Just a few short months after the incidents of the Bazar de la Charité fire, a male aristocrat was once again on center stage, this time, in the theater itself. Yet Cyrano de Bergerac, the eponymous hero of Edmond Rostand's play, redeemed – by timing if not necessarily through the intention of the author – the gardenias whose honor had suffered greatly. First presented on the Parisian stage on December 27, 1897, just two weeks prior to the publication of Zola's “J'Accuse,” on January 13, 1898, Cyrano de Bergerac became an immediate critical and popular success and played to full houses during the height of the Dreyfus Affair, uniting within the theater walls a public profoundly divided outside them.

Since the fin de siècle, Cyrano has become one of the most beloved and most often staged plays in the history of the French theater. Translated into countless foreign languages, it has been adapted for the cinema, most recently, in the 1990 Rappeneau film, in which Cyrano was portrayed by the ubiquitous Gérard Depardieu. The centennial of Cyrano de Bergerac in 1997 inspired numerous festivities, among them two different revivals of the play, an exhibition organized in conjunction with the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris and a great number of articles in the leading newspapers and weekly magazines.