A Voyage to the Moon

I had no sooner said the word, but he rose like a Whirlwind, and holding me between his Arms, without the least uneasiness he made me pass that vast space which Astronomers reckon betwixt the Moon and us, in a day and a halfs time; which convinced me that they tell a Lye who say that a Millstone would be Three Hundred Threescore, and I know not how many years more, in falling from Heaven, since I was so short a while in dropping down from the Globe of the Moon upon this. At length, about the beginning of the Second day, I perceived I was drawing near our World; since I could already distinguish Europe from Africa, and both from Asia; when I smelt Brimstone which I saw steaming out of a very high Mountain,121 that incommoded me so much that I fainted away upon it.

I cannot tell what befel me afterwards; but coming to my self again, I found I was amongst Briers on the side of a Hill, amidst some Shepherds, who spoke Italian. I knew not what was become of my Spirit, and I asked the Shepherds if they had not seen him. At that word they made the sign of the Cross, and looked upon me as if I had been a Devil my self: But when I told them that I was a Christian, and that I begg'd the Charity of them, that they would lead me to some place where I might take a little rest; they conducted me into a Village, about a Mile off; where no sooner was I come but all the Dogs of the place, from the least Cur to the biggest Mastiff, flew upon me, and had torn me to pieces, if I had not found a House wherein I saved my self: But that hindered them not to continue their Barking and Bawling, so that the Master of the House began to look upon me with an Evil Eye; and really I think, as people are very apprehensive when Accidents which they look upon to be ominous happen, that man could have delivered me up as a Prey to these accursed Beasts, had not I bethought my self that that which madded them so much at me, was the World from whence I came; because being accustomed to bark at the Moon, they smelt I was come from thence, by the scent of my Cloaths, which stuck to me as a Sea-smell hangs about those who have been long on Ship-board, for some time after they come ashore. To Air myself then, I lay three or four hours in the Sun, upon a Terrass-walk; and being afterwards come down, the Dogs, who smelt no more that influence which had made me their Enemy, left barking, and peaceably went to their several homes.

Next day I parted for Rome, where I saw the ruins of the Triumphs of some great men, as well as of Ages: I admired those lovely Relicks; and the Repairs of some of them made by the Modern. At length, having stayed there a fortnight in Company of Monsieur de Cyrano my Cousin, who advanced me Money for my Return, I went to Civita vecchia, and embarked in a Galley that carried me to Marseilles.

During all this Voyage, my mind run upon nothing but the Wonders of the last I made. At that time I began the Memoires of it; and after my return, put them into as good order, as Sickness, which confines me to Bed, would permit. But foreseeing, that it will put an end to all my Studies, and Travels;122 that I may be as good as my word to the Council of that World; I have begg'd of Monsieur le Bret, my dearest and most constant Friend, that he would publish them with the History of the Republick of the Sun, that of the Spark, and some other Pieces of my Composing, if those who have Stolen them from us restore them to him, as I earnestly adjure them to do.123

FINIS

1

This evidently refers to an earlier translation of the Voyage to the Moon, published probably in 1660. The present editor will be greatly obliged to any one who will put him on the track of a copy of this, or any other early translation from Cyrano, such as the "Satyrical Characters and handsome Descriptions, in Letters, written to several Persons of Quality, by Monsieur De Cyrano Bergerac. Translated from the French, by a Person of Honor. London, 1658."

2

Among the "others" who had previously "discovered" the Moon, Ariosto is the most prominent. In his Orlando Furioso, Astolfo goes to the moon, visits the "Valley of Lost Things," finds there many broken resolutions, idlers' days, lovers' tears, and other such matters; and finally recovers Orlando's lost wits, which he brings back to the earth.

The Satire Ménippée (1594) gives, in its Supplément, "News from the Regions of the Moon."

Quevedo, the Spanish satirist and novelist (1580-1645), with whose works Cyrano was acquainted, also gives an account of the moon in his Sixth Vision.

In England, the Rev. John Wilkins (1614-1672), once Principal of Trinity College, Cambridge, and later Bishop of Chester, a brother-in-law of Cromwell, and one of the founders of the Royal Society, published in 1638 the "Discovery of a New World; or, a Discourse to prove it is probable there may be another habitable world in the Moon; with a discourse concerning the possibility of a passage thither"; and later, in 1640, the "Discourse concerning a new Planet; tending to prove it is probable our earth is one of the Planets." These two works are said to have done more than any others to popularize the Copernican system in England. The Discovery of a New World was translated into French by Jean de Montagne, and published at Rouen in 1655 or 1656. See Charles Nodier, Mélanges extraits d'une petite bibliothèque.

Finally, the most important of Cyrano's predecessors in the discovery of the moon was Francis Godwin, M.A., D.D., Bishop of Llandaff and later of Hereford (1562-1633). It was not till 1638, after the worthy Bishop's death, and in the same year that Rev. (later Bishop) John Wilkins' Discovery of a New World was published, that there appeared his "Man in the Moone; or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither, by Domingo Gonsales, the Speedy Messenger." This was translated into French by Jean Baudoin or Baudouin in 1648, as "L'homme dans la lune … voyage … fait par Dominique Gonzales, aventurier espagnol," and was well known to Cyrano, as we shall see.

In saying that "the sun owes its discovery wholly to our author," the translator appears to be ignorant of a work which Cyrano certainly knew: the Civitas solis of Campanella, published in 1623 as a part of his Realis Philosophiæ Epilogisticæ Partes IV.

3

Cf. the last sentence of the Voyage to the Moon.

4

Monsieur de Cuigy, who is mentioned by Lebret as a friend and admirer of Cyrano, and who was one of the witnesses of his famous battle against the hundred ruffians, possessed an estate at Clamart-sous-Meudon, near Paris. He appears as a character in M. Rostand's play of Cyrano de Bergerac.

5

Jerome Cardan, 1501-1576, natural philosopher, doctor, astrologer, mathematician, and a voluminous author; in short, a sort of Italian Paracelsus, both by his universal learning, and by his intense interest in all domains of possible knowledge, in which he included astrology and necromancy. His most important work is the one referred to here, the De Subtilitate Rerum, 1551.

6

Cf. M. Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, act III., scene xi.: "One way was to stand naked in the sunshine, in a harness thickly studded with glass phials, each filled with morning dew. The sun in drawing up the dew, you see, could not have helped drawing me up too!" (Miss Gertrude Hall' s translation.)

7

Generous = noble. Cf. Lord Burleigh, Precepts to his Son: "Let her not be poor, how generous soever; for a man can buy nothing in the market with gentility."

8

Stammering, mumbling; a North of England word.

9

Paul Lacroix, the editor of the French edition of Cyrano's works, not understanding this phrase, has ingeniously invented the interpretation of "quarantine officer" for it. Not only have the words never had this meaning, but they are evidently a proper name. And in fact François de l'Hospital, Maréchal de France, was Governor of Paris in 1649, the year when the Voyage to the Moon was probably written. Cyrano, thinking he has fallen in France, near Paris, and being asked if he carries news of the fleet to the Governor, naturally answers that he knows nothing of ships going to Paris, and that he carries no news to the Maréchal de l'Hospital.

10

In connection with this discussion it is to be remembered that nearly two centuries were required for the Copernican system, promulgated in 1543, in the De orbium coelestium revolutionibus, to become generally popularized; and that in 1633, only sixteen years before the Voyage to the Moon was written, Galileo had been compelled by the Inquisition to deny the motion of the earth.

11

According to the Ptolemaic system, still generally accepted by "modern Philosophers" at the time of Cyrano's writing, the fixed stars, the sun, the moon, and each of the five (then known) planets, revolved about the earth in different orbits, according to various "epicycles" and "excentrics."

12

The motion of the moon, for instance, was explained in the Ptolemaic system as an epicycle carried by an excentric; the centre of the excentric moving about the earth in a direction opposite to that of the epicycle.

13

The French has: "of the two other motions": i. e., the movement of the fixed stars, and that of the planets.

14

Gassendus or Gassendi was Cyrano's own teacher of Philosophy. Of Provençal origin, and at first Professor in the University of Aix, he came to Paris in 1641, and gave both private lessons and public courses as Professor of the Collège Royal. It was in one of his private classes that Cyrano was a fellow-student with Chapelle, Hesnaut, Bernier, and almost certainly Molière; the most important group of young "libertins" (i. e. free-thinkers) of the epoch.

Gassendi was a bitter opponent of the supposedly Aristotelian school-philosophy of the time; and was on the whole the leader of those who in the seventeenth century followed Epicurean methods in thought. He is the author of a life of Epicurus, and an exposition of his philosophy. He was also an opponent of Descartes, being the most important contemporary supporter of empiricism as against the essentially idealistic method of Descartes.

He is important also as a popularizer of the Copernican system, by his Life of Copernicus, and his Institutio Astronomica (1647).

15

A dog trained to turn a spit, by running about in a rotary cage attached to it. The French has simply: "as a dog makes a wheel turn, when he runs about in it."

16

Cyrano had probably learned this from his master Gassendi. Cf. his "Epistola XX. de apparente magnitudine solis," 1641. Modern Gassendis say the sun is 1,300,000 times greater than the earth in volume, 316,000 times in mass.

17

Ingenuously. The two words were interchangeable in the seventeenth century.

18

Iron pyrites.

19

Supports, feeds; cf. Shakspere, Richard III.

"I'll be at charges for a looking-glass,And entertain a score or two of tailors."

20

St. Augustine.

21

The Feast of St. John the Baptist, June 24.

22

Cf. the play of Cyrano de Bergerac, act III., scene xi.: "Or else, mechanic as well as artificer, I could have fashioned a giant grasshopper, with steel joints, which, impelled by successive explosions of saltpetre, would have hopped with me to the azure meadows where graze the starry flocks."

23

Cf., in the play, the fifth of Cyrano's means for scaling the sky: "Since Phoebe, the moon-goddess, when she is at wane, is greedy, O beeves! of your marrow… with that marrow have besmeared myself!"

24

The translator has apparently misread biaisais where the French editions have baissais: i. e., I was descending toward the moon.

25

"That place was," unquestionably, the Garden of Eden, which Cyrano heretically locates in the Moon; and the "Tree" turough which he has fallen, and an "Apple" of which has besmeared his face and recalled him to life, is the Tree of Life, that stood "in the midst of the garden."

This is the first of a series of hiatuses, which occur in all the French editions as well as the English, and which are marked by those stars that Cyrano refers to in the play: "But I intend setting all this down in a book, and the golden stars I have brought back caught in my shaggy mantle, when the book is printed, will be seen serving as asterisks."

Lebret speaks of these gaps in his preface, saying he would have tried to fill them but for fear of mixing his style with Cyrano's: "For the melancholy colour of my style will not let me imitate the gayety of his; nor can my Wit follow the fine flights of his Imagination."

It seems altogether improbable, however, that Cyrano himself left the work thus incomplete, as Lebret would imply. And in fact we can supply from a Manuscript recently acquired (1890) by the Bibliothèque Nationale, a long passage not printed by Lebret (see pp. 60 ff.). There can be little doubt that the passages were deliberately cut out by some one on account of their "heretical" character. It even seems probable, from passages at the beginning of the Voyage to the Sun, that when the work was circulated in Manuscript, Cyrano had been the object of persecution on account of them.

The passages lacking were cut out then but by whom? The usually accepted opinion is that of our English translator, who says the gaps are "occasioned, not by the Negligence of our Witty French Author, but by the accursed Plagiary of some rude Hand, that in his sickness rifted his Trunks and stole his Papers, as he himself complains." M. Brun has suggested, however, and with some plausibility, that Lebret himself was responsible for the omissions; and that he thus continued, after Cyrano's death, his lifelong attempts at reforming and toning down the impolitic, unorthodox notions of his too-independent friend. So Cyrano was conquered once more in his battle with "les Compromis, les Préjugés, les Lâchètes," and finally "la Sottise":

"Je sais bien qu' à la fin vous me mettrez à bas;N'importe! je me bats, je me bats, je me bats!"

We are proud of printing for the first time in any edition of the Voyage to the Moon, at least a part of what had been cut out; and of being able to indicate for the first time what must have been the substance of the other lost passages, and what is the sense of the fragments preserved.

26

The Apple of the Tree of Life.

27

The translation is not fully adequate here; the French means: "… was fully satisfied, and left me in its place only a slight memory of having lost it."

28

This beautiful Nature-description, the like of which cannot be found in all seventeenth-century French literature outside of Cyrano's works, was apparently his favorite passage, since it is the only one he has used twice. Cf. his Lettre XI., "D'une maison de campagne."

29

In the literal sense, full of delight, delighted.

30

"Quality" = title– as often in the seventeenth century; cf. Shakspere, Henry V.:

"Gentlemen of blood and quality."

31

Probably a long passage has been lost here, in which the "Youth" (the Prophet Elijah, who had "translated" himself hither and become young by eating of the Tree of Life) describes the place where they are as the original Garden of Eden; and tells of the Creation, the Fall, and the Banishment of Adam and Eve. At the beginning of the next paragraph he is still speaking, and telling of Adam's transference from the Moon to the Earth.

32

The woman to the man, from whose side she was taken. Probably only a few words have been omitted at the last hiatus.

33

The supposed situation of the Earthly Paradise.

34

Adam and Eve.

35

We may imagine this a short hiatus, to be filled in as follows: "He suffered a few ages after that, that a holy man, whose name was Enoch, cloyed with the company of men…" etc.

36

Enoch. On his translation, which Cyrano here makes Elijah account for, see Genesis, chapter v.

37

Adam. Cyrano may possibly have confused the Enoch who was translated with another Enoch who was the son of Cain and so grandson of Adam. But it is more probable that he used the word aïeul in its common sense of ancestor; as indeed "grandfather" was used in old English.

38

Cf. the play: "Since smoke by its nature ascends, I could have blown into an appropriate globe a sufficient quantity to ascend with me."

39

"Qu'il prit congé de ses nageoires," = "when he abandoned his floats (or bladders)."

40

Cyrano may here be credited with anticipating the idea of the parachute.

41

Elijah, The passage referred to is lost.

42

Spell the name backward.

43

Ball Cf. Bowling. Cf. also p. 177.

44

Cf. the "sixth means" in the play: "Or else, I could have placed myself upon an iron plate, have taken a magnet of suitable size, and thrown it in the air! That way is a very good one! The magnet flies upward, the iron instantly after; the magnet no sooner overtaken than you fling it up again… The rest is clear! You can go upward indefinitely."

45

The "chariot of fire" in which Elijah was taken up into heaven. Cf. 2 Kings, ii. 11.

46

The following pages are translated from the text as printed for the first time, from the Manuscript at the Bibliothèque Nationale, in an appendix to M. Brun's thesis on Cyrano Bergerac, 1893.

47

"The serpent," as soon appears, is original sin, which

"Brought death into the world, and all our woe."

48

Our author's treatment of "original sin" is, according to M. Brun, unprintable.

49

Here the original text resumes, as found in all the editions, both French and English.

50

Astonishment.

51

Mobile = people, populace. Cf. p. 145.

52

Lemures; malicious spirits of the dead. Cf. Milton:

"The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint."

53

Lars, larvas; ghosts, spectres.

54

Lamias; female demons or vampires.

55

Cf. p. 12

56

"Jerome Cardan pretended to have written most of his books under the dictation of a Familiar Spirit … but, in his treatise De Rerum Varietate, he ingenuously declares that he had never had any other genius but his own: Ego certe nullum dæmonem aut genium mihi adesse cognosce" (Note of Paul Lacroix.)

57

Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, 1486-1535, philosopher, astrologer, and alchemist. Cyrano introduces him in his Lettre XII., "Pour les Sorciers."

58

Jean Trithème (or Johann Tritheim), Abbot of Spanheim; a man of universal scholarship, and an experimenter in alchemy; also accused of sorcery.

59

César de Nostradamus, physician and astrologer of the early sixteenth century.

60

A famous occult order which probably never existed, but about which much was written in the first half of the seventeenth century. It was supposed to have been founded early in the fifteenth century by Rosenkrenz, a pilgrim who had acquired all the wisdom of the Orient.

61

Tomaso Campanella, 1568-1639, Italian poet and philosopher, who came to Paris in 1634. His philosophy was much admired by Cyrano, since he rejected the Aristotelism of the schools, advocated empiricism as the only method of arriving at truth, and insisted on the "four Elements" as the origin of all things.

He appears as an important character in Cyrano's Voyage to the Sun, where he is Cyrano's companion and guide to the Land of the Philosophers.

62

Campanella's principal work, published in 1620.

63

François de La Mothe le Vayer, 1588-1672. He was the tutor of the Due d'Orléans, brother of Louis XIV., and, after 1654, of Louis XIV. himself. In philosophy he was a free-thinker, in literature a disciple of Montaigne. He nevertheless concealed his scepticism in philosophy, even in his chief work, the Doutes sceptiques, under a pretended orthodoxy in religion, and so was never persecuted. Possibly it is to this that Cyrano refers in saying, that he "lived as much like a philosopher, as Gassendi wrote."

64

Cf. p 28, n. 1.

65

Divine. The translator has mistaken an adjective for a noun.

66

François Tristan Thermite, 1601-1655, a French dramatist of importance. His tragedy of Mariamne, in date contemporary with Corneille's Cid, marks him as a predecessor of Racine in method and manner. He is also the author of fugitive verse, but neither that nor his plays make him quite worthy of Cyrano's exalted "Elogy."

He was compelled to pass the years 1614-1620 in England, on account of a duel fought at the age of thirteen!

67

Talc, silicate of magnesia.

68

The "Philosopher's Stone," in form of powder, for chemical "projection" upon baser metals, to transmute them into gold.

69

The "Elixir of Life," or the "Philosopher's Stone" in liquid form.

70

Eulogy. Still so used at the end of the eighteenth century.

71

Consequence = conclusion, deduction. Cf. Matthew Prior:

"Can syllogisms set things right?No, majors soon with minors fight.Or both in friendly consort joinedThe consequence limps false behind."

72

Officious = kindly, ready to serve, doing good offices. Cf. Milton, Paradise Lost:

"Yet, not to earth are those bright luminariesOfficious; but to thee, earth's habitant."

73

Cf. The Man in the Moone, of Francis Godwin: "Their Language is very difficult, since it hath no Affinity with any other I ever heard, and consists not so much of Words and Letters, as Tunes and strange Sounds which no Letters can express; for there are few Words but signify several Things, and are distinguished only by their Sounds, which are sung as it were in uttering; yea many Words consist of Tunes only, without Words."

74

Origin. Cf. pp. 137, 170, 174; and cf. Shakspere, Henry IV., Part II.: