A Voyage to the Moon

44

Cf. the "sixth means" in the play: "Or else, I could have placed myself upon an iron plate, have taken a magnet of suitable size, and thrown it in the air! That way is a very good one! The magnet flies upward, the iron instantly after; the magnet no sooner overtaken than you fling it up again… The rest is clear! You can go upward indefinitely."

45

The "chariot of fire" in which Elijah was taken up into heaven. Cf. 2 Kings, ii. 11.

46

The following pages are translated from the text as printed for the first time, from the Manuscript at the Bibliothèque Nationale, in an appendix to M. Brun's thesis on Cyrano Bergerac, 1893.

47

"The serpent," as soon appears, is original sin, which

"Brought death into the world, and all our woe."

48

Our author's treatment of "original sin" is, according to M. Brun, unprintable.

49

Here the original text resumes, as found in all the editions, both French and English.

50

Astonishment.

51

Mobile = people, populace. Cf. p. 145 (#p_145).

52

Lemures; malicious spirits of the dead. Cf. Milton:

"The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint."

53

Lars, larvas; ghosts, spectres.

54

Lamias; female demons or vampires.

55

Cf. p. 12 (#p_12)

56

"Jerome Cardan pretended to have written most of his books under the dictation of a Familiar Spirit … but, in his treatise De Rerum Varietate, he ingenuously declares that he had never had any other genius but his own: Ego certe nullum dæmonem aut genium mihi adesse cognosce" (Note of Paul Lacroix.)

57

Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, 1486-1535, philosopher, astrologer, and alchemist. Cyrano introduces him in his Lettre XII., "Pour les Sorciers."

58

Jean Trithème (or Johann Tritheim), Abbot of Spanheim; a man of universal scholarship, and an experimenter in alchemy; also accused of sorcery.

59

César de Nostradamus, physician and astrologer of the early sixteenth century.

60

A famous occult order which probably never existed, but about which much was written in the first half of the seventeenth century. It was supposed to have been founded early in the fifteenth century by Rosenkrenz, a pilgrim who had acquired all the wisdom of the Orient.

61

Tomaso Campanella, 1568-1639, Italian poet and philosopher, who came to Paris in 1634. His philosophy was much admired by Cyrano, since he rejected the Aristotelism of the schools, advocated empiricism as the only method of arriving at truth, and insisted on the "four Elements" as the origin of all things.

He appears as an important character in Cyrano's Voyage to the Sun, where he is Cyrano's companion and guide to the Land of the Philosophers.

62

Campanella's principal work, published in 1620.

63

François de La Mothe le Vayer, 1588-1672. He was the tutor of the Due d'Orléans, brother of Louis XIV., and, after 1654, of Louis XIV. himself. In philosophy he was a free-thinker, in literature a disciple of Montaigne. He nevertheless concealed his scepticism in philosophy, even in his chief work, the Doutes sceptiques, under a pretended orthodoxy in religion, and so was never persecuted. Possibly it is to this that Cyrano refers in saying, that he "lived as much like a philosopher, as Gassendi wrote."

64

Cf. p 28, n. 1 (#cn_13).

65

Divine. The translator has mistaken an adjective for a noun.

66

François Tristan Thermite, 1601-1655, a French dramatist of importance. His tragedy of Mariamne, in date contemporary with Corneille's Cid, marks him as a predecessor of Racine in method and manner. He is also the author of fugitive verse, but neither that nor his plays make him quite worthy of Cyrano's exalted "Elogy."

He was compelled to pass the years 1614-1620 in England, on account of a duel fought at the age of thirteen!