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.