The Beauty of Unfulfillment

A Close Reading

Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655) was a historical figure before being a fictional character. A real writer and duelist who lived at the time of Richelieu and Mazarin, the two famous Cardinals that guided France when the kings, respectively Louis XIII and Louis XIV, were either too weak or too young to rule. ³ As it happens in these cases, the Cyrano of the play is, and is not, the Cyrano of history in the sense that reality is blended with invention and myth. ⁴ However, while it is commonly accepted that Rostand “has not so much invented his character as discovered it” (Butler 231), the intention was to create a character more legendary than historical. Premiered in 1897, Cyrano de Bergerac was an instantaneous triumph. How do we explain its overwhelming success? ⁵ Patricia Elliott Williams offers a sociological explanation. After the defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870) and after the turmoil of the Dreyfus case, ⁶ France was a society subject to intolerance, decadence, and lack of idealism. With this frame, the gestures of a man, in full glory and dignity, offered France a cultural escape to revive the image of a heroic past: “France's need for inspiration and relief from grim reality found a panacea in Cyrano de Bergerac” (165).

Cyrano comes with evident romantic traits: He is superior in intelligence, self-consciousness, and imagination. In fact, he has much in common with the Romantic heroes of French literature. Don Cesar de Bazan, Victor Hugo’s protagonist in the play Ruy Blas (1838), wears a white plume symbol of his pride. Quasimodo, in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) is a character notorious for his physical deformity and a beautiful soul. D’Artagnan from Dumas’s Trois Mousquetaires (1844), was a Gascon and Rostand makes him a swordsman in the Cadets of Gascony, the same regiment as Cyrano. But perhaps his closest model is Don Quixote, both uncompromising idealists with a semi-impossible love of which they do not feel worthy; men of innate goodness and unwavering commitment, they set out to right the world’s wrongs with the might of their sword. Not surprisingly, when asked by the Comte de Guiche if he has ever read Don Quixote, Cyrano replies: “I have. And at the name of that divine madman, I uncover” (94). I agree with Benner, “[o]ne must conclude that Rostand employed them [Rostand’s borrowings] knowingly and openly as a method of rendering homage to his illustrious literary forbears and as one way of linking his work directly with Romanticism” (611). Undeniably, Rostand has created a neo-romantic play, with some sort of Aristotelian catharsis in the end considering that Cyrano dies in tune with his lifelong values. Critics have often focused on Cyrano’s nose, that is how an inconsequential imperfection can inhibit ultimate achievement. What interests me instead, is the theme of failure, the fear of failure, and the beauty behind it.

Cyrano is a story of lies and perhaps altruism if we believe with Anna Freud (1936) that Cyrano sacrificed his own aspirations for the benefit of someone else. The play is set in the dramatic days of the 1640s when Louis XIII was King and Cardinal Richelieu, a brilliant and manipulative minister, led the country into the 30 Years' War. ⁷ The first act opens in Paris, at the theatre, a microcosm of human experience. Cyrano is a man all along in love with Roxane, his cousin. They grew up together, yet he never dared confess his feelings. He is kind and courteous; brave and liberal, a man of great aspirations and noble thoughts. Famous for being the most skilled soldier of the Guards, but first and foremost a musician, an eloquent philosopher, and a brilliant poet. He is an idealist who wants to be right in his own eyes. Thus, in the first scene, Rostand has Cyrano throwing in disdain a bag full of money to the players knowing that he will be hungry afterward. He is brave, consistent, and loyal. A man witty and knowledgeable. He speaks up for himself, fights against arrogance, protects the weaker, and is scornful of death. However, his body image poses an insurmountable obstacle to revealing and fulfilling his desire. He comes with a physical flaw, a big nose “my forerunner ever by a quarter of an hour” (66). Portraits of the real Cyrano reveal that the nose “in each portrait is aquiline and prominent-large to be sure, particularly in relation to the mouth which seems unusually small” (Butler 234), but scarcely of proportions to justify ugliness. Be what it may, the nose portrays his insecurities, and because of it, Cyrano is diffident, halting, and lacking in self-confidence. Hence, he is incapable of conquering Roxane: “Oh, I foster no illusions!” (67).

To make the story a subject for drama Rostand adds a great love to the fictional Cyrano and he makes Cyrano love in vain. Someone unattainable for whom he fights the great duels of his life; for her, he composes his best poetry; to save her pain, he sacrifices all the rest and himself. Roxane is beautiful with “the attributes of a goddess” (66). In the first place, she seems to value only the surface, in fact, she is attracted to Christian by his physical qualities. In reality, it is Cyrano’s soul that she loves; Christian would bore her within a few hours. Rostand lets us understand that Roxane praises bravery and intelligence, courage, and wit. When Cyrano suggests that Christian might be a fool, stamping her foot in protest she replies “I should die, there!” (87). And as the first scene closes with Roxane walking away remembering to herself how brave Cyrano is, the reader knows that she could have loved him. Scholarship have reduced her to a passive role, “Her whole role is to listen” (Besnier 26), but this is misjudging the whole play. In many ways, she parallels Cyrano’s stance on life. She, too, loves the great gesture. Cyrano’s letters brought her to the front (Arras). Careless of the danger, she goes through the enemy lines with food to see her husband to whom she confesses: “I love you for your soul alone” (159). She, too, is devoted until death, hence she turns her back on the world, and retires to the convent to mourn her lost husband.

As far as the plot is concerned, one night at the theatre she sees someone, Christian. In antitheses to the grotesque Cyrano, he is young and extremely handsome. An honest soldier rather timid; Roxane describes him as “proud, noble, young, brave, handsome” (86) but not a poet, as he confesses to Cyrano “I dare not speak to her, for I am of a simple wit” (43). And because destiny sometimes is cynical, the young Christian has been assigned to Cyrano’s regiment, the Cadet of Gascony: “And cousin, is it not a strange coincidence—that he should serve exactly in your regiment!” (85). ⁸ Rather than antagonists, they become each other’s ideal ego, with each one of them having what the other lacks, respectively, beauty and intelligence. Chained to the necessity of the other’s existence, such a state of perfection is fantasied by Cyrano: “Roxane shall not have disillusions! Tell me, shall we win her heart, we two as one?” (103). Christian seems to not comprehend the full implication of the illusory fulfillment; thus, Cyrano becomes explicit: “Will you complete me, and let me in exchange complete you? We will walk side by side: you in full light, I in your shadow.... I will be wit to you… you, to me, shall be good looks” (ibid.). And so, letters are sent; all written by Cyrano, all signed by Christian. And Roxane falls in love, with Christian. It happens all very fast; those are the times of tragedy. They kiss, they marry, and the very same night the war begins. It is a true war where people die, and the war compels people to be real, to tell the truth. ⁹ The first one is Christian, tired of playing a part and disillusioned with Roxane loving him for someone he is not; he is drained from having an enemy inside. “I am weary of carrying about, in my own self, a rival!” (162). But Christian dies and Cyrano has no time to tell the truth. Instead, he kneels down and to the dying Christian mutters a final lie: “I have told her everything!… You are still the one she loves!” (165). Rostand has Cyrano die some 14 years later, that is Cyrano had 14 years plus a few minutes to try to win Roxane’s over, if not, to simply disclose his heart. But he never did. I will return to this point later. Let us now focus on Baudelaire’s A une passante. ¹⁰

The street about me roared with a deafening sound.

The word modernity was first explored by poets, not sociologists, not political scientists. In the essay The Painter of Modern Life (2010) Baudelaire elaborates on the term producing one of its most quoted definitions: “Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable” (18). That is, in Baudelaire’s experience, modernity has a dual image: the individual and the crowd, the woman and the prostitute, the eternal of art and its circumstantial element, contemporaneity as it goes. Beauty is a synthesis of these elements, and the artist’s task is to capture the transience, the excitement, to catch the impression of modern experience. In A une passante, modernity is impersonated by the fleeting encounter between the poet and an anonymous woman in the urban crowd. A street, that in its allegorical status is equivalent to urban existence, hence, elusive and disconnected, is around the narrator. As Ross Chambers (1985) points out “the Baudelairian street manifests the phenomenon of entropy most obsessively in the form of noise” (247). We need to imagine chaos and incoherent rumors; the throng is nowhere named but it is there, in the street roaring ‘with a deafening sound,’ where fragmentation is at hand and certainty is unavailable. Yet, what Marx calls alienation, in Baudelaire becomes beauty. There is a tone of nostalgia; the ‘she’ protagonist is in mourning, possibly a widow, a passerby passing by in the street of Paris. ¹¹ Beryl Schlossman stages Baudelaire’s passante in three ways: “the object of a gaze, as an image, and as the incomparable resonance of desire” (1014). Surely, the narrator’s reaction implies that she is much more than a faceless stranger. Elegant, raising, from time to time, the hem of her dress, to the point that Stamelman makes her mourning ‘aesthetics:’ “the woman in the poem is an ideal emblem or icon of sublime, baroque mourning” (397).

The narrator sees her and he is taken by an isolated shock “with which an imperious desire suddenly overcomes a lonely man” (Benjamin 77). Baudelaire wants us to imagine the unknown woman as a young widow, while Benjamin wants us to imagine the man as a lonely poet searching for sketches of modernity. Modern experience offers him a seemingly erotic encounter and simultaneously denies consummation. A passing woman steps into his path. In Benjamin’s words “it is love at first sight and love at last sight” (185). Said otherwise, the flâneur is soon emotionally involved, it is a transient moment that leaves an eternal mark in his (human) memory. “Her leg was a like a statue,” Baudelaire is immobilizing the object so to impress her figure, the moment, as a photo does. We are given only a few details but it is a full description: The clothing that reveals a woman in mourning, a veil that covers her beauty, the hand with a glittering ring. The passerby becomes the narrator’s muse in the way a statue might, but a statue that will not stay for long; instead, she allows him to witness her passing toward disappearance. Baudelaire, the equivalent of the narrator, is fascinated by the experience of a modern crowd, he wants to do what he cannot: to arrest the moment. She is moving away, hence, in revenge, Baudelaire turns the fleeing beauty into a monument erected by his memory. He Petrifies the moment, so that “the fetishized leg -the fragment of an idol or the divided body of allegory-corresponds to the subject's desire, a suffering that nails him to the spot” (Schlossman 1016). Emerging from the crowded, noisy street like a swaying stature, Baudelaire leaves no doubt that he looked deep into the eyes of the passerby. The two exchange glances establishing some sort of erratic empathy, a level of intimacy that can only exist between strangers who share the same condition. The woman’s gaze is a vivid lighting, but it is also fatal. In fact, he is left in darkness. In one moment, he experiences a new birth and death, pleasure and pain, darkness and light. He is taken in by delirium, we have to envision it as a Stendhal’s syndrome, that is an extreme emotional response due to exposition to beauty. As suspended by the shock he presumably talks to her. They went through so much in a so short time, that the anonymous passerby of the previous stanza is now addressed as ‘you.’ He has doubts about the possibility of ever seeing the woman again “Will I see you no more before eternity?” Impersonality, chaos, and silence are some of the elements that converge on the stage of modernity. As the narrator addresses the passerby, a gulf of incommunicability is revealed. She does not reply.

Baudelaire’s world is always ambivalent; the shock of modernity threatens the subject and turns illusions into ruins. They could have been harmoniously joined by love but, as she emerged from nowhere, she disappears from his sight, and escapes his grasp in the crowded street. “For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go.” She is already far beyond his space and time, not because of the city’s noises but because the event itself is incomplete. After all, he is talking to an absent presence. The aftermath assumes dramatic connotation; absence is sided by a space of oblivion, and one of death. A declaration of love is unsuccessfully transmitted, consequently, producing regret: “O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!” Baudelaire is using the past perfect subjunctive (toi que j'eusse aimée), the tense of hypothetical situations in the past, to convey a mood of unconsummated opportunity. Love is already memory. Thus, the poem ends as it had begun: by communicating an experience of loss. She is carried away by the nameless crowd, while he remains alone contemplating the beauty of perfect ‘could have been(s).’ In sum, what the poem does is translate love in terms of modernity; love emerges in a brief moment and disappears in a moment of destruction. In a city as large as Paris, it is possible to see a person but once, hence, love is offered as a failure; a feeling that retreats in an image of absolute anonymity.

Unfulfillment as a Choice

What is missing in both texts is the lovers’ physical involvement. Love has not been consummated, it remains a game of glances and words. In linguistics terms what we have with Cyrano and the unknown passante is a signifier without the signified. ¹² The subject of the signifier lacks the object of the signified. To fend off such an inconsistency, love becomes a product of imagination. “Love is a phenomenon which takes place in the imaginary level” (1988 142) with these words Jacques Lacan (1991) intends to say that it is not the Other that one loves; rather, it is the self in the Other. Leaving aside the narcissistic nature of love, the signified can be created through words. “People do not love if they don’t talk about love” (Salecl 18), that is to say, speaking or writing about love enables the signifier to create the signified, it becomes possible to replace the Other with desire since desire is also embedded in the symbolic register. According to Lacan, to fulfill the function of desire the woman must disappear, there must be a misrecognition, she must become a performance that allows her femininity to be ‘visible’ only as a representation. In other words, Lacan's point is that man’s fascination is related to a feminine masquerade in which a woman's absence becomes her myth. “ [The Woman] lends herself readily to the perversion which I hold to be The Man's. Which leads her to the well-known Masquerade (…) the on-the-off chance of being prepared so that The Man's fantasy can find its hour of truth in her” (qtd. Leonard 15).

Cyrano’s ‘hour of truth’ arrives when it is too late to make any significant change. Baudelaire’s hour is a sudden instant that finds him unprepared. Eloy LaBrada (2016) reminds us of the Querelle des Amyes, a lyric debate during the Renaissance, concerning parfaicte amitié, according to which a relationship could be virtuously enjoyed without materially being acted upon. But neither Cyrano nor Baudelaire’s poem can be reconducted to Neoplatonism, at least this is not the reading I am offering. ¹³ After all, why should we evaluate an event solely in terms of ‘what happens?’ What are the criteria that define a love story? In what cases an experience is fully lived or not? “If a relationship is in large part imagined, conjectured, fantasized, or missed, rather than instantiated and consummated in observable physical acts, is it therefore unreal or opposed to the real?” (LaBrada 8). My interest lies in the paradox that our dreams, night dreams, and daily fancies, are both illusory and remarkably lifelike. Our intense, subjective visions and perception are issued from the source of our being, and they directly reveal the unconscious forces that rule over us and dictate our actions. In this sense, imagination, as the quintessence of human life, can be considered more real than physical reality. Therefore, it is safe to say that the lovers speak even when they do not, that love exists even when the object of such love does not or no longer does. More specifically, there is as much beauty in fulfillment as there is in its anthesis. Unfulfillment indeed.

The reason is to be found in the nature of desire. Desire has a relational structure, that is without the Other there is no desire: “The circuit of desire necessarily passes from the other because desire cannot suffice itself” (Recalcati 20). ¹⁴ However, lack and desire are coextensive. Lacan clarifies that desire is not need. While need can be satisfied by an object (water for the thirsty man), desire, due to its paradoxical nature, cannot. Wholeness is the ultimate purpose of desire. But there is a catch-22. In order to exist, desire needs to replicate itself endlessly, therefore, its goal must remain unattainable. Desire is made of a dimension that is erratic, elusive because it is never desire for ‘this,’ for what I already have, but it is always desire for something else, that is never present. With reason, Lacan sustains that children say they want the moon. That is something not here and now, it is an object outside. They want the unattainable object. In other words, the experience of desire is an experience of lack, of concealment if not suppression of something. On this account, to desire the Other is to submit to perpetual dissatisfaction. Massimo Recalcati’s statement is representative of the issue: “The desire of the other accompanies like a shadow the vacuous dimension of utopia” (25). Hence, in this utopian dimension that the Other is, desire, as a desire for the other, resembles, according to Lacan, a work by the Flemish Brueghel where a column of blind men follows a guide also blind. ¹⁵ Because desire is led by desire, there can never be ultimate fulfilment. Following this line of reasoning, contrary to the fantasy that love is about wholeness and harmony, love is instead about distance, separation, difference: “The One everyone talks about all the time is, first of all a mirage of the One you believe yourself to be” (Lacan, 1975 47). Lacan insists that it is not the one which arises from love but the two, the Other and a mirage of one’s own self-image. In this sense, once the enigma of the difference is put into words love becomes a symbolic demand for identification. Not surprisingly, at the core of Lacan’s argumentation, there is the inherently narcissistic nature of love which is desire to possess the object of desire as means for jouissance (enjoyment). ¹⁶ Lacan further states: “That is what love is. It’s one’s own ego that one loves in love, one’s own ego made real on the imaginary level” (ibid.). Accepting Lacan’s view is to accept the idea that love is essentially the desire to capture oneself in the Other. While the texts under scrutiny offer a weak evidence for such a statement, on the other hand, a case can be built to explain the absence of the signified. Despite man’s desire to know what is behind years of unsaid words, the success of the feeling of desire depends upon a woman remaining enigmatic, hence, an unceasing postponement of unity. Specifically, what keeps together Cyrano and Baudelaire’s lonely stranger is a sense of loss, but one in which “intimacy with what has disappeared is preserved by an obsession, a fascination” (Stamelman 391).

For Cyrano, the aesthetic form that strives to represent the absence of what he cannot have is a weekly routine. 15 years later the episodes I summarized above, Roxane has retired to a convent and Cyrano keeps making enemies outside. Despite their different lives, there is a day of the week, Saturday, in which Cyrano pays Roxane an afternoon call to recount the events that have taken place in Paris. In the final act, Cyrano is late for the first time; Roxane is not aware of what happened outside, but all the same her waiting is accompanied by anxiety. He finally arrives with a big hat over his eyes. The reason for his delay is that his enemies, not capable of defeating him in a knightly fashion, have decided to trick him into death. A heavy timber has been dropped on his head and he has now no much longer to live. ¹⁷ Cyrano is wounded on his head, he is pale, but she seems to not notice it. He sits on the bench outside, and as he begins reporting, in rhyme, the Paris Gazette, a phrase from Roxane, “Each one of us has his wound: I too have mine” (180), reminds him of the last letter he had written some 14th years before. Death is approaching once more compelling its protagonists to come to terms with life. He asks Roxane for that letter for him to read it, letter that he clearly remembers in its entirety. It is September, almost autumn; the leaves are falling; the sun has set; it is dark outside but night not yet. How can he possibly read? She goes behind him, she notices the letter that he is holding down in his hand, the darkness deepens and he goes on reciting. “How can you go on reading? It is dark.” (181), she whispers.

And in one instant she understands it all: “And he, for 14 years, has played the part of the comical old friend who came to cheer me!” (181). Roxane is talking to herself, not to him. “So it was you” (ibid.) the fancy, the words, the voice that night. And as she compels him to confess, Rostand offers Cyrano an immortal verse: “No, no, my darling love, I did not love you!” (182). Roxane knows the full implication of this confession, “how many things within the hour have died … how many have been born!” (ibid.), what she does not comprehend is the reason for this long silence: “the tears were yours” (ibid.). His answer links the whole significance of this unfulfillment to honor. “Because … the blood was his” (ibid.). That is, Cyrano is well aware that Roxane loves an image of Christian that his love letters have created. Therefore, to be true to her is to dishonor the dead. Areti Spyropoulolu reads Cyrano’s renunciation as an act of narcissism: “His narcissism turns honor, pride, and morality into an instance of auto-erotic pleasure and a justification for renouncing all satisfaction that presupposes a relation with the object” (338). I cannot subscribe to the statement. Instead, here lies the play’s real tragedy, grounded on dramatic irony. On the one hand, we have confirmation that Roxane’s real love is for the ugly Cyrano and not the handsome Christian, and on the other hand, we perceive the impossibility for Cyrano to confess, at least until then, his love. Irony this one that creates another one. Cyrano is a man intelligent to the point of brilliance. He fought injustice and mediocrity, succeeded in winning Roxane for Christian with poetic oaths, prevented De Guiche from interrupting the marriage ceremony, and inspired his soldiers in battle to fight and face death defiantly. But he is also an outsider in 17^th century France, hence, in more than one way, he has to live in the shadow: “while I have stood below in darkness, others have climbed to gather the kiss and glory!” (183). Overall an Aristotelian character whose misfortunes are not the result of his own wickedness but a weakness of sorts for he let emotions emerge dominant over rational thought. ¹⁸

The one in the final act is a Roxane somewhat cruel. Self-centered on her grief, she fails to see that Cyrano is wounded, and ignores the motif of his faintness. More importantly, she seems to scold him for having finally broken the ‘noble silence:’ “Then why let the sublime bond of this silence be loosed to-day?” (182). Because Cyrano is about to die; now, he is the dead waiting to receive a tribute. And he does. Roxane has been freed at last from the willful deceit of a lifetime, thus she openly confesses: “I never loved but one … and twice I lose him!” (184). At this stage, Cyrano is delirious; he first recites his self-composed epigraph, a man who was everything and who was nothing, and then, sword in hand, he begins fighting an enemy that does not exist. It is his last battle against an opponent which, in a Quixotesque moment, reveals itself to be a tree. Explaining the allegory, it is an imaginary struggle against his life’s enemy, falsehood, compromise, and prejudice. Breathless he waves his sword fighting off the ghosts of his imagination. They finally win, yet in spite of them all, something will remain once he has gone. And it is in this very same interval that Roxane bends over him, kisses his forehead, perhaps waiting for a word of love. Meanwhile, he has waited a lifetime plus 14 years, this is his last moment on earth, why does he not kiss Roxane? Rostand implies that one’s spirit is more valuable than one’s exterior appearance, which can be misleading, ephemeral, and shallow. Hence, poetry (art) becomes the dominant value in the play, capable of providing intellectual and emotional significance. And this is all that matters. However, this explanation is not exhaustive. Why does Cyrano fail to conquer what he was about to grasp? What emerges at last is the beauty of unfulfillment. Cyrano is a character of a ‘certain magnitude’ given by the nobility of his actions and his soul. Confronted with the moral dilemma of whether to seek his own pleasure or to help Roxane and Christian achieve their happiness he did not hesitate to choose the latter. It is a melancholic tale but, it is a melancholy that keeps the lost object alive, for, as Freud observed, “by taking flight into the ego love escapes annihilation” (178). ¹⁹ Therefore, if it is a romantic closure that we are expecting, then we are asking to be deceived. To kiss Roxane in the end, to consume, so to speak, a story whose gravity lies elsewhere, would have compelled Cyrano to face the passing of time and consider his life in terms of regrets. We need to imagine Cyrano as a Gatsby ante-litteram the moment Daisy came up to him: “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God” (127). In the same fashion, once Cyrano’s imagination has broken through his consciousness, he cannot return: a Romantic character cannot undo what his imagination has done. In other words, Cyrano can exist only within the rhymes of romantic unfulfillment while Roxane can exist only insofar she lacks recognition. On the other hand, with his very last word, we are given to understand the real significance of his renunciation. What remains is his panache, unstained and unspotted from the world, which we have to understand as the symbol of his freedom in his thoughts as in his actions. Cyrano dies standing behind all that he lived for.

Likewise, we have to understand Baudelaire’s poem. The sonnet explores the encounter between the wandering poet, the flâneur “I,” and the unknown woman in the guise of pleasure as an allegory of modernity. At once statuesque and fleeing, she is an embodiment of Baudelaire’s theory of beauty, that is eternal and transient, relative and absolute. Allegedly, the poet laments what could have been. As the woman went on, the poet is left alone to contemplate, or perhaps regret, the love he might have experienced. According to Benjamin, the poem “reveal [s] the stigmata which life in a metropolis inflicts upon love” (185) and that is because Benjamin’s critique presents a vision of modernity that is permeated by the angel of history, that is history as a movement toward decadence. ²⁰ While I do not embrace Benjamin’s catastrophism, it is safe to say that the bittersweet pleasure of the city is the point of intersection where the passing-by of history occurs. The passerby walks the street of the age of mechanical reproduction; the aura has been destroyed, that is, the here and now, the unreproducible uniqueness of art and human encounters. Aware of it, Baudelaire's experience of the crowd is one of shock, metaphysical more than physiological. His narrator is a man paralyzed by what he sees: fashion, commodity, artificiality, commodity stores, homeless, prostitutes, moving, changing without ever refraining. With A une passante the poet of the modern city tries to capture the impossible, the ‘here and now,’ a snapshot, an instantané of modernity. The narrator’s state of delirium has its raison d’être at the beginning of the first tercet – “a lightning flash… then night.” Baudelaire has just captured a profound truth about the human condition, the unattainability of the ideal. As she is walking past him, his entire life seems to disappear into the three dots of that ellipsis. The ellipsis is the whole distance that separates the narrator’s imagination from the real. Schlossman, as Benjamin had already done, assumes that “the subject drinking in the woman's eyes is the most sensual and intimate connection between the spectator and the feminine figure” (1023). I do not see here a sexual drama, because both characters are frozen to different degrees. There is neither loss nor denial of love. It is a renunciation. The key point is that he needs her to disappear in order to love her. The woman’s glance as she passes out of existence is the last image he has of her. She disappears (symbolically dies), leaving a void in her place. In truth, the woman’s image, the only image of her, continues to live on within the poet. She has left a trace in his ego, unique because it is the only one, thus confirming Benjamin's remark that what Baudelaire experiences is love “not at first sight, but at last sight.” The woman disappears, but the love relation between poet and object endures beyond the moment. It is an intense occurrence of concentrated ecstasy in which the poet, by sharing the same doubt, achieves a momentary oneness with the loved being. All distance is annulled, time is suspended, otherness is thoroughly destroyed, and by ‘dying’ he avoids what he most fears: separation. As might be expected, the evanescence of the moment and the impossibility of fulfillment give rise to the mad intensity of his feeling, “the sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills.” Once more, Benjamin has masterfully captured the essence of the encounter: “It is a farewell forever which coincides in the poem with a moment of enchantment” (185).

There is something of immortal in a love that is prevented from loving. Same goes for Baudelaire’s narrator. The word ‘never’ marks the zenith of his passion that in the last tercet becomes frustration. The rebirth of the previous stanza seems now very problematic. On the other hand, fulfillment, as already for Cyrano, would destroy the very essence of his desire. Unfulfilled longing is all the more compelling as the object of desire remains obscure. The passerby, by definition, is mysterious otherwise it would not be a passerby, but someone in our lives. Ergo, from the outset, Baudelaire has built a case in which love emerges without hope of possession. He has placed between the actors a physical distance, he has made consummation virtually impossible, with the intention to create a story in which attainment is not denied but rather spared. Otherwise stated, to find her again, to have her, would be anti-climactic; yearning, craving, lusting, the intensity of longing, the depth of passion, all that would be lost at the moment of fulfillment. And so, for the sake of that love, and, of necessity, for the sake of art, there cannot be conclusion or attainment. Assuming the legitimacy of the argument, this conception of love has strings attached to the lovers in Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn (“Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss”), who remain caged in an eternal pursuit that cannot be consummated and still remain beautiful and eternal. Frozen in time on the surface of an urn, the fair youths will never grow old, the music of the pipes and lyres will never cease to sound, and the lovers will never cease to love. Significantly, Chris Andre (1998) has noted that “such a lover is denied the momentary bliss of fulfillment, yet simultaneously avoids the mortal peril that such satisfaction affords” (121). If time threatens love and consumes life, Cyrano and Baudelaire have then retained a sense of distance, articulating their declaration of love on a state of continuous yearning.

Conclusion

In tune with the progressive de-centering that is 20th century epistemological discourse, Jean-Paul Sartre had reduced man to a useless passion, Lacanian theory makes love an imaginary passion, for following Lacan’s description, what the woman hides from him is the falsity of wholeness. Accordingly, we have men that fill the absence with words. Those are not stories of lovers awaiting the end of their wait, nor protagonists guilty of a lack of action. Flirtation is here altogether futile. “It is not that love is impossible because imaginary but that it is imagined as impossible” (LaBrada 16–17). While the narrative plot challenges the protagonists’ pessimism, in the sense that love could have been possible, the same protagonists act according to alternative values. Cyrano and Baudelaire are Renaissance men. Art does turn grief into beauty. But they are also modern men aware of something different; that suffering is permanent and love discovers a melancholic fulfillment through death. Paradoxically, Cyrano and Baudelaire have loved alone. Both the play’s and the poem’s content are happening merely in the mind of the male protagonist. I understand that this experience is rather unthinkable for those who endorse the logic of noncontradiction, according to which “an experience is necessarily undergone, enjoyed, or ‘had’ and if so, then it is had, undergone or enjoyed by someone or something or other” (Priest 32). However, we shall keep in mind that love belongs exclusively to oneself. It is perhaps the most individualist and spontaneous of all acts; it cannot be willed or imposed, and it cannot be chosen. Indeed, the two texts, I have discussed, theorize that love can be lived without the emotion being reciprocated. In this sense, love can be made of absence. Love evades, exceeds, and transcends the limits of experience to an extent that even if the phenomenological act is absent, the feeling itself can still be fully felt. Thus, one can ultimately claim it as one’s own.

There is no torment in unfulfillment because there is no suspension. Montaigne et al.,(2003) in one of his essays, “On Presumption,” claims that when a man cannot control the events he has, at least, to control himself: “the most anguishing position (…) is to remain in suspense among pressing troubles, torn between fear and hope” (732). This is not the case for Cyrano and the lonely poet. Rostand and Baudelaire have given us two manuscripts in which nothing of what really matters has been said, in which protagonists exist in absence. We are given two love letters in which love is never confessed, in which Roxane and the passerby do not exist as women but as images, do not stand as loved ones but lost ones, not as living figures but shadows. Yet there is no suspension, the impossible Other is compensated by the fulness of one’s absolute renunciation. It is this dialectical integration of nostalgic emptiness and ecstatic plenitude of sorrow, a distant echo of Plato’s suggestion of Eros as the child of Poverty and Plenty, to channel the ambivalence between what is lost and what remains, and rearrange unfulfillment into beauty. In Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27) the narrator looks into his heart, examines it thoroughly and eventually he finds Albertine tedious. He is soon oppressed by boredom. The reason is clear: “Love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety. . . It is born, and it survives, only if some part remains for it to conquer. We love only what we do not wholly possess” (3:102). In this vein, suffering seems to be the destiny of love. The pain of the Other’s unattainability is the dark spell that keeps on the flame of desire. A passerby, unknown, unknowable, the embodiment of “all that is most mysterious in the beauty which we desire” (1:855) inspires stream of images in our mind, all promising ultimate happiness. As the narrator in Proust remarks, “I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving” (3:101). Again, Ode on a Grecian Urn comes to mind, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter.” Keats implies that lasting permanence (the unheard melodies) is superior to transient passion. Somewhere along the line, Rostand and Baudelaire have left love necessarily unsaid. It is the written word that allows them to bring love beyond the imaginary. Stolen from the logic of time are a few scattered images that represent love. Our task as readers is to fill the gaps and recreate the whole to the magnitude of our imagination.