At eight years of age the child, Edmond Rostand, was certainly the father of the man. As a schoolboy, at the lycée of Marseilles, his Quixotic, pathetic temperament--his characteristic preference for the unsuccessful--was already established. An old, drunken usher scorned by the masters, tormented by the boys, a dreamy Bardolph whom his pupils (on account of his shining nose) surnamed _Pif-Luisant_, was young Rostand’s chosen companion. And in his first volume of verse, the poet dedicates a charming poem to the tippler of genius who gave him, perhaps, his first idea of Cyrano:-- ‘Toi que j’ai tant aimé ... doux pochard ... Pif-Luisant.’ At one-and-twenty years of age, Edmond Rostand published his first volume of verse, _Les Musardises_, and shortly afterwards married the beautiful young poetess of _Les Pipeaux_, three years younger than himself. I can remember Rosemonde Gérard in her nineteenth year, a vision of loveliness, as, one evening, in the salon of the old poet, Leconte de Lisle, she stood up, so slender, so smiling, so ravishingly blonde and fresh, and recited a lyric as charming as herself. Madame Rostand has a talent of her own, sincere, simple, femininely sentimental. All the lovers in France know her _Chanson éternelle_:-- ‘Car vois-tu chaque jour je t’aime davantage, Aujourd’hui plus qu’hier, et bien moins que demain.’ _Photo: Dormac_ _To face p. 56_ [Illustration: =Edmond Rostand=] This marriage with Mademoiselle Gérard, granddaughter of Napoleon’s marshal, the victor of Wagram, the victim of Moscow and Waterloo, confirmed Edmond Rostand in his meditations on the dramatic fiasco of the First Empire--that extraordinary antithesis of triumph and disaster, of all tragedies the most touching to martial and patriotic France. The poet, however, was too wise to undertake this tremendous subject with a ‘prentice hand. He made his debut as a playwright in 1894, at the age of twenty-six, with a pretty little fanciful comedy, _Les Romanesques_. A year later, Sarah Bernhardt produced his _Princesse Lointaine_, playing herself the part of the Lady of Tripoli. Sarah Bernhardt again, in the Easter week of 1896, brought out _La Samaritaine_. And at Christmas, 1897, came the conquering hero, _Cyrano de Bergerac_. I cannot analyse Rostand’s plays, which everybody knows, which are (with Kipling’s novels) the immense, the international, the universal success of our times; I cannot calmly plod through the plots of these familiar pieces with the patience I employ on an obscure play of Paul Claudel’s, known perhaps to a hundred readers in the British Isles.