Word: gascon
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Europe. Few know any history except the Anglo-American combination. But U. S. play-goers who have seen Walter Hampden act the Parisian smash of 1897, Edmond Rostand's lyrical Cyrano de Bergerac, have gained an inkling of what 17th Century France was like. For swaggering, fork-tongued Gascon Cyrano actually lived, and in those melodramatic days. The Rogers biography reveals the real Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-55) as "swordsman-libertine-man-of-letters." Author of Walt Whitman the Magnificent Idler, Biographer Rogers now finds his pen cluttered at every turn with a man whose short, quick-tempered life...
...hundred baldpates. It was funereal." The lecture tour was salvaged by substituting a laudatory address on South America. The original lectures now appear in book form to make pleasant if somewhat disappointing reading. From the mass of anecdote that has accumulated about the figure of the famed 16th Century Gascon, Lecturer France has gleaned the few bits that seem authentic and pieced them into the patchwork of Rabelais' vagabond life. Scholar and classicist, Francois Rabelais nevertheless defied Hippocrates, the Church and prevailing custom, to the extent of publicly dissecting a man who had been hanged. But the fascination...
Cyrano de Bergerac's verses were bright, rousing, full of Gascon gallantries. His rapier was rapid. But his nose was freakishly long, disfiguring. Therefore he felt frustrated in his love affair with Roxanne, and Edmond Rostand's famed heroic comedy turns into tragedy. Cyrano has made theatrical history in the versions of Constant Coquelin and Richard Mansfield. In the. U. S., of late years, Walter Hampden has honored both himself and the role. On Christmas night he revived Cyrano, scored again. Ingeborg Torrup was a new, petite, luscious Roxanne...
...plenty. Gentlemen insult each other with perfect grace, and draw their long steel on the lightest provocation. Madame De Chevreuse still plots this time in trousers. And if Richelieu is becoming feeble, Mazarini "the snake replaces the eagle" is on hand to put obstacles in the way of redoubtable Gascon gentlemen. The three original musketeers are missing but the loss is slight when their places are taken by Cyrano de Bergerac and the young Chevalier Tancrede, whose antecedents will surprise the reader, but whose identity, like the plot of detective plays, is not to be divulged by the reviewer...
...that week very rapidly and its editors could congratulate themselves that, in gratifying a whim of the business department they had performed a typical World re-form for the city. More than ever was the World the self-styled "D'Artagnan of journalism," for it was that lusty Gascon who, in search of employment, picked quarrels to make friends...