Transcriber’s Note

Cover created by Transcriber, using a photograph from the original book, and placed in the Public Domain.

Table of Contents added by Transcriber and placed in the Public Domain.

SARAH BERNHARDT AS I KNEW HER

Mme. Bernhardt in her Dressing-room during her Interpretation of La Gloire, by Maurice Rostand, in 1921.

Photo, Henri Manuel.]

Frontispiece

SARAH BERNHARDT
AS I KNEW HER
The Memoirs of Madame Pierre Berton
as told to BASIL WOON

WITH NINETEEN ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON: HURST & BLACKETT, LTD.
PATERNOSTER HOUSE, E.C. 4.
1923

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Never was more apt the German proverb, “Truth is its own justification,” than in the telling of the story of that most remarkable of women, Sarah Bernhardt. During her life, in spite of the fact that she enjoyed more widespread publicity than any other person, man or woman, remarkably little was known by the public of her real life story. The very extent of this worldwide publicity served, in fact, as a sort of smoke-screen to conceal the intimate personality of the woman it vaunted.

To the playgoers of the world, and even to those who had never seen her act, Sarah Bernhardt was for ever acting a part. She shared her glory with the dozens of poets and playwrights whose inspired interpreter she was. The laurel wreath around her brow was of the same tinsel quality as the scenery which framed her personality.

To the world, Sarah Bernhardt was the greatest tragedienne who had ever lived, and that was all. The “all,” you will say, was a very great deal. I grant you that; but when you have read this book I think you will say that the title of “great woman,” which Sarah Bernhardt in reality earned, expresses her true personality far better than that of “greatest actress.”

It is hard to begin this work of telling the true, the intimate story of Sarah Bernhardt without laying oneself open to the charge of revealing secrets that were better left inviolate, of tearing down rather than building up the laborious character-structure of an international idol. But I refuse to allow these first pages to become a justification—the work itself will be that. What I am attempting now is simply an explanation.

If, in the course of this book, certain episodes are recounted that may possibly wound the feelings of those who worshipped Sarah as an actress, I would point out that the enthralling story of her tremendous fight against the worst odds that ever faced a woman cannot be properly told if certain essential elements of her history are suppressed. Such elements, despite the character they seem to convey, are component parts of the amazing whole. We cannot reveal Bernhardt in her genuine greatness without revealing also certain things that in a less important biography had certainly better have been left unwritten.

For seventy-nine years Sarah succeeded in concealing the facts of her birth. Yet more than thirty years ago she said to Madame Pierre Berton, to whose remarkable and faithful memory the facts of this biography are due, “I hope that, when I am dead, you, who are younger than I am, will reveal to the world the real Sarah—the Sarah whom the audiences never knew!”

From time to time thereafter, throughout their long and intimate association, Sarah told Madame Berton the facts of her birth, of her childhood, of her absorbing up-hill battle towards celebrity and of her final conquest. These facts, together with matters of Madame Berton’s own observation, are contained in this book.

Scrupulous to a fault, Madame Berton refrained from telling or publishing a word of what had been given her in confidence, until Sarah’s death released her from her promise, and at the same time put her under the immediate obligation of fulfilling her old friend’s wish and “revealing to the world the Sarah whom the audiences never knew.”

A word about Madame Berton. She is the widow of Pierre Berton, the actor and playwright, who, before his marriage to her, was the adored intimate of Bernhardt. Their liaison, which is recounted hereafter, lasted two years, and even after they separated their friendship continued.

It was Berton who convinced Duquesnel, the director of the Odéon, of Sarah’s genius as a tragedienne; it was Berton who encouraged her and taught her and who, more than any other man, was responsible for her early triumphs. It was Berton who stood beside her when all Paris sneered at and mocked her, and it was Berton who defended her when the co-directors of the Odéon wished to cancel her contract because of what they termed her “incorrigibility.”

No living person, then, can be so fitted to tell Sarah’s true history as the widow of the man who, himself, lived a part of it.

Madame Berton, after her marriage to Berton, accompanied her husband on many of Sarah’s famous tours about Europe. Even after her marriage, Thérèse Berton remained Sarah’s confidante and friend, though there were intervals of coldness that were natural enough in a temperament as self-centred, and as jealous as was Sarah’s.

From now on the story will be as Madame Berton related it to me. I shall let her tell it here just as she told it me in Paris, in the same simple convincing language, without the addition of literary flourishes or anything that could detract from the dramatic power of the narrative itself.

BASIL WOON.

Sarah Bernhardt as I Knew Her

CHAPTER I

For all my intimacy with Sarah Bernhardt (said Madame Berton), I find it difficult to believe that she loved me. I think that, on the contrary, she distrusted me, and I even believe that at times she hated me, because it was I, and not she, who had married Pierre Berton.

Yet she confided in me. She was at times hard-pressed for somebody to whom she could tell her secrets. She knew that I would keep my promise never to relate them during her lifetime, and I know she told them to me because she realised that one day even the most intimate details of her life would belong by right to posterity.

This great actress with Jewish, German, French and Flemish (and probably also Gypsy) blood in her veins, was born into that condition of life which even to-day spells ruin, hate, despair and poverty for the great majority. In those days illegitimacy was almost an insuperable obstacle to recognition and success.

To the fact that the union of her mother and father was never blessed by holy matrimony may with justice be ascribed the impunity with which she was assailed during the first forty or fifty years of her life by all manner of critics, high and low. No less than three books or pamphlets were written attacking her before she had attained her fortieth year.

Articles in the Parisian press were sometimes so virulent as to be inconceivable, when it is remembered that the object of their venom was the world’s greatest actress, the “Divine Sarah.” Every blackmailing penny-a-liner in Paris essayed to make Sarah pay him tribute at some time or another. I do not think that she ever paid, but I do know that the fits of rage and despair into which she was thrown after reading these attacks often made her so ill that for days her understudy was obliged to play her part.

Her long fight to keep the truth of her birth from being published is known. In telling me one day of the sordid circumstances to which she owed her appearance in the world she pledged me to secrecy during her lifetime. I have kept that pledge, and it is only because she gave me express permission to write this book after her death, and because it is time that the world knew the true story of this extraordinary genius, that I tell it now.

The “Divine” Sarah was divine only in her inspiration; the “immortal” Sarah was immortal solely in her art. The real Sarah, the Sarah whom her intimates knew and adored, was not so much a divinity as an idol; a woman full of vanity and frailty, dominated since birth by ambitious egoism and a determination to become famous.

She was the supreme woman of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but it was not her supremacy or her position at the pinnacle of theatrical success that made her lovable. She was loved, not because she was a saint but because she was not a saint; for to err is human and to be human is to be loved. Even on the stage her art was natural—she did not pose, she lived.

In the history of the Christian world only one other woman was born under a greater handicap than was Sarah Bernhardt, and few women ever rose to a similar fame. Yet Sarah, even at the height of her career, did things which were justly condemned by strict-living people and would not have been tolerated in anyone else’s case.

Consider this woman. She was born to an unwed Jewish mother whose birth-place was Berlin. Her father was a French provincial lawyer, a profligate, who afterwards became a world-traveller.

She was born a Jewess, baptized a Catholic. By birth she was French, and by marriage she was Greek.

Throughout her life she was, first, an actress; secondly, a mother; thirdly, a great, a tempestuous lover.

She was a sculptress of extraordinary merit; she was a painter whose pictures were exhibited in the Paris Salons before she became famous as an actress; she was a writer with many books to her credit.

A temperamental morbidity was, I think, supreme in her character, although many who knew her placed ambition first. After these came mother-love, vanity, affection and malice. She made more enemies than friends; more people feared her than loved her; yet her life was replete with great sentimental episodes with some of the most famous men of her time.

The happiest period of her life was during the infancy of her son Maurice; her greatest joy was in his abiding affection. The bitterest period of her life was her old age, when she was surrounded by jackals whose affection for her was chiefly purchased by the money she mistakenly lavished on them; and who reduced her to such a penniless condition that, practically on her death-bed, she was forced to pose for an American film company, so that her debts and funeral expenses might in part be covered.

Fifty years of constant association taught me the truth about Sarah Bernhardt. Others might have known her longer, but none knew her better. None certainly could speak with greater authority of her intimate life. I had the details of her birth, her life, and her loves that are here set forth from her own lips, and from the lips of others who figured in her career.

The first time I met Sarah Bernhardt will live in my memory for ever. A child of eight, I was taken to visit the actress—then beginning to taste the first fruits of success—in her loge at the Odéon Theatre.

I remember my fright as we crossed the vast, cavernous stage, on our way to the stairs which led to the dressing-rooms. Enormous pieces of scenery looked as though they might topple on one at any moment. Cardboard statues, which to my childish imagination seemed forbidding demons, leered at me from the shadows. Rough, uncouth scene-shifters, acolytes of this painted Hades, jostled me as we passed. The great height of the stage, ending in a gloomy mystery of ropes, pulleys and platforms which hinted at occult rites, awed me and made me feel smaller than I really was (and I was very small!).

From time to time voices, bawling from the gloom but whence exactly I neither knew nor could discover, echoed and re-echoed through the shadows. The curtain was up, and beyond the darkened proscenium I could faintly discern the four-storied auditorium, awesome in its resounding emptiness.

Whom could we be going to visit here, I wondered, and clung tighter to my mother’s protecting skirts, while she inquired her way of a black-coated gentleman, who appeared with disconcerting suddenness as we reached the foot of the stairs. But I dared not voice the question, and now we mounted a bewildering number of steps, each bringing a more mysterious vista than the last.

Finally we reached the top of the stairs and my mother led me down a long passageway, lined with doors which had once been painted white but which were now a dirty cream colour. Some of these doors had simply numbers; others bore a name inscribed on a piece of pasteboard, inserted in a metal holder.

Almost at the end of the corridor my mother stopped before a door precisely similar to the others, except that instead of a number or a pasteboard it bore the name in golden letters:

SARAH BERNHARDT

Even then the young actress had evinced her preference for gold. She said that it matched her hair.

Receiving a summons to enter, my mother opened the door and went in, dragging me resolutely after her. Inside this door was another, inscribed in like fashion, and when this in turn was opened, we found ourselves in a large room illuminated by two windows and shaded lights, for it was winter and the windows opened on a courtyard.

This room contained a settee, an armchair, two other chairs and a table, which had three movable mirrors above it. The table was littered with pots and vases of every description and a wild confusion of gold-backed brushes and toilet accessories. A great vase full of carnations stood on it, and another filled with the same flowers was on the floor near one of the windows. The room was carpeted, but the carpet was so littered with envelopes, pieces of paper and various articles of wearing apparel that its design could not be discerned.

Seated before the table-de-toilette was an angel.

Let the reader remember that he is dealing with a child’s memory. My imagination had so been wrought upon by the fearful caverns below that I had fully expected to see, enthroned here, in the upper chambers, His Majesty Satan in all his glory. The sight then of this radiant creature, her head literally crowned with a tumbling glory of gold, came as a tremendous shock—until I recalled that, although that awful place down below must have been Hell, we had mounted upwards since then and must therefore by now have reached Heaven!

As my mother shook hands, I ran behind her and, terror-stricken at I know not what, hid my face in her ample skirts. Then, as though from far away, I heard the divinity speak.

“So this is little Thérèse!” she said. “Come here, ma petite, and let Sarah Bernhardt kiss you!”

But I would not go, and only buried my face all the deeper in my mother’s dress.

“Mais, ma mignonne,” remonstrated the angel, “I cannot see you if you hide like that! Come!”

My mother, excusably vexed, dragged me from my hiding-place.

“Come! come!” she said sharply; “speak to Mademoiselle! Go and kiss her!”

Thus commanded in a tone I knew too well, I advanced a step and stood there shyly, not daring to lift my head. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by two arms and a mass of golden hair, which literally covered my head and shoulders as Sarah Bernhardt caught me to her.

“La pauvre petite ... la pauvre mignonne!” she kept repeating, punctuating the words with hearty hugs and an embrace on both cheeks. Then, holding me at arm’s length:

“So, you want to be an actress?”

Now this, to my knowledge, was the first occasion on which I had ever heard that I was to be an actress. Certainly I had never mentioned the idea to anyone, least of all to my mother, who was not a person to whom one made confidences. I stood there dumb.

“Ma foi,” ejaculated the angel, in her glorious voice, “she is pretty enough!”

There followed a rapid exchange of remarks between my mother and Sarah Bernhardt—the connection between whom I have never been able to fathom—and during these I was ordered to sit on the chair (my legs did not touch the ground) and told not to open my mouth. As if I would have dared to! But I had become bold enough to feast my eyes on the divinity, and to study her at leisure.

How easily that first childish impression of Sarah comes to me now, fifty years later!

Those amazingly blue eyes, widely-spaced; that arched nose, a pulse beating in the sensitive nostril as she talked; that glorious mouth, full and red, the upper lip slightly projecting over the under one; that firm chin, with the dimple that Edmond Rostand afterwards raved about; those high cheek-bones, the line of them extending to where the hair covered the ears; above all, that extraordinary mass of unruly golden-red hair, tossed about in riotous confusion and every direction.

Many another face I might see and forget, this one, never!

When Sarah stood up to say good-bye, I saw that she was taller than my mother, and unbelievably slender.

As we went downstairs, I was in such an ecstatic state of bliss that I had not the slightest fear of the gnomes lurking in the shadows of the nether regions as we passed them again on our way out, nor do I remember my mother talking to me.

My heart was dedicated to a goddess. Sarah Bernhardt, from that day onwards, was my idol.

CHAPTER II

What is the truth about Sarah Bernhardt’s birth? Have I the right to tell it, even though I know the facts? Have I the right to divulge this secret of all secrets, for nearly four-score years locked in the breast of the greatest woman of five epochs? Who am I that I should venture into the cupboards of the dead Great for the purpose of rattling the skeletons I am certain to find there—yes, in the cupboards of all the dead great ones who later surrounded this celebrated woman, and not alone Bernhardt?

I have faced this problem squarely, fought it out with myself through long, sleepless nights, when publishers were bedevilling me for the truth, the whole truth and—scarcely anything but the truth. It is a problem that will raise a sharp conflict in the feelings of all my readers. It is a problem for Poe.

Have I the right—knowing what I do of the real circumstances surrounding not only the dead genius but her living relatives also—have I the right to tear the shroud from that dead face, and let the world gaze afresh on a long-familiar visage, only to find a new and wondrously changed entity beneath?

I will be frank. I had made up my mind not to do it: not for fear of giving offence to the dead, for ’twas from this very glorious clay that I had the truth with permission to publish it, but from respect to the living. Sarah Bernhardt not only left a son, Maurice Bernhardt; she left grandchildren and great-grandchildren, little ones whom I have watched joyously at play in the Parc Monceau, unknowing that at that very moment the great battle for life was being staged in the drab little house on the Boulevard Pereire. She had made up her mind that the sorrows which were hers should never blemish these innocent ones.

And yet—what a fallacy, what a heartrending fallacy it is to believe that such things can be concealed, or that, being concealed, they do not fester in their hiding-places!

Scarcely had the last, sad curtain been rung down on that greatest of real-life dramas than the scavengers of literature—those grisly people who lurk in the night of life, dealing in calumny and lies—began delving into the past of Sarah Bernhardt, just as the real chiffoniers, those horrible old women of the dawn, delve into the dustbins of Paris, seeking for Heaven knows what filth.

The mystery of her birth was Sarah’s great secret. Insatiable, the greedy public desired to rend this secret and to tear it into little bits. Literary ghouls fell upon the great woman’s reputation and fought over it. They disinterred legends that Sarah, while living, had successfully and scornfully proved untrue. They sent out lies by the bushel, secure in the knowledge that the Golden Voice, which alone could brand them, was stilled for ever.

Perhaps it was to be expected that the first of these legends came from Germany, a country that Sarah scorned and once refused to visit, although she had been offered a million marks to do so; a country, moreover, which had claimed Sarah as its own on more than one occasion.

In 1902 the Berlin Lokal Anzeiger published a “revelation” of the birth of Sarah Bernhardt. She was born, said the inspired writer, at Frankfort. Her father was a German, her mother a Fleming. She had been taken to France when a tiny child and there abandoned by her parents.

“We are aware,” said the Lokal Anzeiger, “that Sarah herself claims to have been born in Paris. Our only retort to this is: let her produce her birth certificate!”

They knew, of course, that Sarah’s birth was never registered. Later I will tell you why.

Sarah Bernhardt was interviewed about these statements at the time they were published. As always, she refused to comment on the extraordinary story, and contented herself with referring inquiring journalists to her Memoirs, entitled “Ma Double Vie,” which had been published some years before.

In these Memoirs Sarah told an infinitesimal fraction of the truth. She said that she was born on October 22, 1844, at number 5, rue de l’Ecole de Médecine, in Paris. This was the only mention she made of the circumstances of her birth, and it was true.

Now comes George Bernhardt, a famous German, who ought to know better than to pander to the scandal-mongers, and who states positively that Sarah’s father was his great-grandfather, George Bernhardt, and that her mother was a Gypsy woman for whom he experienced a temporary passion while living in Algeria.

But here he hedges. “At least,” he says, “family records tell of the existence of the child, and of the allegation that George Bernhardt was the father; but they also say that the assertion was denied by him, which leads to the probability that Sarah Bernhardt had no claim whatever on the name she bore.”

Frankfort, and now Algiers! A Flemish mother and a Gypsy mother! A fine haul for the scavengers!

Sarah had to fight rumours of this kind on several occasions during her lifetime. In a scurrilous book which was written many years ago it was asserted that she “never knew who her father was.”

This, as might be expected, was untrue. Sarah not only knew who her father was, but knew him well. Though she never lived with him, he visited her frequently, especially when she was at school in the Convent at Grandchamps, and when he died he left her a portion of his fortune.

Sarah herself starts her Memoirs with this reference to him: “My father was travelling in China at the time—why, I do not know.”

Here, then, was the answer to the problem that had been bothering me: it was clearly better to tell the truth once and for all, and to set at rest all doubts concerning this much-debated question of Sarah Bernhardt’s birth, than to let every newspaper scavenger have his own way with it, prolong the agony, and incidentally contrive, by unscrupulous inference, to cast a shadow much blacker than the importance of the matter justified.

To aid me in coming to this decision I had the knowledge that Sarah herself, in telling the story to me many years ago, was aware that one day it would be made public, and wished things so. She knew that in time to come she would belong to history, and also how little of history is founded on actual fact. The last thing she wanted was for the facts of her life to be at the mercy of imaginative chroniclers, who would have nothing to base their story on except rumour.

Thus she told it to me, and thus I tell it to you. Let the world decide.

CHAPTER III

No. 5, rue de l’Ecole de Médecine was a weird, queerly-leaning tenement house in a black little side-street just off the Boulevard St. Germain, near the Boulevard St. Michel, in the heart of the students’ quarter of Paris. It was a poor dwelling, at best, with a crumbling façade, ornamented with some scarcely-discernible heraldic device which told of past dignity. It had a low, wide doorway, with one of its great oak, iron-studded doors askew on its hinges, so that a perpetual draught whistled up the stone-flagged corridor that loomed darkly, like a cave, from the street to the crumbling stairs. A four-story building ... each floor was just a trifle more weather-beaten, more decrepit, than the next. On the ground floor, next to the loge du concierge, was a wineshop, smelling of last night’s slops, where the brown-aproned proprietor leaned against his little wooden bar and filled new bottles with the dregs that had not been drunk the day before; next to the wineshop stood a cobbler’s stall, with the tap-tap of the cobbler’s wooden mallet resounding through the street to the courtyard at the rear; and next to the cobbler’s, the stall of a marchand des frites, whose only merchandise was sliced potatoes fried in olive oil.

On the first floor was the appartement of the wine-dealer; on the second and third, logements for students—students who, returning nightly from the cafés of the Boul’ Mich’, enlivened the aged edifice with their cries.

And on the fourth floor of this building, on this twenty-second day of October, 1844, in a modest flat of three rooms—bedroom, sitting-room and kitchen—was born the baby who afterwards became Sarah Bernhardt.

Her mother, then a beautiful young woman in her late teens, was named Julie Bernard, but sometimes she called herself Judith Van Hard. Among her intimates she was affectionately known as Youle.

It was eight o’clock at night. Youle was lying in bed, her mass of red-gold hair tumbling over her shoulders and down under the sheets. Her eyes of sapphire-blue were closed, and her breathing hard and spasmodic. Her features were drawn; her face pale.

Three other persons were in the room. One was a man—the doctor, busy packing up his instruments. The other was a young friend, Madame Guérard. The third was a tiny atom of humanity, barely a foot long and weighing certainly not more than half a dozen pounds. This infant’s head was covered with a fuzz of reddish hair resembling the mother’s; its tiny mouth was open and its little lungs were working at top-blast.

The temper for which Sarah Bernhardt was later to become notorious was making its first manifestation.

The delivery had been difficult, and Julie was not asleep but unconscious. Thus, though the baby cried all night, the mother did not awaken, and in the morning Mme. Guérard sent off to the nearest synagogue for a Jewish priest.

But when the doctor came the crisis had passed; the girl on the bed had recovered consciousness and was already fondling her child. From then on her recovery was rapid, and before little Sarah had properly got her blue eyes open or begun to take an interest in things around her, the beautiful little Jewish girl was back at her work-table in the sitting-room, trimming hats for which she was paid a few sous each by the clients whose houses she visited in turn every week.

Julie Van Hard, or Bernard, was a Flemish Jewess born of a struggling lower-middle-class family in Berlin. Her father, originally from South Holland but a naturalised German, had worked in a circus, but had forsaken this occupation to go into the retail grain and seed business, first in Hanover and then in Berlin. Her mother was a German dressmaker and a great beauty. When Julie was thirteen, her father died and left her only a handful of marks with which to complete her education.

Instead of doing so she chose to leave school, and became an apprentice in a big Berlin millinery establishment. After working there a little more than a year, she fell in love with a non-commissioned officer in a cavalry regiment, who seduced and then callously left her. When the affair came to the ears of the girl’s employer, she was discharged in disgrace.

After that she left Berlin and went to Frankfort, where she kept herself for a few months by making hats (at which she was very clever) and singing on occasion in cafés-concert. She was a lovely child, even in the poor dresses she could afford, and having a talent for music, had been taught the piano by her mother. She displayed, however, little of the great histrionic ability which was to develop in her daughter. In fact, Sarah Bernhardt never completely satisfied herself from which side of the family she derived her talent. Her father’s relations, from what little she learned of them, were comfortable, mediocre middle-class people in the French provinces—with German or Dutch connections, to be sure, but with no “acting blood” as far as she could discover.

The Van Hard family, however, was an offshoot of the Kinsberger clan, who owned circuses and theatres in Northern Europe before Napoleon’s day, and who later developed into wholesale dealers in grain. When Napoleon invaded Poland, in fact, a Kinsberger supplied him with grain for his horses. The exact relationship of this Kinsberger to Sarah she never properly knew, but he was probably a cousin of her grandfather.

Away back therefore in this maternal line, there probably existed someone with a talent for the theatre. Whether the ancestor in question ever used it is not on record. We know that her grandfather was a performer in a Dutch circus, but we do not know whether he was a clown or an animal-tamer.

In Frankfort, Julie Bernard, the modiste, met a young Frenchman, a courier in the diplomatic corps, and a wild love affair followed, which culminated in the girl following the young man to Paris. There they continued their liaison for less than a month, however, since the courier’s parents, people of noble birth, stepped in and forbade him ever to see the little German girl again. He left her without warning, and without money.

For weeks afterwards little Julie, a stranger in a strange land and speaking little French, lived as best she might. Paris is a hard city now, for the unprotected girl; it was harder then. Often the German waif came perilously near starvation. Once, according to a story that she later on in life related to Jeanne, her second daughter, who told it to Sarah, she tried to commit suicide by throwing herself under the wheels of a passing coach. But she had misjudged the distance and the wheels passed within inches of her.

What she did to eke out a bare living in those terrible days we do not know. It is unlikely that she ever confided the whole story to her daughters—even to Jeanne, her favourite. What is known is that she continued to make hats whenever she could save sufficient sous to buy the material, and perhaps she sang or danced in the cabarets of the quarter; but this is unlikely, because of her ignorance of French. Whatever she did, no one now can blame her.

Eventually, she struck up an acquaintance with a law student, who was registered on the books of the University of Paris as Edouard Bernhardt. The family name of this man, according to what Sarah learned later, was de Thérard, and his baptismal name was “Paul.”

The exact reasons for the dual nomenclature I cannot give. Sarah herself knew of the matter only vaguely. I suggested that de Thérard was the student’s right name, but that he carried on his liaison with Julie under the name of Bernhardt. Sarah admitted this was a plausible inference, but insisted that the attorney for her father’s estate always referred to him as Bernhardt.

Bernhardt, or de Thérard, was one of the wildest youngsters in the Latin Quarter. He was constantly getting into scrapes, which his family at Le Havre had to pay for. Many of these scrapes were with women much older than himself, and l’aventure amoureuse was probably his strong—or weak—point. At any rate, he succeeded in studying as little law as possible, for he failed completely in all his examinations.

Where he and Julie met is unknown; probably it was a simple rencontre de la rue, which is common enough in Paris to-day. The nature of Julie’s trade, when delivering her hats to her customers, took her frequently into the streets of the quarter in which young Bernhardt was studying and in which he prosecuted his love affairs. It is likely that, seeing a marvellously pretty girl (of a type then unusual in Paris), walking along the Boul ‘Mich’, he followed her and, being of the handsome, devil-may-care type, pleased her so that she agreed to meet him again.

Be that as it may, the link between the little German girl and the reckless Havre student soon became public enough. Their appearance in any of the cafés or cabarets of the quarter was the signal for a chorus of congratulations and ironical greetings from Bernhardt’s comrades.

The little flat at Number 5, rue de l’Ecole de Médecine, was furnished and rented by Bernhardt for Julie, out of his slender student’s purse.

Two weeks before the birth of his child, Bernhardt returned to Havre.

He wrote ardent letters to the forsaken mother and sent regular sums for the child’s support. Sometimes he visited Paris, but rarely remained there longer than twenty-four hours. As his financial circumstances improved, for relatives bequeathed him fairly large sums, he began to travel, and before his first voyage, to Portugal, he suggested that the infant Sarah should be sent to his own old nurse, now become a professional dry-nurse, with a farm near Quimperlé, in Brittany.

About this time Julie’s fortunes underwent a sudden change for the better. This came about through several circumstances which occurred within a few weeks of each other. First, a relative of the young girl died in Holland, and bequeathed to her and each of her three sisters an equal number of guelders. The sum was not large, but it sufficed to lift Julie above immediate want. She went to Holland to claim the money, and was gone six months.

A few days after the legacy reached her, she discovered to her astonishment that one of her sisters, Rosine, who was her elder by four years and who was supposedly in Marseilles, was in reality living in Paris. How she was living is rather a mystery. But she seemed to be well off, and she had been long enough in France to speak the language excellently.

When Julie returned from Holland, she came by way of Berlin and brought with her Henriette, her younger sister, then aged thirteen. There was still another sister, two years younger, and another aged twenty-eight, who was married and who lived in the French West Indies.

Julie and Henriette, when they arrived in Paris, went to live with Rosine, who had a flat in Montmartre. With baby Sarah safely in the country, in charge of a capable nurse, and with funds for the child’s upkeep provided by the father, Julie felt free to look around.

She was a remarkable woman by this time. Eighteen years old, very fair, with a marvellous complexion and the wonderful head of hair that was to make her renowned later on, Julie Bernard possessed a gay and careless disposition that would have made her notorious anywhere. With her sisters, she began frequenting the cafés that were then fashionable, and it was not long before the trio began to meet interesting people.

Baptismal Certificate of Sarah Bernhardt, May 21st, 1846.

Among these acquaintances was a man whom Sarah herself always referred to as “Baron Larrey,” but who was probably another man of title with a similar name. Baron Larrey and Julie became first friends, then lovers, and the relationship lasted five years.

Far behind her now the dingy, decrepit old building at 5, rue de l’Ecole de Médecine! Far behind her the days when she had to trudge weary miles, in all weathers, to secure orders and deliver hats! Julie was now a “fille à la mode.” She flaunted the latest fashions, the latest colours, the latest millinery on the Boulevards and in the exclusive restaurants. Her relationship with the Baron commanded for her a certain respect in the gay, care-free Bohemian world that was the Paris of 1845. Nobles at Court commenced to be interested in her. Famous personages of the stage consented to sit at her table.

She soon eclipsed in beauty and in accomplishments her less endowed sisters, although they too formed wealthy and prominent relationships.

All three sisters loved to travel. Julie took the younger one on many voyages throughout Europe, and Rosine made regular pilgrimages to Germany to the famous spas.

While Julie lived the gay, irresponsible life of a Parisian butterfly, her daughter Sarah, a weak, anæmic child, cursed with a terrific temper, remained on the farm in Brittany.

When she was nearly two years old she was still in her “first steps”; she did not begin to learn to walk until she was fourteen months old. Her nurse, who had married again, had other duties about the farm and could give scant attention to the little one during the day. In order to keep her quiet, the nurse got her husband to build a little chair, in which the baby was fastened with a strap. This was then pushed against a table, so that the child could amuse herself with pieces of coloured paper—the only toys Sarah Bernhardt knew until she was three years old.

One day the woman set her in the chair as usual but neglected to fasten the strap, and the baby, leaning forward to catch something, fell from the high chair and into the wide, Breton fireplace, in which a log fire was burning. Her screams brought the nurse and her husband running. The nurse picked her up and plunged her bodily, flaming clothes and all, into a huge tub of milk which was waiting to be churned.

Doctors were sent for from a neighbouring village and hasty messages sent to Paris. The only one of the sisters to be found was Rosine, who sent a message to Julie at Brussels, and herself hurried to Brittany. Four days later Julie arrived in Baron Larrey’s coach, which had been driven at top speed all the way from Paris.

From this incident grew Sarah’s nickname, which remained with her all her childhood, “Flower-of-the-Milk.” She was three months recovering from the severe burns she had sustained, and until she died she bore scars to remind her of the accident.

For ever after, Sarah Bernhardt had a horror of fire. She could not bear even to look at one, and would shiver and turn pale when she heard the trumpets and bells of the fire brigade. Yet mother-love conquered this fear when, nearly twenty years later, her flat took fire and she dashed through a barrage of flames to rescue her own baby boy.

When little Sarah recovered, Julie proposed to the nurse, now a widow, that she should leave the Breton farm and live in Paris in a cottage Baron Larrey had taken on the borders of the Seine, at Neuilly. The nurse agreed, and a new existence began for the child on the fringe of the city, where her mother was earning a reputation as a gilded social butterfly.

CHAPTER IV

During the year which followed transfer of nurse and child to Neuilly-sur-Seine Sarah saw her mother but once, and then merely by chance.

Returning from a gay court party near St. Germain the coach, in which Julie was travelling with a resplendent personage the Comte de Tours, broke down just after it had crossed the bridge over the Seine and reached the outskirts of Neuilly. The nearest coach-builder was a mile distant, and while the coachman walked this distance, Julie bethought herself of the neglected child living only a few streets away. So she and the Count daintily picked their way to the cottage, and found Sarah revelling in her bi-weekly bath.

This bath was an extraordinary affair, because it took place in the same tub as the family washing—and probably other washing that the nurse solicited in order to eke out her income. On the principle of killing two birds with one stone, the nurse would make a warm tub of soap-suds, put the linen to be washed into it, and then hoist in baby Sarah!

The sight amused the Count and infuriated Julie, who gave the nurse a sound scolding. Sarah was hastily taken from the tub, dried, clothed and then handed to her fastidious mother, who fondled her in a gingerly way. But the baby failed to recognise the mother who had sacrificed so little for her sake, and burst into a storm of tears, pounding the finely-dressed lady with her puny little fists.

The Count thought it a fine joke, and laughed uproariously. “She is just like her mother, Youle!” he remarked, twirling his fine moustache.

Julie handed her tempestuous child back to the nurse.

“If that is the way she behaves when her mother comes to see her,” she said, “I shall not come again.”

She kept her word to such good purpose that, eighteen months later, when the nurse married for a third time, and desired to take the child with her to her new home, letters to Julie’s address were returned undelivered. The errant mother had not even thought it worth her while to keep her child’s nurse informed of her movements.

The nurse’s new husband was a concierge, one of those indispensable people who open the doors of Paris buildings, lose letters, clean stairs, quarrel with flat-owners, and generally make themselves as much of a nuisance as possible. This particular specimen was a big, upstanding man with sandy hair, about forty years of age, or ten years younger than his bride.

He was then concierge at Number 65, rue de Provençe, in the heart of Paris, near where the Galeries Lafayette, the great stores, now stand. It was a dingy building, mostly devoted to commerce, and the concierge occupied one room on the first floor. This one room was bedroom, sitting-room and kitchen combined.

There was only one bed, a big four-poster, jammed against the window. There was also one kitchen table, on which he ate his meals; two chairs in varying stages of decrepitude; a small coal stove screened from the bed by a heavy velvet curtain—soiled legacy of some opulent tenant—and another small table, on which stood a wash-basin and pail. When water was wanted it was necessary to fetch it from a pump in the street.

It was into this sordid environment that little Sarah, “Flower-of-the-Milk,” now almost five years old, was brought willy-nilly by her foster-mother. There was no room to put a cot for the child, so she shared a fraction of the bed. She was quickly put to work by her new lord, who soon initiated her into the mysteries of floor-washing and door-knob polishing, while it was generally la petite Sarah, when water was wanted, who was commissioned to stagger down the stairs with the empty pail and return with the full one.

Living with two adults in this ill-ventilated, badly-lighted room—the sole window was one about twice the size of a ship’s port-hole—and forced to do work which might well have proved too much for a child twice her age, it is small wonder that Sarah was frequently ill.

She lost appetite and colour, and grew weak, while the anæmia, which the bracing air of the country had almost cured, returned. Her eyes grew listless and had large puffs under them, so that neighbours, who pitied the child, prophesied that her days would soon be over.

Her only playmate, almost as unhappy as herself, was another little girl named Titine, the daughter of a working jeweller, who lived on the floor above; her playgrounds were the busy streets of Paris; her language the argot of the slums. No one dreamed of sending her to school, which was not then compulsory.

There is very little doubt that the world would never have known Sarah Bernhardt if this state of affairs had lasted another year. The child was fast going into tuberculosis, and could not even summon strength for the fits of temper that had distinguished her up till this time.

I have said that her only playmate was Titine, the daughter of the jeweller, but there was another for a month or so—the son of the butcher at the street corner.

One afternoon the janitor’s wife returned from an errand and heard screams coming from the loge. Hastening there she discovered the butcher’s son, aged six, stripped to the waist, and the diminutive Sarah laying on to him with a strap.

“I am playing at being a Spaniard,” she said in explanation, Spaniards having then a great reputation in France for cruelty. The incident is interesting in the light of later incidents in her career, when charges of callousness and cruelty were brought against her. For myself I have never doubted that a streak of the primitive existed in Sarah. But, unlike others, I believe that she was the better for it, for out of it grew her single-mindedness and her will to conquer.

During all this time Sarah’s mother gave no sign of life, despite repeated efforts on the part of the old nurse to find her. In fact, the child’s board had not been paid for nearly two years and, with her delicate health, she was becoming a charge which the couple could ill afford. Deliverance from this state of affairs came unexpectedly. One day Rosine, Sarah’s aunt, paid a visit to a neighbouring house. Sarah, who was playing in the courtyard of the building at the moment her aunt arrived, immediately recognised her, although the two had not met for more than a year.

“Tante Rosine! Tante Rosine!”

The extravagantly dressed woman turned, hardly believing her ears.

“It is not?—why, it is Sarah, the daughter of my sister Youle!”

“Yes, yes! It is I, Sarah! Oh, take me away—take me away! They suffocate me, these walls—always walls! I cannot see the sky! Take me away! I want to see the sky again, and the flowers...!”

Sarah’s cries had attracted a crowd, and much confused Rosine hurried the child into the concierge’s room, and was there overwhelmed by the old nurse’s explanations.

Something seemed to tell Sarah that she was not to be taken away at that moment.

“Oh, take me with you—take me with you! I shall die here!”

It was the cry of a desperate child fighting for her life, and it visibly wrenched at the heart of Tante Rosine. Yet—take her with her? How could she? What would her friend, the companion whom she lived with and who paid for her fine gowns and hats, say, if she brought home this little child of the gutter?

“Well,” she conceded, as the woe-begone child clung convulsively to her skirt, “I will come back to-morrow, and take you away.”

But with that curious intuition that characterises most children, Sarah sensed that she was about to be abandoned for a third time. She flung herself on the bed, sobbing, as her nurse accompanied her aunt down the stairs to the street below, where a fine equipage of boxwood and plush, prancing horses and liveried footmen was in waiting.

Rosine got into her carriage, dabbing a lace handkerchief at her eyes. She had a tender heart and was firmly resolved to write to Youle at once—Julie was in London—and make her take her child.

The footman regained his seat, the coachman clucked to his horses and the equipage moved away. But before it had gone two feet there was a heartrending wail and shriek, followed by a chorus of affrighted shouts, and a body came hurtling past the coach to the pavement. It was Sarah. The child had attempted to jump from the tiny first-floor window into the coach as it passed.

When Sarah awoke she found herself in a great, clean bed, surrounded by kind faces. She was at the home of her aunt in the rue St. Honoré. She had a double fracture of her right arm, and a sprained left ankle.

Julie, who was sent for immediately, arrived three days later, together with numerous other members of Sarah’s family. For the first time in her brief existence, Sarah found herself a person of importance.

For the next two years little Sarah was an invalid, capable of walking only a step or two at a time. She passed this period sitting in a great arm-chair, unable to move without pain, dreaming childish dreams of splendour for the future.

“Never once,” said Sarah in speaking of this period to me, “did I include in those dreams a suspicion that I would one day be an actress. I had never seen the inside of a theatre, and although many actors and actresses were among the friends constantly in and out of my mother’s home at 22, rue de la Michodière—a rather meretriciously furnished flat with gilded salons and musty bedrooms—I was shy with them and they with me, and learned little from their conversation.

“In fact, the stage and all appertaining to it remained a deep mystery to me for nearly ten years after my accident. My actual going on the stage was an accident—or rather the solution of a problem which had worried my mother almost to death.”

How this came about will be described in a later chapter.

At seven years of age, Sarah Bernhardt had so far recovered that she could walk and move without difficulty, and there was serious discussion about sending her to school. Her volatile mother, absent for the most part during Sarah’s convalescence, nevertheless resented the presence of the child in her home as irksome, and chafed to place her where she would be in good hands and could do without maternal supervision and attention.

As a matter of fact, at the age of seven Sarah could neither read nor write, and had never heard of arithmetic!

When her mother explained that she was to go to live in a place where there were hundreds of other little girls, who were to become her playmates, Sarah was overjoyed. During the terrible two years when she could not run about like other children, Sarah had had no playmates whatever; and, during her airings in her mother’s or her aunt’s carriage, had often wistfully watched other and luckier little girls rolling hoops along the gravelled paths of the Champs Elysées, or in the fields which then fringed what is now the Boulevard de Clichy. She had been an intensely lonely child from her infancy and could scarcely contain her happiness at the thought that at last she was to be as other children, and have little friends with whom she could talk and play as an equal.

Probably the main reason for sending Sarah away at this juncture was the fact that Julie was again about to become a mother.

It may be as well to state here that Julie Bernhardt was the mother of four children including a boy who died. Sarah was the first, Jeanne the second, and Régine the third. More will be told hereafter concerning these two turbulent sisters of the actress. They both lived unfortunate lives and died still more unfortunate deaths.

A report of Sarah’s parentage that has won considerable credence was published by a weekly Paris newspaper in 1886, and re-published again as recently as April 8, 1923, by La Rampe, a Paris theatrical paper. I quote from the latter:

“Edouard Bernhardt, grandfather of Sarah Bernhardt, was a Jew. He fulfilled the functions of chief oculist to the Court of Austria. He came to St. Aubin-du-Corbier, in Brittany, and there married the Marquise de la Thieulé du Petit-Bois de la Vieuville, by whom he had four daughters and one son: Julie, Rosine, Agathe, Vitty and Edouard. The Marquise died and Edouard Bernhardt married, secondly, Madame Van Berinth, who had been governess to his children. Rosine and Julie (mother of Sarah Bernhardt) ran away to Havre, where they obtained work as saleswomen in a confectionery establishment. Their father sent for them, and they fled to London. Shortly afterwards they returned to Havre, where Julie lived as the wife of a man named Morel, a ship-builder. They had fourteen children, of whom Sarah, born at Paris, 125, Faubourg St. Honoré, on October 23, 1840, was one.”

This seems circumstantial but it is absolutely inaccurate. I give it here, together with the evidence to contravert it, because so many people believe the above to be the true story of Sarah’s birth.

The rebutting evidence consists, first, in Sarah’s own denial, which was published almost immediately after the story itself, and, secondly, in the fact that the certificate of her baptism, in which the truth was certainly given, states that she was born, not in the Faubourg St. Honoré, but in the rue de l’Ecole de Médecine—not on October 23, 1840, but on October 22, 1844; that her father was not “Monsieur Morel,” but George Bernhardt; and that her mother was not “Julie Bernhardt” but Julie Van Hard.

And, as I have said, Julie had only four children, not fourteen!

The same paper (La Rampe) says that Sarah was baptised at the age of eight years. When she was eight, Sarah was still a Jewess and at the school of which we shall shortly give an account. Sarah was baptised, under the name of Rosine, five years later, at the Grandchamps Convent, Versailles.

When she was seven, then, and five months before Jeanne was born, Sarah was taken to Madame Fressard’s school, at 18, rue Boileau, Auteuil. The building still exists, but it has been turned into a private sanatorium.

Sketch of Thérèse Meilhan (afterwards Mme. Pierre Berton) by Georges Clairin, 1881.

The journey to Auteuil, which one can now make from the rue St. Honoré in twenty minutes by underground railway or in half an hour by tramway or motor-bus, was then quite a formidable affair. Paris was left behind at the Avenue Montaigne, and from there the way lay along the banks of the smiling Seine, with only a roadside estaminet bordering what is now one of the most aristocratic streets of all Paris. It took over an hour for the coach to reach the rue Boileau, in the little village of Auteuil. Sarah, needless to say, was enchanted with the journey and with the happy prospects ahead of her.

It was quite a ceremony, the installation of Sarah in her new home. Besides Julie and Aunt Rosine, there was a General and another man, who represented Sarah’s father, then absent in Lisbon. They were very pompous and important, and inclined to exaggerate the wealth that was so evident in the rich trappings of Aunt Rosine’s coach.

After much talk and negotiation, during which the party gathered around a bottle of wine opened by Madame Fressard, Sarah was formally entered on the books of the school as a pupil.

Amongst other things Julie insisted on presenting Madame Fressard with eight large jars of cold cream, with which she gave orders that Sarah was to be massaged every morning. Another order concerned Sarah’s mass of curly hair. It was not to be cut or trimmed in any way, but to be carefully combed night and morning. And when Madame Fressard ventured a slight protest at all these injunctions, Julie only waved her hand with a large gesture, saying:

“You will be paid—her father is wealthy!”

The exact sum contributed by George Bernhardt towards Sarah’s maintenance was four thousand francs annually.

During all the conversation that attended her installation as a pupil at the Auteuil school, Sarah remained mute, too shy to say a word.

“What a stupid child!” said Aunt Rosine, who was years before she gained a very high opinion of Sarah.

“Naturally stupid, I’m afraid!” sighed her mother, languidly.

Only Madame Fressard, the stranger in the group, came to the forlorn little creature’s aid:

“Well, she has your eyes—so intelligent, madame!” she said.

And with this the party left in their flamboyant coach, each scrupulously kissing the child farewell at the gate, and each, without any doubt at all, exceedingly glad to be rid of her.

Sarah was at last at school.

CHAPTER V

In later years it was fairly well known amongst theatrical people that Sarah was subject to “stage fright.” The only occasion however on which nerves actually stopped her performance, occurred at Auteuil school, when she was eight years and three months old. Sarah told this story to me on one memorable day at Ville d’Avray, when, during a fête given by the Grand Duke Peter of Russia, we had stolen away from the crowd into Bellevue woods. I have never seen the incident referred to in print.

“I had been at the school a little more than a year,” Sarah told me, “when it was decided to give a performance of Clotilde, a play for children, which concerned a little girl’s adventures in fairyland. Stella Colas, afterwards the wife of Pierre de Corvin, was cast for the name part. Another little fair girl (whose name I have forgotten) was to play the rôle of Augustine, the partner of Clotilde. And I was cast for the part of the Queen of the Fairies.

“At the rehearsals—we rehearsed all the winter—everything went well. My part was not an important one, but it involved some pretty realistic acting in the second act, when the Queen of the Fairies dies of mortification on hearing Clotilde affirm that the fairies do not really exist. This was the first ‘death scene’ in which I ever acted.

“I wore wings, of course, and many rehearsals were necessary before the stage-manager, who was our kindergarten teacher, could get me to fall without breaking them. Finally I learned the part, and managed to do it to the entire satisfaction of everyone.

“When the great night came, we were, of course, all very nervous, myself most of all, for my mother and two aunts had written that they would be present accompanied by no less a personage than the Duc de Morny, then considered to be the power behind Napoleon the Third’s throne.

“Before the curtain went up, my knees were knocking together and I felt a wild desire to fly. I tried to run away and hide, in fact, but the teacher found me, petted me and made me promise to go on with the part.

“I had nothing to do until the end of the first act, when Clotilde and Augustine fall asleep at the foot of a great tree and dream of the fairies. My part was to descend from the tree, assisted by unseen wires, float to the middle of the stage, and then pronounce the words: ‘On demande la reine des rêves? Me voici!’ (‘They want the Queen of Dreams? Here I am!’)

“Clotilde and Augustine fell asleep, and trembling all over I floated down and advanced to the front of the stage. We had no regular footlights, and everyone in the little auditorium could be distinguished from the stage.

“Instead of pronouncing the sentence about the Queen of Dreams, I stood tongue-tied, unable to utter a syllable. Several times my mouth opened, and I tried to speak, but the words would not come. All the time I was anxiously searching the audience for familiar faces. It was only when I saw none, and realised that my mother was not present, that I managed to stutter:

“‘On d-d-dem-m-m-mande la reine d-des rêves? M-m-me voici!’

“The last word I uttered in one breathless syllable; then rushed off the stage to the accompaniment of much amused applause.

“In the wings of the tiny stage I was met by the principal of the school, who, affecting not to notice my embarrassment, complimented me warmly on my ‘success,’ and then told me that my mother and her party had not arrived. This, more than anything else, gave me the necessary courage to go through with my part.

“Even in later years when I was on the regular stage, the presence of my mother in an audience invariably made me so nervous that I could hardly play. She was ever the harshest critic I had!

“The second act proceeded fairly well, since it was chiefly a dance by the fairies, with myself in the centre, wielding a mystic sceptre. All I had to do was wave the sceptre, and the fairies would bow as it was raised and lowered. Finally came the big moment when Clotilde awakens, and says: ‘Pshaw, I was dreaming; there are no such things as fairies!’

“With these words I was supposed to stop and wave my sceptre indignantly, on which all the other fairies disappeared, leaving me alone with Clotilde and the sleeping Augustine. Clotilde advances to me and asks: ‘Who are you?’ To my reply ‘I am the Queen of the Fairies,’ she answers scornfully: ‘You are a fraud, for there are no such things as fairies.’

“When she utters these words I stagger and then, moaning and clasping my hand to my heart, sink slowly to the ground. Clotilde, agonised, asks: ‘What is the matter?’ and I reply: ‘You have killed me, for when a little girl says she doesn’t believe in the fairies, she mortally wounds their Queen.’

“We had got as far as my reply ‘I am the Queen,’ when suddenly I perceived, in the front row of the audience, six beautifully-gowned ladies and two gentlemen, who had not been there before. In trepidation I searched their faces, standing stock-still and not listening to Clotilde’s scornful reply. Yes! There was my mother, and there were my two aunts, as I had feared!

“All my stage-fright came back to me. And, instead of sinking to the ground as I was supposed to do, I burst out sobbing and ran off the stage, in the centre of which I left poor Clotilde standing, a forlorn little girl of ten. Instantly there was a storm of laughter and applause. Unable to stand it, Clotilde too ran off the stage, and the curtain was hastily rung down.

“Soon I was surrounded with teachers and elder girls, some abusing me, others begging me to finish the play. But it was useless. I could act no more and the play, for lack of an understudy, was over. I was hustled, a weeping and very bedraggled-looking fairy, to the dormitory, where I was left alone with my thoughts.

“I would have given worlds to have been left alone for the remainder of the day! But it was not to be, for scarcely fifteen minutes passed before the door opened and my mother appeared, followed by my aunts and their whole party!

“I could have prayed for the floor to open and swallow me! I hid my head in the bedclothes, like an ostrich, and affected not to hear the words addressed to me. Finally I felt firm hands on my shoulders and I was dragged forth, weeping violently.

“If mother had only taken me in her arms and kissed and comforted me! I was only a tiny child, not yet nine years old and still constitutionally weak, with high-strung nerves. But she stood there holding me and looking coldly into my tear-filled eyes.

“‘And to think,’ she said icily, ‘that this is a child of mine!’

“‘One would never think it,’ said Aunt Rosine, sternly.

“All were hard, unsympathetic, seeming not to realise that they were bullying a child whose nerves were at the breaking point and who was in reality almost dead from exhaustion. I broke into another storm of sobs and, kicking myself free from my mother, ran to the bed and threw myself upon it in despair. With some further unkindly remarks from my mother and aunts, the party finally left, but as he reached the door the Duc de Morny, the last to go out, turned and retraced the few steps to my bed.

“‘Never mind, my little one,’ he whispered. ‘You will show them all how to act one of these days, won’t you?’

“His comforting words, however, had come too late. I had sobbed myself into a fever and the next morning the doctor had to be called. For several days I was kept in bed and forbidden to see the other girls. Through these long four days I kept thinking constantly of my mother. Why had she been so cruel, so cold to her daughter? I knew that another child had been born the year before, and with childish intuition I hit upon the right answer. Mother loved the baby more than she loved me—if, indeed, she loved me at all. I was inconsolable at the thought. How lonely a vista the coming years opened to my immature imagination! Scores of times I sobbed out loud: ‘I would rather be dead! I would rather be dead!’

“Alas! this was not the last time that my mother’s chilly behaviour towards me threw me into a paroxysm of misery resulting in illness. I never grew callous to her disapproval of me; her cutting criticisms had always the power to wound me to the heart. And yet I loved her! More, I adored her! Poor, lonely, friendless child that I was and had ever been, my starved heart cried out to the one human being whose love I had the right to claim, and who responded to my caresses sometimes almost as if I had been a stranger.”

This was the only occasion on which Sarah Bernhardt ever bewailed to me or to anyone else, her mother’s lack of affection for her. She was scrupulously loyal to both her parents, and on the rare occasions when she mentioned them, it was always in terms of genuine love and respect.

During her two years in Auteuil, Sarah’s mother went to see her only three times, and her father only once. Her father’s visit took place at the end of the first year, in December 1851. It was the first time, to her recollection, that Sarah had ever seen him. They met in the head-mistress’s office, and the occasion must have been replete with drama.

“I was called from study one afternoon about three o’clock,” said Sarah, “and taken to Mme. Fressard’s bureau. I found her waiting for me at the door with a peculiar expression on her face, and in the arm-chair near the fireplace I saw a very well-dressed man of about thirty, with a waxed moustache.

“‘Ma chérie,’ said Madame Fressard, ‘here is your father come to see you.’

“Mon père! So this was the mysterious personage whose wish and order governed my life; this the parent of whom my mother was apparently so much in fear, and yet whom she seldom saw; this the stranger who was responsible for my being!

“I advanced shyly and gave my face to be kissed, an operation which my father performed twice, on both sides, his moustache giving me a prickly sensation on my cheeks.

“‘Why, she is growing into quite a little beauty!’ he said to Madame Fressard, holding me so that he could look at me closely. Then he asked me many questions: Was I happy? Was I well? Had I playmates? What had I learned? Could I read and write?—and spell?—and do sums?

“The interrogation lasted ten minutes and then my father took his tall grey hat and gloves, and prepared to leave.

“‘We will leave her with you for a little while longer, madame,’ he said to Madame Fressard, while I listened with all my ears.

“‘I am going for a long journey and do not expect to return for eight or ten months. When I come back we will consider what is best to be done.’

“Kissing me again, he took his departure and Madame Fressard drew me to her.

“‘I should think you would love your father very, very much,’ she said. ‘He is such a handsome man!’

“‘How can I love him?’ I replied wonderingly. ‘I have never seen him before.’”

A year later Bernhardt had not returned from South America, but he sent Julie a letter, in which he urged that Sarah should be taken from Madame Fressard’s preparatory school and sent to a convent; he suggested Grandchamps Convent, at Versailles. He had written to the Superior, he said, explaining the circumstances, and the latter had replied that if little Sarah was sponsored by one other gentleman, preferably one in Paris, the matter could be arranged. Julie at once asked the Duc de Morny, who agreed to sponsor the child.

In the same letter Bernhardt said that he had made his will, in which he left 20,000 francs to Sarah, providing she had married before the age of twenty-one.

“I do not intend my daughter,” he wrote coldly, “to follow the example of her mother.”

Until she was twenty-one the income from the 20,000 francs was to pay for Sarah’s schooling. Her mother was to pay for her clothes.

Although the letter said that Bernhardt did not expect to return to France for several months, he actually caught the next boat to that which carried his letter, and arrived in Paris just after Sarah had been withdrawn from the school at Auteuil.

This had not been effected without a storm of protest on Sarah’s part. The two years had passed happily at Madame Fressard’s, and she feared the future, surrounded by strange and cold relatives.

Julie had gone to London, and it was Aunt Rosine who went to the school to fetch the child.

Sarah delighted to tell of this departure from the school.

“I hated to leave,” she told me, “and it was two hours before they could succeed in dressing me. Once this was accomplished, I flew at Tante Rosine like a young fury, and spoiled all her elaborate coiffure.

“She was furious and, bundling me into her coach, commanded me to keep silent. But I would not, and throughout the journey in the jolting carriage from Auteuil to 6, rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, where my aunt and my mother owned a joint flat, I tore at her hair and kicked at her legs, and otherwise performed like the disgraceful young ragamuffin I really was.

“I was no better on our arrival at the flat, and kept the whole household in an uproar until I heard the sudden announcement that my father had arrived! Then I collapsed and had to be carried to bed, where I lost consciousness for three hours. When I awoke, it was to find a doctor and nurse installed and an array of medicine bottles on the table. I felt utterly exhausted and I heard Doctor Monod, the great physician who had been called by the Duc de Morny, tell my father that I was in an extremely delicate condition and that my recovery depended upon my being kept absolutely quiet. ‘Above all,’ said he, ‘she is not to be “crossed.”’”

Sarah’s father often visited her during her three days’ convalescence from the fever brought on by a fit of temper, and on two occasions he brought with him Rossini, who lived in the same street and was an intimate friend.

Julie had been informed of Sarah’s illness, but was herself ill at Haarlem, in Holland, where she had just arrived from London. It was a fortnight before she reached Paris, and in the meantime Sarah stayed at Neuilly, in the home of another and married aunt whose husband afterwards became a monk.

When Julie finally arrived, a dinner was arranged to take place the night before Sarah was taken to the Convent. Edouard Bernhardt was present. This was the last time Sarah saw her father, for he died shortly afterwards in Italy.

Sarah’s life at the Convent has been more or less faithfully described in her own Memoirs, and I shall not dilate on it here. She was expelled three times—the last time for good. She was baptised at the age of twelve under the name of Rosine, and from then on dated her determination to become a nun. For two years she was fanatical on the subject of religion, but this did not prevent her fits of temper from breaking out and disturbing the whole school.

“All my time at the Convent I was haunted by the desire to be a nun,” she said to me once. “The beautiful life of the sisters who taught us at Grandchamps, their almost unearthly purity, their tranquil tempers, all made a tremendous impression on me. I dearly desired to take the vows and, had it been left to me, Sarah Bernhardt would have become Sister Rosine. But I doubt whether I would have remained a nun for life!

“I was never genuinely religious. It was the glamour and mystery and, above all, the tranquillity surrounding the life of a cloistered nun that attracted me. I should have run away from the Convent before many weeks.”

Young Sarah was tremendously high-spirited and constantly in trouble. The nuns were always sending despairing reports to her mother.

Once, during a presentation of prizes, she pretended to faint and acted the part so realistically that even the Superior was deceived and believed her pupil to be dead. It gave her such a shock that the poor lady was ill for days. Sarah was sent to her bedroom in disgrace.

“I spent the time reading forbidden books and eating bonbons that the concierge had smuggled in to me,” she said, in telling me the story.

On another occasion she organised a flight from the Convent. In the dead of night she and six other girls of a similarly adventurous disposition climbed down torn and knotted sheets from their dormitory windows to the ground. Clambering over the high wall surrounding the Convent grounds, they took to their heels and were caught only at noon the next day, when in the act of throwing stones at horses of the Royal Dragoons.

For this exploit she was expelled, but was allowed to return on her promise never to give trouble again.

Scarcely two months afterwards, however, she was discovered by the mother-superior on top of the Convent wall, imitating the Bishop of Versailles, whom the day before she had seen conducting the Burial Service at a graveside. Expelled again!

On still another occasion she was caught flirting with a young soldier, who had tossed his cap over the wall. When the nuns tried to catch her, she climbed the wall and stayed there for hours, until long after dark. On this occasion she caught a chill which nearly resulted in her death, and when she had recovered she left the Convent for good.

CHAPTER VI

At the age of fifteen Sarah was a thin, weedy, shock-headed girl, about five feet tall, but undeveloped. Her complexion was pale and dark rings under her eyes told the story of unconquered anæmia. She had a chronic cough that would shake her thin body to paroxysms. She was extremely subject to colds and chills, and the slightest indisposition would send her to bed with fever. Doctors shook their heads over her and predicted that she would die of consumption before reaching the age of twenty.

Her anæmia gave to her face a species of sombre beauty which was enlivened by the extraordinary play of expression in her eyes as she talked. Her features reflected every change of mood, and her moods were many. Judged by her face alone, she was not so much beautiful as striking. Character fairly leapt at one when she spoke.

Her character was a curious composite of morbidity, affection, talent and wilfulness. Her mother and her governess, Mlle. de Brabender, a probationer nun, were often reduced to despair by her temper, which seemed to grow worse as she became older. At other times, but more rarely, she was tractable to the point of docility.

Sarah’s first visit to the theatre was to the Opéra-Comique. This great event occurred when she was slowly recovering from the illness which followed her expulsion from the Convent at Grandchamps. One day she was at her music lesson with Mlle. Clarisse, when her mother’s maid came to say that her presence was desired in the salon. There she found her mother, the Duc de Morny, and her younger sister Jeanne, who was never far from her mother’s side when the latter was in Paris.

Putting his hand on her curly head the Duke said:

“We have a great surprise for you.”

“A wonderful surprise,” added her mother.

Sarah clapped her hands excitedly. “I know—I know! You are going to let me enter the Convent—I am to be a nun!”

She was overwhelmed with joy; never doubted but that her fondest dream was to be made true.

“What is this?” demanded the Duke in amazement. “Our beautiful little Sarah wants to be a nun? And why do you wish to condemn yourself to that living death, may I ask?”