page_title: Cyrano de Bergerac
section_title: Ancestors
hierarchical_section_title: Cyrano de Bergerac / Life / Family / Ancestors
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Savinien de Cirano, vendeur de poisson de mer
context_page_description: Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac was a French novelist, playwright, epistolarian and duelist.
  A bold and innovative author, his work was part of the libertine literature of the first half of the seventeenth century. Today he is best known as the inspiration for Edmond Rostand's most noted drama Cyrano de Bergerac, which, although it includes elements of his life, also contains invention and myth.
  Since the 1970s, there has been a resurgence in the study of Cyrano, demonstrated in the abundance of theses, essays, articles and biographies published in France and elsewhere in recent decades.
context_section_description: His paternal grandfather, Savinien I de Cyrano (15??-1590), was probably born into a notable family from Sens in Burgundy. Documents describe him in turn as a "merchant and burgher of Paris" (« marchand et bourgeois de Paris » 20 May 1555), "(sea-)fish merchant to the King" (« vendeur de poisson de mer pour le Roy ») in several other documents in following years, and finally "Royal counsellor" (« conseiller du Roi, maison et couronne de France » 7 April 1573). In Paris, on 9 April 1551, he married Anne Le Maire, daughter of Estienne Le Maire and Perrette Cardon, who died in 1616. They are known to have had four children: Abel (the writer's father), Samuel (15??-1646), Pierre (15??-1626) and Anne (15??-1652).
  Of his maternal grandfather, Estienne Bellanger, "Financial Controller of the Parisian general revenue" (« contrôleur des finances en la recette générale de Paris »), and of his background, we know almost nothing. We know more about his wife, Catherine Millet, whose father, Guillaume II Millet, Lord of Caves, was secretary of the King's finances, and whose grandfather, Guillaume I Millet (149?-1563), qualified in medicine in 1518, was doctor to three kings in succession (Francis I, Henry II and Francis II). He married Catherine Valeton, daughter of a property tax collector from Nantes, Audebert Valeton, who, accused of involvement in the Affair of the Placards, was "burned alive on wood taken from his house" on 21 January 1535 at the crossroads of la Croix du Trahoir (the intersection of the Rue de l'Arbre-Sec and the Rue Saint-Honoré), in front of the Pavillon des singes, where Molière lived almost a century later.
caption: Savinien I de Cirano, fish merchant
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