Self is on p. 38 of Moon Palace (What a book, btw):

  • Then I began to describe Cyrano's voyage to the moon, and someone interrupted me. Cyrano de Bergerac wasn't real, the person said, he was a character in a play, a make-believe man. I couldn't let this error go uncorrected, and so I made a short digression to tell them the story of Cyrano's life. I sketched out his early days as a soldier, discussed his career as a philosopher and poet, and then dwelled at some length on the various hardships he encountered over the years: financial troubles, an agonizing bout with syphilis, his battles with the authorities over his radical views. I told them how he had finally found a protector in the Duc d'Arpajon, and then, just three years later, how he had been killed on a Paris street when a building stone fell from a rooftop and landed on his head. I paused dramatically to allow the grotesqueness and humor of this tragedy to sink in.