He was born in Paris, in spite of his Gascon-sounding name which accounts for the theatrical character created by Edmond Rostand in 1897, a fictious personnage who has come to obscure the real Cyrano. In fact Cyrano was an incisive and cutting-edge thinker, prominent among the libertin avant-garde of the first half of the seventeenth century.

The libertins were intellectuals who, in the face of Calvinist rigourism and Counter-Reformation propaganda, found in Greek and Roman scepticism materials and methods to debunk dogmas and develop "free-thought" and, often by implication, to reinvent what was then labelled "pagan" morality, sex.

Whether an atheist or not, it is certain that Cyrano's rejection of Catholic dogmas regarding nature, society (he stood against absolutism) and morality found its source in his homosexuality as a subversive force. He had to exercise caution in concealing his "atheism" (the sum total of the above) since such random accusation had cost the life of a forerunner, Luvilio Vanini, burnt at the stake in Toulouse, and brought to the pyre an effigy of fellow poet and homosexual Théophile de Viau.

Yet, in the central episode of his Les états du soleil, Cyrano lifts the veil on his homosexuality: a comely youth appears, whose bodily beauty resonates through the universe, cosmetic appearance and cosmic arrangement being one in the raptured contemplation of male assertiveness. It is an erotic vision powerfully sexual and seminal. He died for a stroke on the head, near Saint-Forget (now Yvelines).