In the Comédie Française stands a statue: the bust of Molière, the
great actor-playwright to whom the theatre is dedicated. Each year, on
the anniversary of his death, every actor and actress belonging to the
company attached to the playhouse must file past the statue and salute.
It was due to an incident occurring during this annual ceremony that
Sarah Bernhardt left the Comédie for the first time.
The actresses were assembled in a corridor giving access to the
statue--the _sociétaires_ (actresses who had completed their period
of apprenticeship) naturally taking precedence over the _débutantes_.
All were in costume, and over the costumes they wore the long mantle,
showing their badge of membership of the Comédie. These mantles had
long trains and, in endeavouring to avoid treading on one of them,
little Régine Bernhardt, who held Sarah’s hand, inadvertently stepped
on that worn by Madame Nathalie, one of the oldest actresses of the
theatre, whom Sarah described as “old and wicked.”
Madame Nathalie turned and, roughly seizing the child, pushed her so
violently that she was flung against a stone pillar bruising her side
and cutting her face.
Sarah Bernhardt forgot the solemnity of the occasion, forgot the
distinction of the company, forgot everything except that her little
sister had been wantonly struck.
“Beast!” she cried, and, running to the old actress, slapped first one
side of her face and then the other, as hard as she could strike. The
blows resounded throughout the corridor.
Madame Nathalie remained rooted to the spot. Sarah stood before her,
with panting bosom and eyes flashing fire. For an instant it looked as
though the ceremony would be spoiled, but other members of the company
rushed between the two and they were hurried in different directions.
The next day she was summoned to the office of M. Thierry, director of
the Comédie.
“Your conduct has been disgraceful, mademoiselle!” he said, “and your
engagement should be cancelled immediately, but I have decided to give
you one chance to make amends. Waiting in the next room are Madame
Nathalie, and two other _sociétaires_. You will apologise to Madame
Nathalie, in their presence, and in mine.”
“Apologise to that woman who injured my baby sister?” cried Sarah.
“Never!”
“Think, mademoiselle,” urged Thierry. “Unless you do so you leave the
Comédie!”
Leave the Comédie! After all the torturing months of preparation,
after all the help she had received from the Duc de Morny, from
Camille Doucet and her other friends, after the hard struggle at the
Conservatoire. Sarah saw her mother’s bitter eyes, heard her scornful
tongue.
She knew that her admission to the Comédie Française had been an honour
and a favour which her performances at the Conservatoire did not
justify. She knew that if her engagement was cancelled it was possible
that she might look in vain for other employment; that every manager
in Paris might be turned against her. More, she knew that her family
would regard her leaving the Comédie as a personal insult to them, and
it would, she realised, be no longer feasible for her to live at home.
Sarah thought of her Aunt Rosine’s triumphant “I told you so,” and
shuddered.
But, on the other hand, she knew that she was in the right. A sense of
tremendous injustice weighed upon her. This woman had struck her little
sister, and she had administered a deserved correction. What though she
were one of the oldest _sociétaires_ at the Français. _She_ should be
the one to apologise!
It took Sarah some five minutes to arrive at this, her final,
conclusion, and then, turning to M. Thierry, she said:
“If Madame Nathalie will apologise to Régine, I will apologise to her!”
M. Thierry looked at her incredulously.
“You mean that you will allow a question of pure pride to interfere
with your career and perhaps spoil your future?” he demanded.
“I mean that if the whole incident occurred again, I would slap Madame
Nathalie twice as hard!” said Sarah angrily.
M. Thierry turned back to his papers.
“Very well, mademoiselle,” he said; “you have until to-morrow afternoon
to change your mind!”
Sarah did not apologise, and she was not immediately sent away. Her
powerful friends who had supported her in her effort to enter the
theatre made representations to M. Thierry, and, much against his will,
he agreed to give the young actress another chance.
But Madame Nathalie nursed her spite, and when, a few weeks later,
Sarah was given the rôle of Dolorès, in the play of that name by
Brouihet, she contrived to influence the director to take the part away
from the girl, almost on the eve of production, and give it to Madame
Favart.
No sooner did Sarah learn this than she bounded into M. Thierry’s
office.
“Give me my contract!” she cried. “I resign! I will have nothing more
to do with your theatre!”
The same evening she was again a free agent. She had left the Comédie.
When she returned home to inform her mother of her action, the latter
took it coolly.
“Very well,” said Julie, “you need look for no further help from me, or
from my friends. Hereafter you can do with your life as you wish! You
are emancipated!”
Sarah was then eighteen years old. From that day on she was free of
maternal control, and a few weeks later she secured a minor part at
the Gymnase. After playing this, she was promised a leading part in a
play called _Launching a Wife_, but this promise was not kept. In her
anger, Sarah left the theatre, packed her trunk, and, with less than a
thousand francs, left suddenly for Spain.
In Madrid she developed a passion for bull-fighting. At one moment,
according to Caroline, her maid, she became engaged to Juan Lopez, a
famous matador, but at a dinner given to celebrate the engagement,
which was attended by famous personalities of the _corrida_, Lopez
drank too copiously of the strong vintages of Spain, and Sarah,
disgusted, left him and the dinner party and returned to her hotel.
This incident decided her return to Paris, and, borrowing the necessary
money from the manager of the hotel, who had known her father, she
left the next day.
This was the first of two mysterious visits Sarah paid to Spain. Of the
second, which occurred some eleven years later, practically nothing is
known.
Now began the most painful period of Sarah Bernhardt’s life. No longer
able to face the daily tirades of her mother and her aunts, who called
her lazy, idle and wilful, she left the former’s flat and took one of
her own in the rue Duphot, close by the Madeleine.
She drifted away from her family and the friends of her childhood
and made questionable acquaintances in the fast-living set where her
beauty, originality and wit made her much sought after. She became a
well-known figure in certain salons and in the restaurants _à la mode_.
Now and again she played small parts in various theatres, but long
intervals occurred between the occasions on which she worked. Her
figure remained excessively slender, boyish and agile. It never became
really full, but its slenderness was less noticeable after she had
given birth to her son, Maurice. It then to some extent rounded out,
only to become thin again when she was forty, at which epoch she
invented the shoulder-length glove to conceal the skeleton-like outline
of her arms.
The birth of her son was the event which changed Sarah’s whole life.
It gave her something to live for. Until then she had been a wilful,
spoiled, eccentric girl, given to tremendous fits of temper which were
invariably followed by prolonged periods of despondency.
She had few intimates, and the friends who gathered round her were
not of the sort likely to set her feet in the right direction. She
had spells of strenuous energy, which would be succeeded by fits of
laziness lasting sometimes for months, during which time she would live
parsimoniously on small sums borrowed from stage acquaintances or from
her mother’s friend, the Duc de Morny, who still remained faithful to
the child for whom he had done so much.
Nothing, unless it was her eccentricity, distinguished her from the
hundreds of other lovely girls at that time adorning the Paris stage.
She had given up her attempts at painting, after moderate successes
gained at several salons; the passion for modelling had not yet seized
her, and, although she had undoubtedly immense talent for acting,
she neglected to develop it, with the result that her theatrical
engagements were few and far between.
She and her young sister Jeanne, then aged only fourteen, would often
be seen at public balls of the better class, dancing with a cohort of
young men, amongst whom were included some of the wildest members of
society. She was frequently a guest at smart but somewhat questionable
entertainments in the homes of titled acquaintances, whose riches
were expressed in the luxury and the beautiful women with whom they
surrounded themselves, and in the amount of rare wines they and their
friends consumed.
Of average height, exceptionally slim, with blue eyes alternately
flashing wit and fire, and invariably costumed in the latest fashion,
Sarah, as she neared her majority, was in danger, despite her great
talent, of falling into that bottomless pit which still exists in Paris
for beautiful girls, and out of which it is so difficult to climb.
She was a member of one of the fastest sets of a fast city, and only a
miracle could have been expected to save her. Her health was bad, she
had frequent spells of coughing, and the tell-tale flush of fever was
constantly on her cheeks. To all admonitions, however, she would reply
that, if her life was to be a short one, she had better enjoy it to the
full while there was yet time.
But the needful miracle happened. As the result of an ardent love
affair, almost certainly with a man of princely family, she gave birth
to a boy, whom she named Maurice.
As in her own case, the _accouchement_ was a difficult one, and
complications ensued which rendered her recovery doubtful. The child
was under-sized but robust, and from his birth he resembled his mother.
Motherhood to Sarah was at once a boon and a scourge that whipped her
flagging consciousness of right and wrong.
It brought her face to face with the hard realities of the pathways of
error, but it gave her the strength of character she had lacked and
which was to lead her up from and out of these dangerous pathways. It
provided her with the one thing that had been so far lacking in her
character.
Motherhood gave Sarah Bernhardt ambition.
If from then on she became greedy of praise and publicity, she at
the same time became a strenuous worker; if she was hard with those
whom she used as stepping-stones, she was harder with herself; if she
allowed her tongue to become caustic and her manner overbearing, it
was because life had been revealed to her in its veritable aspect, and
because she realised the supreme necessity of building a wall between
herself and her past.
Intolerant of criticism, exquisite in her art, mighty in labour, Sarah
Bernhardt lavished on her tiny son a love she had never believed she
could feel for any human being.
Every aim of her existence was to provide for him while he was young
the shield of respectability she herself had never known.
Proud though she might be to the exterior world, she was humility
itself before the cradle of her child.
And her struggle was no easy one. She told me of it one day on board
ship while we were travelling to the Near East, and so deep an
impression did her words make on me that I can remember them almost
textually.
“When my son was born,” she said, “I had, for all my fortune, the sum
of two hundred francs. If it had not been for Madame Guérard, who
officiated at the birth of my child as she had officiated at my own, I
do not know what I should have done.
“I owed ten times two hundred francs in small tradesmen’s bills,
scattered about the city. My mother was ill, and could not be appealed
to. I was ashamed to go to my other friends, such as the Duc de Morny,
who would have been only too glad to have helped me, and I forbade
Madame Guérard to say a word to anyone about my predicament.
“When my sister Régine came to see me, she was told that I had a
contagious disease and could not be seen. Later on it was given out
that I had left Paris for a holiday in the country.
“When the first week was up I had scarcely a sou. It was then that I
determined to appeal to the one man whom duty should have compelled to
aid me, and I sent a letter to the Prince, imploring him to take pity
upon me and upon our child.
“The Prince’s reply was brutality itself: ‘I know a woman named
Bernhardt,’ he wrote, ‘but I do not know her child.’ The note
enclosed--fifty francs!
“I persuaded myself that there was a mistake. I could not believe that
the man I had loved could be so cruel.
“I dragged myself out of bed and went, faint and ill, to a mansion
in the rue de Lille, where the Prince was that night giving a joyous
_fête_.
“I was shown into an ante-room and waited nearly an hour before the
Prince finally condescended to see me.
“Standing there in the doorway like a magistrate come to judge--to
judge me, the mother of his child whom I carried in my arms--he asked
me what I wanted. I could not believe his attitude.
“‘I have come to show you your child, and to demand your recognition of
him!’ I answered.
“The Prince’s reply was to become purple with anger, to thump his fist
on the table, and not only to deny the child, but to make the most
monstrous allegation conceivable.
“Nearly fainting, I went from the house in tears, my baby’s cries
mingling in my ears with the music of the dance and the shouts of the
reckless party within.”
Such was the first great trial of the woman who was to become the most
famous tragic actress on the world’s stage.
The fortitude that Sarah Bernhardt gave proof of then became the basis
of the strong character which slowly formed from that day onwards.
Scorned by the man who of all men had best the right to help her, Sarah
bitterly determined to make the males of the species pay for the agony
of her calvary.
This was the turning point of Sarah Bernhardt’s life. In one respect
the world owes the evil Prince ---- a debt, for had he recognised
the child, had he lavished money and tenderness upon the mother,
there is a probability that she would never have found the will and
determination which were the earnest of her future success. Never was
the adage that courage is born of necessity truer than in the case of
the young Sarah Bernhardt.
Forced to work to support her child, whom she sent to a professional
nurse in Normandy, Sarah laboured with a fierceness and a tenacity
unequalled in the history of the stage.
She found work at the Gymnase, at the Porte St. Martin, at the
Vaudeville, at the Lyric and at other theatres. Never allowing herself
a moment’s rest, studying her parts far into the night, arriving always
the first for rehearsals, she gamely set foot on rung after rung of the
ladder which she had herself set up.
Her reputation, which had been so sadly tarnished by her previous
mistakes, became once more satisfactory. She enjoyed the friendship of
influential managers and playwrights. It was not long before she became
marked for success. Critics began to comment favourably on her work,
especially in _La Biche au Bois_, a play at the Porte St. Martin, which
gave her her first opportunity as a star, and which resulted in her
being offered a contract by M. Fournier for three years.
Before she accepted this contract, however, Lambert Thiboust, a
well-known playwright, asked her to take the name part in _La Bergère
d’Ivry_, and she accepted--subject, of course, to the approval of the
directors of the Ambigu theatre, where the piece was to be played.
These directors were two men named Faille and Chilly. Chilly had a
mistress, Laurence Gérard, whom he desired to have the part. To please
Thiboust, however, they consented to give Sarah a hearing in the
rehearsal room of the Ambigu, and thither she went and recited a part
she had learned at the Comédie Française in _On ne badine pas avec
l’amour_. There was complete silence until she had finished, and then
Faille rose and shook his head sadly.
“My poor little girl,” he said, with assumed sympathy, “you cannot take
this part! You are too thin--and, besides, you are in no way equipped
for the theatre! You are not even a good actress!”
Sarah could hardly believe her ears.
“_Tenez_,” pursued Faille, “here is Chilly, who has heard you from
behind that curtain. Ask him what he thinks.”
Sarah turned to Chilly, the little director who was later to be
intimately associated with her career.
“Lambert Thiboust is crazy!” said Chilly shortly. “You would be no good
in the part, mademoiselle! We cannot give it to you!”
As Sarah went out, more or less in a daze, she passed Laurence Gérard
on her way in. Then she realised why she had lost the part.
Later on, Chilly became famous as co-director of the Odéon. Faille
never succeeded, and years later, taking pity on him, Sarah Bernhardt
acted in a benefit performance to establish a fund for his old age.
Sarah was ever generous in such matters. She never forgave an enemy who
remained powerful, but she could always forgive and forget when poverty
or misery overtook those who had done her harm.