Today, he is best known as the inspiration for Edmond Rostand's most noted drama, Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), which, although it includes elements of his life, also contains invention and myth.

[2] Without Henri Le Bret, who wrote the biographical information, his country childhood, his military engagement, the injuries it caused, his prowess as a swordsman, the circumstances of his death and his supposed final conversion would remain unknown.

Since 1862, when Auguste Jal revealed that the "Lord of Bergerac" was Parisian and not Gascon, research in parish registries and notarial records by a small number of researchers,[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] in particular Madeleine Alcover of Rice University, has allowed the public to know more about his genealogy, his family, his home in Paris and those of some of his friends, but has revealed no new documents that support or refute the essentials of Le Bret's account or fill the gaps in his narrative.

Of his maternal grandfather, Estienne Bellanger, "Financial Controller of the Parisian general revenue" (« contrôleur des finances en la recette générale de Paris »), and of his background, we know almost nothing.

He married Catherine Valeton, daughter of a property tax collector from Nantes, Audebert Valeton, who, accused of involvement in the Affair of the Placards, was "burned alive on wood taken from his house"[note 5] on 21 January 1535 at the crossroads of la Croix du Trahoir (the intersection of the Rue de l'Arbre-Sec and the Rue Saint-Honoré), in front of the Pavillon des singes, where Molière lived almost a century later.

[19] His library, relatively poorly stocked (126 volumes), testifies to his schooling as a jurist and to an open curiosity: a taste for languages and ancient literature, the great humanists of the Renaissance (Erasmus, Rabelais, Juan Luis Vives), knowledge of Italian, interest in the sciences.

[21] Espérance and Abel I had at least six children: The historian Auguste Jal discovered the baptism of the (then) supposed Gascon in the 1860s: Finally, after long exertion, I knew that Abel Cyrano had left the neighbourhood of Saint-Eustache for that of Saint-Sauveur, and that Espérance Bellanger had given birth in this new dwelling to a boy whose baptismal record is as follows: "The sixth of March one thousand six hundred and nineteen, Savinien, son of Abel de Cyrano, squire, Lord of Mauvières, and of the lady Espérance Bellenger (sic), the godfather, nobleman Antoine Fanny, King's Counsellor and Auditor in his Court of Finances, of this parish, the godmother the lady Marie Fédeau (sic), wife of nobleman Master Louis Perrot, Counsellor and Secretary to the King, Household and Crown of France, of the parish of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois".

[24] An Antoine Lamy had actually been accepted as an auditor of finances on 2 September 1602, a year before Pierre de Maupeou, Espérance Bellanger's cousin and son-in-law of Denis Feydeau who was a witness to the marriage of Savinien's parents in 1612.

[note 11] When Savinien I de Cyrano acquired it, the domain of Mauvières consisted of "a habitable mansion…with a lower room, a cellar beneath, kitchen, pantry, an upper chamber, granaries, stables, barn, portal, all roofed with tiles, with courtyard, walled dovecote; mill, enclosed plot, garden and fishpond, the right of middle and low justice…".

His friend Le Bret recalls: The education that we had together with a good country priest who took in boarders, made us friends from our most tender youth, and I remember the aversion he had from that time for one who seemed to him a shadow of Sidias,[note 12] because, in the thoughts which that man could somewhat grasp, he believed him incapable of teaching him anything; so that he paid so little attention to his lessons and his corrections that his father, who was a fine old gentleman, fairly unconcerned for his children's education and overly credulous of this one's complaints, removed him [from the school] a little too suddenly and, without considering if his son would be better off elsewhere, he sent him to that city [Paris] where he left him, until the age of nineteen years, to his own devices.

[note 14] He may have been accommodated by his uncle Samuel de Cyrano in a large family residence in the Rue des Prouvaires, where his parents had lived up until 1618.

It has long been maintained that he attended the Collège de Beauvais where the action of the comedy Le pédant joué takes place[note 17] and whose principal, Jean Grangier would inspire the character of Granger, the pedant of Le pédant joué, but his presence in June 1641 as a student of rhetoric at the Collège de Lisieux[note 18] (see below), has encouraged more recent historians to revise that opinion.

[37] Forty years later, two editors added to the realism and local colour: Since nothing binds Cyrano to the humble lodgings of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Jacques to which the uncertainties of fate condemned his family, he gives himself over entirely to Paris, to its streets and, according to the words of one of his close friends, "to its excrescences" (à ses verrues).

[note 20] He drinks, diligently frequents the Rue Glatigny, called Val d'amour, because of the women who sell pleasure there,[note 21] gambles, roams the sleeping city to frighten the bourgeois or forge signs, provokes the watch, gets into debt and links himself with that literary Bohemia which centered around Tristan L'Hermite and Saint-Amant and cultivated the memory of Théophile and his impious lyricism.

He then proceeded to Paris and the heart of the Latin Quarter, to the college de Dormans-Beauvais,[1] where he had as master Jean Grangier, whom he afterwards ridiculed in his comedy Le Pédant joué (The Pedant Tricked) of 1654.

[41] One author, Ishbel Addyman, varies from other biographers and claims that he was not a Gascon aristocrat, but a descendant of a Sardinian fishmonger, and that the appellation Bergerac stemmed from a small estate near Paris where he was born, not in Gascony, and that he may have suffered tertiary syphilis.

His mixture of science and romance in the last two works furnished a model for many subsequent writers, among them Jonathan Swift, Edgar Allan Poe and probably Voltaire.

However the academic and editor of Cyrano's works Madeleine Alcover uncovered a contemporary text which suggests an attack on the Duke's carriage in which a member of his household was injured.

However, there is strong evidence to support the theory that his death was a result of a botched assassination attempt as well as further damage to his health caused by a period of confinement in a private asylum, orchestrated by his enemies, who succeeded in enlisting the help of his own brother Abel de Cyrano.

This play, which became Rostand's most successful work, revolves around Cyrano's love for the beautiful Roxane, whom he is obliged to woo on behalf of a more conventionally handsome but less articulate friend, Christian de Neuvillette.

[citation needed] Cyrano de Bergerac served as an inspiration for the creation of Saint-Savin, one of the main characters of Umberto Eco's novel The Island of the Day Before.

Another rendition is a gender-flipped romantic comedy interpretation, The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996), starring Janeane Garofalo as a veterinarian/radio talk show host (and the Cyrano in question), and Uma Thurman as her model friend/facsimile.