At least one of my readers has certainly been asking him/herself through this column about its obvious poetic title. And who knows? Maybe even one has even copied the title, pasted it within quotation marks in the search window of AltaVista and clicked on Search to see what comes up. Actually, I've found that the line shows up only once, but show up it does. (A complete text version can be found here. This is, however, a different translation, and it thus has a different ring to it.):
Each separate pageIt's from Act IV of Edmund Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac. Ironically, perhaps fittingly, they are spoken by Roxane to Christian, whom she thinks wrote the letters she received when he was away at war. Alas, although "Every page of them / Was like a petal fallen from your soul", the particular soul in question wasn't Christian's, but Cyrano's. Roxane even apologizes to Christian:
Was like a fluttering flower-petal, loosed
From your own soul, and wafted thus to mine.
For the insult done to you when, frivolous,Cyrano has found some continued virtual life in cyberspace. There is, for instance, a quite comprehensive site devoted to the play, and a popular automatic love letter generator that bears his name.
At first I loved you only for your face!