Cyrano de Bergerac

I am in the process of reading Cyrano de Bergerac's The Comical History of the States and Empires of the World of the Moon in an 1899 Doubleday reprint (on Google Books, thanks Google Books!) of the 1687 translation by A. Lowell (or, as the work says, "Englished" by Lovell).  A few choice quotations from the section about the author:

• “The fortune of his early education made him fall into the hands of a country curate, who was an insufferable pedant (the species seems to have been common at that time), and who had no real scholarship (the two things are by no means contradictory).  Cyrano dubbed his master an “Aristotelic Ass,” and wrote to his father that he preferred Paris.”

• “He lived the Paris student’s life, burning honest tradesmen’s signs and ‘doing other crazy things.’” I feel like such a lame student in comparison.  Why, I haven't burned a single tradesman's sign over in Grad School City.  I haven't even thrown a stone at the townies (though sometimes I am sorely tempted).  Perhaps I should remedy this situation, and take up the life of a 17th century Parisian student.      

• On Cyrano's famed nose: “not ridiculous, but monumental! … It is said that this nose brought death upon more than ten persons…”  Even Cyrano himself had hilarious things to say about his nose though—“This veridic nose arrives everywhere a quarter of an hour before its master.  Ten shoemakers, good round fat ones too, go and sit down to work under it out of the rain."

The section was written by a Curtis Hidden Page, a professor of English literature at the turn of the century (no, not this past one).  His is a name straight out of a Jasper Fforde novel!