Cyrano de Bergerac and The States and Empires of the Moon
Cyrano de Bergerac's Other World, published posthumously in 1657: bottles of dew, rockets, the Selenites and the libertine satire of 17th-century France.
Before he became the hero with the enormous nose in Edmond Rostand's play, Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac was a real writer, and one of the boldest of seventeenth-century France. Born in Paris in 1619 and dying in 1655, a soldier, duellist and free thinker, he left a fantastic novel recounting a journey to the Moon: The Other World, or the States and Empires of the Moon, published posthumously in 1657.
A book censored by friends
It was published by his friend Henry Le Bret, who prepared the edition with many cuts. The most daring pages, those discussing the immortality of the soul, miracles and the origin of the world, were softened or removed to avoid trouble with the censors. The full text was reconstructed only later thanks to rediscovered manuscripts, which restored the author's entire irreverent vein.
Cyrano belonged to the circle of the learned libertines, who read Epicurus, Lucretius and the new astronomers and called traditional truths into question. The lunar journey offered him the perfect pretext: observing the Earth from outside, through the eyes of another world, made it possible to criticise its customs, hierarchies and prejudices without attacking them openly.
Dew, rockets and beef marrow
The story opens with a discussion among friends: might the Moon be a world like ours, of which the Earth is in turn the moon? The narrator decides to find out. His first attempt is comically ingenious: he ties around his body many bottles full of dew, which the morning sun draws upwards. He really does rise, but comes down in New France, that is in Canada, where he is welcomed by the governor.
He then builds a flying machine. Some soldiers, as part of a celebration, tie rockets to it, and the contraption takes off with the narrator aboard. What carries him all the way to the Moon, however, is an even stranger detail: he had smeared his body with beef marrow to treat his bruises, and the Moon, which according to popular belief draws up the marrow of animals, sucks him towards itself.
The Selenites and the world upside down
The narrator lands in the Earthly Paradise, located on the Moon, where he meets the prophet Elijah, who tells him he got there by throwing a magnetised ball upwards. Driven out for his irreverent jokes, he reaches the Selenites, giants who walk on all fours. They take him for an animal and display him in public alongside another earthling, the Spaniard Domingo Gonsales, the lunar traveller of Francis Godwin's English novel.
On the Moon people pay in verses, feed on the smells of food and read books that speak by themselves, a kind of audiobook before its time. An exceptional guide, the demon of Socrates, accompanies the narrator in philosophical discussions. The young rule over the old, and honours are measured by inverted criteria. The novel had a sequel, the States and Empires of the Sun, published in 1662.
In 1897 Rostand paid tribute to the book in a famous scene of his Cyrano, in which the hero lists six fanciful ways of reaching the Moon. But the original work deserves to be read for its own sake: behind the game of invention lies one of the first modern reflections on the relativity of points of view, conducted with the gaze of someone looking down at the Earth.