Cyrano de Bergerac

Why it’s on the list: Rostand’s 1897 verse play about a Gascon cadet with an enormous nose and the best tongue in France, who writes the handsome, inarticulate Christian’s love letters to Roxane — the woman Cyrano loves himself — and never says whose words they were.

Where I heard about it

• Founders Classical Academy — on the seventh-grade reading list at this classical school in Lewisville, Texas, posted by the Classic Learning Test in September 2026 as an example of what a classical curriculum assigns. Full eight-year sequence: Founders Classical Academy Reading List.

About this edition

On the list the same year as Romeo and Juliet, which is the pairing: two plays about love and language, one where the lovers can say what they feel and it kills them, one where the man who can say it best never does. The play premiered in Paris to an hour of curtain calls.

Connections

• Founders Classical Academy Reading List — the curriculum this came from; 56 unique titles across 5th through 12th grade.
• Classical Education — the movement whose canon this list is.
• Edmond Rostand
• Romeo and Juliet
• Literature