If we could once forget the conventional things, the roses, the pierced hearts, the fairy wings and get to something larger, something true; instead … - Edmond Rostand

Wit now would be to insult the night, nature itself, the jasmine scent, the moonlight; one glimpse of the heavens and their infinite spaces reveals the absurdity of our artifices. What scares me is that the alchemy we share may fail to distil true love, the real, the rare, wasting its time on fanciful pastimes while our sophistication destroys our dreams.

A man stands straighter under hostile eyes.

Cyrano’s response is telling; consenting to eat only for fear that to refuse to do so might grieve the sweetmeat vendor, he takes a single grape, a glass of water, and half a macaroon. His abstemiousness with regard to the pleasures of the table extends symbolically to all pleasures of the flesh; a facet of his idealism, which leads him to prefer contemplation of the stars and the moon over more earthly and earthy delights, we will see as the play progresses that this tendency toward self-denial comes close to a philosophy of life — such that he manages to reach the end of the play and the end of his life without having conquered the object of his desire.