Because my family has always had loads of books, we have a special closet that contains all the ones that won't fit in the bookshelves. Unlike places I live - which I've always crammed full of bookshelves - my mother likes to have books kept in certain areas. So there are very nice looking old books here and there, and books that are currently being read on various tables - but if you want to find the books to dig through, it's in the book closet. I assume it was once a linen closet, but it's better for books because it has a light inside so you can actually see what you're looking for. And because its shelves are deep there are two rows of books on each shelf - thus the need for keeping it tidy since books are easily hidden in there.

Anyway, we were doing some cleaning, which basically meant trying to put the books in some sort of order so that you might actually find things. And because I always say "but I haven't read that yet!" we didn't purge many. But I did notice this book from high school and thought about how it'd been a long time since I read it, and so I glanced inside.

wikipedia: Cyrano de Bergerac

wikipedia: Edmond Rostand

I ended up rereading it - though I started out by bouncing around to my favorite scenes. And I had to skip over parts where Cyrano has hopes that he might be loved in spite of his nose - I always have problems with "hopes disappointed" scenes, because I do like the character so much. And as melodramatic and theatrical as the final scene is -

- it made me tear up a bit. Because, ok, honestly I do love this character.

Much of the play's emotions you read into the scene - at some parts there are few words and it's up to the actor to express the feelings behind them. Which is why this is a play actors still enjoy performing.

Version I read was translated by: Brian Hooker (Amazon link here for more detail)

I've said this before about translators - SO much about whether you will love a book can depend on how well they do their job. To discount this is to miss both the difficulty of translating from another language and how much small word choices and phrases can matter.