Cyrano de Bergerac, Savinien (1619-1655)

French writer. Joining a corps of guards at the age of 19, he performed heroic feats. He is the hero of a classic play by Edmond Rostand, in which his excessively long nose is used as a counterpoint to his chivalrous character.

He wrote Le Pédant joué/The Pedant Tricked (1654), a comedy which influenced Molière, and the tragedy La Mort d'Agrippine/The Death of Agrippina (1653), which was suspected of atheism by the orthodox church. His two satirical scientific romances, Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune/Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and Histoire comique des états et empires du soleil/Comical History of the States and Empires of the Sun, were published posthumously (1656 and 1661 respectively) and reveal him as one of the most daring speculative thinkers of his generation. Stories of imaginary journeys to the Moon and Sun, they satirized the contemporary belief that humans were the centre of creation. His works also contain many forecasts of future scientific developments, including the atomic structure of matter.