The recent film Cyrano de Bergerac has a scene in which Roxanne refuses to wear a red dress. Was this in the original play, and did this inspire the Police song Roxanne? As best as I can tell, the song was inspired by a poster of the play in the vicinity of a group of prostitutes and it would seem that the song then inspired the scene in the movie.
But it turns out that the real Cyrano was a 17th century French libertine and the original play, though not the romance, was loosely based on his life. From Wikipedia:
Cyrano was a pupil of the French polymath Pierre Gassendi, a canon of the Catholic Church who tried to reconcile Epicurean atomism with Christianity.
Cyrano de Bergerac's works L'Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune ("Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon", published posthumously, 1657) and Les États et Empires du Soleil (The States and Empires of the Sun, 1662) are classics of early modern science fiction. In the former, Cyrano travels to the Moon using rockets powered by firecrackers (it may be the earliest description of a space flight by use of a vessel that has rockets attached) and meets the inhabitants. The Moon-men have four legs, firearms that shoot game and cook it, and talking earrings used to educate children.
His mixture of science and romance in the last two works furnished a model for many subsequent writers, among them Jonathan Swift, Edgar Allan Poe and probably Voltaire. Corneille and Molière freely borrowed ideas from Le Pédant joué.
I've no idea if he could be considered an Epicurean, but his association with Gassendi is intriguing. As are his stated written works, which seem to be inspired by Lucian.
