The first press notice that Sarah Bernhardt ever received was published
in the _Mercure de Paris_ in October 1860, when she was sixteen years
old. Curiously enough it did not concern her histrionic talent--then
just beginning to develop--but related to a painting entitled “Winter
in the Champs Elysées,” with which Sarah had won the first prize at the
Colombier Art School in the Rue de Vaugirard.
Sarah gave me the clipping to copy--it was among her most prized
possessions--and, translated, it reads as follows:
“Among the remarkable candidates for admission to the Beaux Arts
should be mentioned a young Parisienne of sixteen years, named
Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt, who is a pupil at Mlle. Gaucher’s
class in the Colombier School. Mlle. Bernhardt exhibits an
extraordinary talent for one so young and her picture “Winter in
the Champs Elysées,” with which she has won the first prize for her
class, is distinguished for its technical perfection. Rarely have
we had the pleasure of welcoming into the Beaux Arts a young artist
of similar promise, and there can be no doubt that very soon Mlle.
Bernhardt will be classed as one of our greatest painters and thus
win glory for herself and her country.”
The painting in question was bought by an American friend of Sarah’s
some forty years later. I do not know how much was paid, but other
early paintings of hers, which have sold privately during the past
twenty years, have brought very large prices indeed.
My mention of this first press criticism of Sarah’s work brings to mind
the day she brought me, a little girl, into the library at her house
11, Boulevard Malsherbes, and showed me four fat volumes each filled
with newspaper clippings, and another one only just begun. On a chair
was stacked a collection of envelopes each dated, containing other
clippings, and these Sarah showed me how to paste in the book. It was a
great honour for me.
Later in the afternoon Maurice Bernhardt, then a small boy, came in and
helped me, but I remember that he was more of a nuisance than a help,
and he ended by tipping over the paste-pot and making a mess which I
had to clean up.
When she died Sarah possessed many of these fat volumes of
press-clippings, from every country in the world. It was said that if
all the newspaper notices she received during her career could have
been placed end to end, they would have reached around the world, and
that if all the photographs printed of her could have been stacked in a
pile, they would have reached higher than the Eiffel Tower.
Somebody even calculated once that the name Sarah Bernhardt alone
had been printed so often in newspapers and magazines, and on bills,
programmes and the like, that the letters used would bridge the
Atlantic, while the ink would be sufficient to supply the needs of _The
Times_ for two months!
I cannot vouch for this, but there can be no doubt whatever that,
if the number of times one’s name is printed is a criterion, Sarah
Bernhardt was by far the most famous person who has ever lived. For
nearly sixty years never a day went by without the words “Sarah
Bernhardt” being printed somewhere or other. When she returned from her
American tour in 1898, the press-clippings she brought back with her
filled a large trunk.
The interesting point in all this is that only a very few writers
concerned themselves with her painting and sculpture. Out of all the
millions of articles written about her, a bare sixty or seventy concern
her capabilities outside the theatre.
If little was known of Sarah the artist, still less was known of Sarah
the woman. That is why this book is written.
Thousands of people who loved her as an actress never knew that she
had been married! Those who knew that she was a Jewess born were few
indeed. Nothing was known of her intimate home life, of her _affaires
du cœur_, of her attempts at authorship, of the many plays she either
wrote or revised.
In all the multitudinous clippings in that wonderful collection of
hers, how many reveal the fact that Sarah Bernhardt was a certificated
nurse? How many persons know that she once studied medicine and was
highly proficient in anatomy? How many know that she was a vegetarian,
and often said that her long life was due to her horror of meat? How
many know that, for many long years, until infirmity intervened, Sarah
Bernhardt, the Jewess born, was a practising Catholic, seldom missing
her Sunday attendance at Mass?
Is it not extraordinary that so little should _really_ have been known
of the most famous woman in the world? Is it not amazing that Sarah
was able to conceal her home life under the glorious camouflage of her
stage career?
Yet, looking back into history, how little is known of the great men
and women who decorate its pages!
We know where Jean d’Arc was born; we know she saved the French
armies from defeat; but never has it been written where she went to
school, and little or nothing is known of her family, of the mother
who produced her, of the father who brought her up a heroine. Oliver
Cromwell had a wife, yet what do we know of her? George Washington was
one of the greatest warriors of his day, yet we know little of the
private life of the Father of America.
I have always felt this lack of personal knowledge of our own great
ones. Only recently have biographers realised the true scope of their
task. Until the intimate story of Victor Hugo was published, some few
years ago, how little we knew of the man who wrote three times as many
words as there are in the Holy Bible!
This is somewhat of a digression, but one justified perhaps by the
considerations involved. If the great and successful deeds of men of
genius make entrancing reading, how much more absorbing can be the tale
of their spiritual struggles and “mental fights”?
And with her graduation from the art school--she was entitled to
enter the Beaux Arts but never did--the real struggles of the lonely,
temperamental child who was Sarah Bernhardt began. Though she did not
know it, a war of impulses was going on within her soul.
There was her great, her undoubted talent for painting and sculpture,
which her teachers were convinced would soon make her a great
personage. There was her budding dramatic talent which she was only
beginning to suspect. There was her fundamental morbidity, that would
plunge her into moods during which she dreamed of and longed for
death. There was the craving of her turbulent nature for the peace and
tranquillity investing the life of a cloistered nun. There was her
inherited unmorality--I know of no other word with which to describe
it--which was for ever tugging at her and endeavouring to drag her
down into the free-and-easy existence led by her mother. There was her
maiden heart, starving for affection. There was her delicate health,
which made prolonged effort impossible. And lastly there was her iron
will, inherited probably from her father.
A phrase in one of the pathetic writings of Marie Bashkirtseff comes to
my mind: “At the age of fourteen I was the only person remaining in the
world; for it was a world of my own that could be penetrated only by
understanding, and no one, not even my mother, understood.”
How could the frivolous nature of Julie Van Hard have comprehended the
deep waters that ran within the soul of her unwanted child?
Julie would be enormously vexed at Sarah’s seeming dullness. When she
had said something particularly witty--and Julie was witty according to
the humorous standards of the period--and Sarah did not smile, Julie
would cry: “Oh, you stupid child! To think that you are mine...!”
Not even Sarah’s achievements in the school of painting could convince
Julie that she had not given birth to a child of inferior mentality.
For what success Sarah had with her pictures, Julie took credit to
herself.
She was exasperated by Sarah’s attitude towards the life she herself
loved so well. Julie would remain for hours at table, surrounded by
wits and half-wits, dandies and hangers-on at court, proud in the
assumption that she was an uncrowned queen. At such parties Sarah would
sit speechless, unable or unwilling to join in the coarse sallies of
her mother’s guests. Her mother used constantly to refer to her in
the presence of others as “That stupid child,” or “That queer little
creature.”
When she had an exceptionally important personage to entertain, Julie
would forbid Sarah to show herself, fearful that her daughter’s
“stupidity” would injure her own chances.
As constantly as she blamed Sarah, she praised and lavished affection
on Jeanne, her “little Jeannot.” Jeanne seemed to take naturally after
her mother in all things, and when she grew older she even surpassed
her mother by the frivolous way in which she lived.
The sad story of Jeanne will be told later, but it may be said that she
had none of Sarah’s vast intelligence, none of her good taste, none of
her tremendous capacity for affection. Jeanne was without talent--a
pretty but vapid shell. Her father was not, of course, Edouard
Bernhardt.
Régine, on the other hand, took after Sarah, who practically brought
her up. But Régine had Sarah’s temper and wild, erratic temperament
without Sarah’s talent and Sarah’s stubborn will. Where Sarah was firm
and unyielding, Régine was merely obstinate. Where Sarah was clever,
Régine was only “smart.” She was a “pocket edition of Sarah,” as her
mother once remarked, without Sarah’s depth of character.
Two months after Sarah attained her sixteenth birthday, her mother
moved to No. 265, rue St. Honoré, not far from the Théâtre
Français--better known as the Comédie Française--and Sarah delighted in
loitering about the stage entrance and making friends with the actors
and actresses who passed in and out.
Sometimes she passed whole afternoons and evenings thus employed.
Occasionally she would run errands for her idols, to be recompensed by
a free ticket to the balcony. On one never-to-be-forgotten occasion
Jules Bondy, one of the actors, took the eager little red-head into the
theatre itself and installed her on a case in the wings, from which
she could see the play without herself being seen. It was Molière’s
_Le Médecin Malgré Lui_, and from that time dated Sarah’s love for
the works of the actor-playwright to whom the Comédie Française is
dedicated.
In later years Sarah played Molière several times, but she made no
notable success in this author’s works.
Sarah always longed to be a comédienne; she might have been a great
one, in fact, but for her greater gifts for tragedy, which prevented
managers from risking her appearance in lighter drama. Great
comédiennes of merit are less rare than great tragediennes. In fact, I
doubt whether there is living to-day an actress who will ever be called
Sarah Bernhardt’s equal in tragedy.
Shortly after the household moved, Sarah fell down the stairs and
broke her leg. An infection developed and it was two months before
she was able to walk. When she finally recovered she was thinner than
ever--a veritable skeleton. Her face maintained its eerie beauty, the
large blue eyes retained their occasional fire, but the flush of fever
relieved her habitual pallor and beneath her neck her body was little
more than a bag of bones.
She ceased wearing short dresses and took to long ones, for very shame
of her thin limbs. She wore thick clothes and corsets to pad herself
out. She grew introspective, spending long hours alone or playing
silently with her infant sister Régine, or reading books. Once Mlle.
de Brabender discovered her on her knees and, on inquiry, obtained the
confession that she had been praying steadily for nearly three hours.
The religious habit again grew on her. The subjects for her brush were
mostly saints, surrounded with the conventional halo. She hung her room
with religious pictures, some done by herself and some bought cheaply
at a shop near the Church of St. Germain l’Auxerrois. Over her bed was
a crucifix, modelled by herself from wax.
She was confirmed at the age of sixteen years and five months, and wore
the virginal white for days afterwards--until it grew so dirty, indeed,
that her exasperated mother made her throw it away.
A priest had given her a rosary that had been dipped in the holy waters
of Lourdes, and this she wore continually. In the quarter she became
known as “_la petite religieuse_.” Doctors shook their heads, and
predicted that she was falling into a decline, from which she would
never recover. Her suitors fell off, one by one, until only a retired
miller, Jacques Boujon, a man of fifty, remained.
To English readers it may seem incredible that a girl of sixteen should
have had actual suitors, and among them men of position and wealth.
This was nevertheless common in France in the middle of the last
century, and it is by no means rare in the France of to-day. Added to
this was Julie Van Hard’s intense desire to rid herself, once and for
all, of this strange child she had brought into being, whose sombre
presence in her house of gaiety seemed to be a perpetual mockery.
One day Sarah was visited in her bedroom, where she was studying, by
her mother and Mlle. de Brabender.
“I want you to put on this new dress I have bought you, and then come
down to the salon. There is something particularly important we have to
say to you,” said Julie.
Sarah shivered. There seemed something extraordinarily portentous in
her mother’s manner. Who were “_we_”? The child felt, as she told me
years later, that that moment represented a cross-roads in her life.
Overwhelmed with a dread she could not define, Sarah put her new dress
on with trembling fingers and descended to the salon. There she found
quite a company awaiting her. Foremost in the party was the Duc de
Morny. Next to him was her mother. Across the table was Jean Meyedieu,
her father’s notary-public. Next to him was Aunt Rosine. Madame
Guérard, wearing an anxious look, occupied a seat near the fireplace.
Mlle. de Brabender, accompanied by Jeanne, followed Sarah in.
The door was closed. Then Julie turned to her daughter. “Some months
ago,” she said, “you refused to consider a proposal of marriage from an
honorable gentleman.”
Sarah remained mute.
“To-day another honorable gentleman asks you to marry him.”
Storm signals flashed from the girl’s eyes. “I will marry no one except
God!” she declared. “I wish to return to the Convent!”
“To enter a convent,” put in Meyedieu, “one must have money, or else be
a servant. You have not a sou!”
“I have the money my father left me!”
“No, you have not! You have only the interest until you are twenty-one.
If, at that age, you have not married, the terms of your father’s will
stipulate that you shall lose the principal.”
The Duc de Morny intervened.
“Do you think that you are right, dear, in thus going against the
wishes of your mother?”
Sarah began to sob. “My mother is not married, yet she wants me to be
a wife! My mother is a Jewess, and she does not want her daughter to
become a nun!”
“Leave the room!” ordered Julie, angrily.
Thus ended the second family council over the future of Sarah, and the
problem was not yet solved.
After this Sarah’s existence in her mother’s house became a torment.
She seldom saw her parent; and when she did, the latter hardly looked
at her. She took her meals with Régine and Mlle. de Brabender in the
nursery. She abandoned art, and spent her days looking after her baby
sister in the Champs Elysées and on the _quais_ of the Seine.
She still attended the theatre as often as she could, and became a
faithful devotee of the Comédie. Often she would venture as far afield
as the Châtelet, or the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, to witness plays at
the Gymnase.
One evening she returned, after a solitary evening at the theatre and,
finding the salon empty, began to recite one of the parts she had
seen. She had seen the play so often that the rôle of the heroine was
practically graven on her memory. Believing herself entirely alone,
she went right through with the piece, finishing with a dramatic
flourish at the place where the heroine--I forget the play--was
supposed to stab herself to death.
There was a hearty “Bravo, bravo!” and the Duc de Morny rose from a
chair in which he had been sitting behind a screen.
The Duke went out and called to Julie and Rosine, and, when the two
sisters entered, he asked the child to play the part again. At first
bashful, Sarah eventually plucked up courage and finally did as she was
asked. The Duke was much affected.
“That memory and that voice must not be lost!” he cried. “Sarah shall
enter the Conservatoire!”
“She has no sense, but she is not bad at reciting,” agreed Julie,
scenting a happy compromise.
The Conservatoire? Sarah began to worry. What was this new horror to
which they were so easily condemning her?
“What is it, the Conservatoire?” she asked, hesitating.
“It is a school, my dear,” said the Duke; “a school for great
actresses.”
“To the Conservatoire, by all means!” cried Aunt Rosine. “She is too
stupid to be a good actress, but it will keep her out of mischief!”
The Duke was quite excited.
“We have solved the problem!” he cried. “Our Sarah is to become an
actress!”
“But I don’t want to be an actress!” cried poor Sarah.
Her objections were overridden, and that very night the Duke wrote
to his friends at the Conservatoire, demanding that Sarah should be
inscribed on the lists for admission.
Sarah was now within a month of seventeen.