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?”
Living death! To the child, whose memories of the Convent were so
recent, the life of a nun was a living joy--a joy of service, sacrifice
and peace. To her restless, turbulent, almost exotic temperament
the thought of the calm, well-ordered existence of the tranquil
_religieuses_ was a beautiful one, a sacred memory. She could not bear
the harsh laughter with which her mother greeted the suggestion.
“Expelled from a convent and wants to be a nun!” said Julie,
scornfully. She could never bring herself to believe that this
amazingly complex creature was her own child.
“Hush!” commanded the Duke, frowning. “Now, my little one, my question
is not answered. Why do you wish to be a nun?”
Sarah looked fearlessly at her mother’s protector.
“The doctors say I am soon to die--I have heard them talk,” she said.
“I would like to die with my soul dedicated to God.”
To Julie, who was still a Jewess, this was cause for further laughter;
but the Duke, a man of much sentiment and some honour, was much
affected.
“Nonsense!” he said. “You are not going to die for many years! The
doctors are fools! We shall discharge them for idle talking.... No, my
little one, the great surprise is not what you thought. We are going to
take you to the Opéra-Comique to see a play.”
Instead of the stammered thanks he expected, Sarah began to cry.
“I do not want to go to the Opéra-Comique!” she cried, stamping her
foot. “I won’t go! Mother Saint-Sophie (the superior at the Convent)
said that the theatre was wicked. I do not want to be wicked: I want to
be a nun!”
Threats and persuasion were both necessary before Sarah consented to
don the new gown her mother had purchased for her and accompany her
parent and the Duke to the latter’s box at the Opéra-Comique.
This theatre was then in the Place du Chatelet, and little did the
child dream, as she entered it, that twenty-five years later she
herself would lease it from the city and call it the “Théâtre Sarah
Bernhardt”--which is its name to-day. Thus, the last theatre in which
she acted was also that in which she saw her first play.
Sarah fell an immediate victim to the theatre. The piece she saw that
night--Sarah herself did not remember its name--held her enthralled.
It was necessary for her companions to drag her away after the curtain
had fallen on the last act.
She had been transported to a new world, an unreal sphere of delight.
For days, for weeks thereafter she spoke of little else. She besieged
her mother with demands to be taken to the theatre again. The latter,
however, was too wrapped up in her own pleasure-loving life to take
much heed in the desires of her wilful daughter.
One day Sarah went off to the art school, where she was learning to
paint--her ambition to become a nun was almost forgotten now, and
she would spend feverish hours in preparation for the career she was
convinced was ahead of her as a great portrait-painter--and did not
return until the next morning.
All that night searchers hunted throughout the city for the truant;
the police were informed and it was even suggested that the Seine
should be dragged, for it was remembered that to come home from the art
school, which it was ascertained she had left at the usual hour, it was
necessary for her to cross the Pont Neuf.
At nine o’clock the next morning a tired, sleepy and very dirty Sarah
returned to her mother’s flat and, in reply to a storm of questions and
reproaches from her almost frantic mother, explained that she had spent
the night in the Opéra-Comique.
She had gone there direct from her art school and had succeeded
in entering the theatre unobserved. Hiding under a seat in one of
the galleries, she had waited until the play began and had then
appropriated a chair. After the play, seized with panic, she was afraid
to go out with the rest of the audience and had hidden herself again,
only leaving when the doors were opened to the cleaners in the morning.
After that the Duke gave her regular tickets for the theatre, and she
saw many plays. Frequently she would visit the same theatre a dozen
times, learn several of the parts by heart and surprise her friends by
reciting them.
It was at this period of her life that Sarah began to have friends of
the opposite sex, but she assured me that she loved none of them.
“I had no foolishness of that kind in my head!” she told me on one
occasion. “My mother’s house was always full of men, and the more I saw
of them the less I liked them.
“I was not a very companionable child. I had few girl friends and fewer
male acquaintances, but these latter were assiduous in their attempts
to make me like them.
“The first man who asked me to marry him was a wealthy tanner’s son,
a young fellow of twenty who was earning forty francs a week in his
father’s establishment, but who expected to be rich one day.
“His father used to frequent my mother’s house and one day he brought
his son with him. I was sent for to complete the party and, though I
was haughty and kept the young fellow at a distance, I could see that I
had made a conquest.
“He came again and again, and would waylay me on my journey to and from
the art school, insisting on carrying my books. I did not dislike him,
for he was a handsome, earnest young man, but neither did I like him
particularly; and when he capped his attentions by asking me to marry
him I laughed in his face. He went away vowing revenge.
“That night my mother came into my bedroom and asked me whether the
tanner had not proposed that day.
“‘Yes, mother,’ I said.
“‘And you accepted him?’
“I gave her a look of horror. ‘Accept him?’ I cried. ‘But no, of course
I did not accept him! I do not love him--that is one reason----’
“‘It is a poor reason,’ said my mother angrily. ‘Do you suppose I wish
you on my hands for ever? Are you never going to marry? Your sisters
are growing up and soon they will marry and you will be left, an ugly
_vieille fille_! Love always comes after marriage!’
“‘I do not care,’ I persisted, ‘I will not marry your tanner! He has
large ears and his teeth are bad and he cannot talk. I will not marry
him, and if he comes here again I shall slap his face!’
“My mother was angrier than I had ever seen her. ‘Very well, then, you
shall do as you like! I wash my hands of you!’ she exclaimed, and left
me.
“I burst into a storm of tears and cried half the night. What a lonely
child I was! My only friends were Madame Guérard, who was under the
domination of my mother, and Mlle. de Brabender, a timid soul, who
would fondle and talk to me affectionately when we were alone, but who
was afraid to open her mouth in the presence of my lovely mother.”
The tanners--father and son--ceased to frequent the Van Hard house, and
for a long while Julie did not speak to her daughter except formally.
To make up for it, she was tremendously and ostentatiously affectionate
with her two other daughters, Jeanne and Régine, who had been born
four years previously.
Régine had a childhood somewhat similar to that of Sarah; that is to
say, she was bundled from here to there, never nursed by her mother,
alternately the recipient of cuffs and kisses, and from the age of
three left pretty much to her own sweet devices. It is not to be
wondered at that she grew into a perfect terror of a child.
At the time of which we are writing now, Régine was forbidden the
reception rooms of the house, and spent most of her time in Sarah’s
room. Sarah became her nurse and teacher, and this relationship
continued until, fourteen years later, Régine died.
Julie Van Hard had become a fashionable personage in Paris, owing to
her relationship with the Duc de Morny, who was then one of the most
powerful men in France. The Duke kept her plentifully supplied with
money, and her gowns were the rage of Paris.
Beautiful, of commanding stature, her glossy reddish-gold hair without
a streak of grey in it, Julie was an idol to be worshipped by the
youthful _dilettantes_ of the gay city. No reception, no first night at
a theatre, was complete without the presence of Julie Van Hard.
Dressmakers besieged her to wear their gowns for nothing, in return for
the advertisement she gave them. It was Julie Van Hard, mother of Sarah
Bernhardt, who launched the famous Second Empire style of tightly-wound
sleeves, with lace cuffs, square _décolleté_ and draped gowns with long
trains. She was a great coquette, and almost certainly the Duc de Morny
was not the only recipient of her favours.
Julie Van Hard’s home was spacious, and was invariably filled with
visitors. There was a dinner or an entertainment of some kind every
night. Gathered in the two gorgeously-decorated salons one would see
such people as Sarah’s two aunts, Rosine Berendt and Henriette Faure;
Paul Régis, who stood as her godfather at Sarah’s baptism; General
Polhés, an old friend of Julie’s and godfather of Régine; Madame de
Guérard, Count de Larry, Duc de Morny, Count de Castelnau, Albert
Prudhomme, Viscomte de Noué, Comte de Larsan, Comte de Charaix, General
de la Thurmelière, Augustus Lévy the playwright, Vicomte de Gueyneveau,
and many others.
Sarah seldom appeared at the parties in which these people figured.
Their activities did not interest her. She had refused to continue with
her piano studies, to the great disappointment of her mother, who was
an accomplished pianiste.
“I have always hated the piano!” Sarah told me once in 1890. “I think
it is because Mlle. Clarisse, my teacher, used to rap me on the fingers
with a little cane she carried to mark the tempo. Whenever I hit a
false note, down would come the cane, and then I would fly into a fury,
charge the poor lady like a small tigress and try to pull her hair out.
She did not remain to teach me very long and she was never replaced!”
The next candidate to Sarah’s hand was a worthy glove-maker, named
Trudeau. He was wealthy, as wealth was counted then, and while not
precisely the son-in-law Julie would have wished, he would doubtless
have been welcome enough in the family had he succeeded in breaking
down the barriers Sarah had erected before her heart.
Sarah’s chief objection to Trudeau was that he was too fat. Then,
again, he was smooth-shaven, and it was accounted very ugly in those
days not to have a moustache. Clean-shaven men, on entering a theatre,
would often receive a jeering reception from the audience. The hirsute
fashion of that period was long side-whiskers, a short, double-pointed
beard, and a pointed, waxed moustache.
Julie did not urge her daughter to marry Trudeau. She probably knew
that any such effort would have been doomed to failure from the start.
Trudeau, however, laid determined siege to the young girl for several
months, during which he sent her, among other expensive gifts, a brooch
of the sort that was afterwards known as a “la Vallière.” This brooch
was among those recently sold by auction in Paris.
To all his many proposals of marriage, however, Sarah turned a deaf
ear. She would taunt him about his figure, which was short and broad,
and above all she would jeer at his lack of a moustache.
“Never will I marry a man who cannot grow hair on his face!” she once
declared.
He persisted, until one day Sarah called him a “fat old pig” and threw
the contents of a glass of champagne in his face. Then he accepted his
_congé_, and went out of Sarah’s life for ever.
Following Trudeau came a chemist, who had a shop at the corner of the
Boulevard and the rue de la Michodière. He had been captivated by
the red-haired long-legged youngster who used to come to him to have
prescriptions filled. I do not recall the name of this man, but I know
that when Sarah refused him he consoled himself less than a month later
by marrying a widow. Years later Sarah broke a parasol over his
head, when he refused to promise not to supply her sister Jeanne with
morphine.
[Illustration: SARAH BERNHARDT.
One of the best of the earliest pictures.]
After that a succession of young men unsuccessfully petitioned for her
hand. In a space of two years she had nearly a dozen proposals, all of
which she refused with equal disdain. She was becoming a noteworthy
character in Paris herself, but she, the child, was of course eclipsed
by the brilliant beauty of her mother.
These suitors came from all classes and conditions of society. At least
one--the Vicomte de Larsan, a young fop whose father was a frequenter
of Julie’s house--was of noble birth and heir to a considerable
fortune. He was twenty-two years of age, and when he asked her to marry
him, Sarah slapped his face.
I had many long talks with Sarah about these early romantic episodes.
She loved to repeat reminiscences of her girlhood and she had an
astounding memory.
As far back as 1892, she told me that in her life she had received more
than a thousand proposals of marriage, and that she could remember the
name and the date of every one of them!
I was curious about these thousand proposals of marriage, and often
tried to get her to give me the names. But she said that to do so might
cause harm to some of the men concerned, many of whom were then happily
married, and had children. She told me of many episodes, however, in
which such secrecy was not necessary, and these episodes will be found
in detail later in this book.
“In my teens I cared nothing for men--they disgusted me!” she said. “I
was called a great little beauty, and men used to kneel at my feet and
swear that they would jump in the Seine if I refused them. I invariably
told them to go and do so!
“I was indifferent to all men. My mother’s flat at 22, rue de la
Michodière, which had been beautifully furnished by the Duc de Morny,
was full of men visitors from early afternoon until late at night. I
would keep out of their way as much as possible, and once I ran away
for three days, because one of my mother’s admirers persisted in making
revolting proposals to me.
“Finally I returned one day from the painting school and found my
mother and the servant out and P---- installed in the salon. Before I
could escape, he had seized me and covered me with kisses. They were
the first love-kisses I had ever received, and I was not to give one
for years afterwards.
“I struggled violently, bit him on the chin and scratched his face
frightfully, but I was a weak child and he would have overpowered me
eventually had not the door opened and my mother, followed by the Duc
de Morny, come in. Neighbours had heard my screams and were congregated
outside the door. My mother was white with passion.
“The Duke challenged P---- to a duel in secret, his rank preventing
him from making the affair a public one. The duel was never fought,
however, for P---- left that night for his home near Arcachon, and a
few months later I heard he had been killed in a coaching accident near
Tours.
“The Vicomte de Larsan was the most persistent suitor, after P----, and
he was only a boy. I could not bear the sight of him, with his rouged
cheeks, his scented hands, his powdered hair and his shirts covered
with expensive lace. He used to wait outside the house for hours until
I came out, and would make fervent declarations of love in the street.
I grew to hate him, and I told him so!
“But at that time I hated nearly all men, except the Duc de Morny. That
nobleman was my mother’s most faithful protector, and he gave her large
sums, which helped to pay for my education and my art lessons. He used
to predict a great future for me. Not only did he stand sponsor for
me for the Versailles convent but also procured my entrance into the
Conservatoire.
“Many people in those days thought that I was the Duke’s natural
daughter, and the legend has persisted. It was not true, though, for
when I was born my mother was in exceedingly humble circumstances, and
she did not meet the Duke--a meeting which changed her fortunes--until
several years later.”