Note 1 — Chapter V

"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.