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.
[Illustration: 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.