur; he was as unhappily out of the picture as would be Cyrano de Bergerac on the floor of the Board of Trade. Judged, as at the time he was judged, by writers of comic paragraphs, by presidents of railroads, by amateur "statesmen" at Washington, Harden-Hickey was a joke.
He was at Bordeaux. The Prince was starting at once for Bergerac, whence he would make a great raid into France. It would not end without a battle. They had sent word of their coming, and the good French King had promised to be at great pains to receive them. Let Nigel hasten at once. If the army had left, then let him follow after with all speed.
Nor yet quite all on murder bent, some on pleasure; the Knights and Ladies of the Cloth of Gold and the hosts of the Renaissance: Cyrano de Bergerac and François Villon leading the ragamuffin procession; the jades of the Fronde, Longueville, Chevreuse and fair-haired Anne of Austria; and Ninon, too, and Manon; and the never-to-be-forgotten Four, 'one for all and all for one; Cagliostro and Monte Cristo; on the side, Rabelais taking notes and laughing under his cowl.
Cyrano de Bergerac was a good play, first of all, and a good poem also; and even a public that fears to seem Philistine knew the difference instinctively. Mme. Nazimova has been quoted as saying that she would never act a play in verse, because in speaking verse she could not be natural.
"You are doubtless aware, my dear friend," replied Trublet, "what Cyrano's bird said on this very subject. One day Cyrano de Bergerac heard two birds conversing in a tree. One of them said, 'The souls of birds are immortal, 'There can be no doubt of it, replied the other.
It is a refuge from the world, and not even, properly speaking, a part of it. Their wit is a thin sheet of shining ice over the eternal waters of bitterness. 'Cyrano de Bergerac' came to us as the new decoration of an old truth, that merriment was one of the world's natural flowers, and not one of its exotics.
He attacked and took in rapid succession Bergerac, La Reole, Aiguillon, Montpezat, Villefranche, and Angouleme.
It is in my mind that come what may there will be much honor for all of us this day. Ever in my head I have a rhyme which the wife of a Welsh archer gave me when I crossed her hand with a golden bracelet after the intaking of Bergerac. She was of the old blood of Merlin with the power of sight. Thus she said
Word Of The Day