Cyrano de Bergerac

First edition.

3/4 red morocco, smooth spine elaborately decorated with gilt typographic motifs and green morocco onlays, crossed musketeer swords gilt-stamped at center of spine, gilt date at foot, marbled paper boards framed in gilt, marbled endpapers and pastedowns, original wrappers and spine (slightly toned) preserved, top edge gilt, small restorations to corners and spine color restored.

Rare inscribed copy signed by Edmond Rostand: "A Monsieur Henry Fouquier avec ma reconnaissance la plus cordiale. Edmond Rostand."

Fouquier was among the very first journalists to write about Cyrano, and published a raving review the day after the play's premiere (Le Figaro, 29 December 1897).

The premiere "was one of the greatest nights in French theatre" and was met with such overwhelming success that "Ladies threw their gloves and fans on stage and gentlemen, their opera hats. Friends invaded the wings to congratulate Edmond and Coquelin. But this was nothing to the uproar when the curtain finally fell at the end of Act Five. After Coquelin had taken forty curtain calls, the curtain was simply left up. The audience just could not bear to leave" (Susan Lloyd, The Man who was Cyrano, p. 138). Rostand’s gratitude toward his dedicatee was thus well warranted. Fouquier was a respected name in theatre journalism, and his Cyrano review still frequently appears in Rostand’s biographies:

“My mind is truly uplifted and my soul gladdened by the great success—one of the greatest, and perhaps the greatest—we have had the pleasure of witnessing in a long while, which greeted Cyrano de Bergerac. And it is not only my artistic sensibility that is gratified to hear on stage a language of exquisite poetry and uninhibited fancy, like the kind that once burst forth in [Victor Hugo's] Ruy Blas; there is something more, and to my mind, something greater still.

That something is the joy of seeing a poet make an audience understand and applaud the most delicate emotions, the most refined stirrings of the heart. In this, Mr. E. Rostand is in a class of his own [...]”

Fouquier’s admiration for Rostand never waned. He would later write an equally glowing review of L’Aiglon, performed by the great Sarah Bernhardt, after attending its premiere on 25 March 1900:

“The profound originality of the poet’s dramatic genius lies in his seamless blending of all these captivating elements into a single work, in which each one blossoms into a compelling form—now lyrical, now tragic or intimate, witty, or again filled with imagination and exquisite sensitivity, a page of history, a stanza of poetry, a dream, and the whimsy of fairy-tale fantasy.” (Le Théâtre, April 1900, p. 2).