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Act 3, Scene 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Cyrano De Bergerac, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Appearances and Identity
The Many Kinds of Love
Panache
Social Hierarchy and the Romantic Ideal
Loyalty and Honor
Summary
Analysis
Outside Clomire’s house, Cyrano and Christian discuss Roxane. Christian insists that he’s going to wait outside the house for Roxane. After weeks of sending Roxane love letters, he’s eager to meet her and talk to her face-to-face. Christian assures Cyrano that he’s learned enough from reading Cyrano’s letters to hold his own in a conversation with her. Cyrano decides to allow Christian to speak to Roxane on his own, and he walks behind a nearby wall, leaving Christian alone outside the house.
In a sense, Christian has spent the last few weeks receiving an education from Cyrano—an education in how to express his feelings and couch his love in the European tradition of rhetoric. The scene being set up here, then, is a “test” of whether or not eloquence can be taught, or whether it’s somehow innate to the speaker. This section of the text parallels the philosophers’ lecture on love—it poses some of the same questions about feeling, education, and expression.
Themes
