SARAH BERNHARDT

SARAH BERNHARDT

BY JULES HURET

WITH A PREFACE BY EDMOND ROSTAND

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY G. A. RAPER

WITH FIFTY-FIVE ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd. 1899

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, London & Bungay.

vii

PREFACE

My Dear Huret,

You have given me an attack of vertigo. I have been reading your biography of our illustrious friend. Its rapid, nervous style, its accumulation of dates and facts, its hurried rush of scenery and events flying past as though seen from an express train, all help to attain what I imagine must have been your object—to give the reader vertigo. I have got it.

I knew all these things, but I had forgotten them. They are so many that no one even attempts to reckon them up. We are accustomed to admire Sarah. “An extraordinary woman,” we say, without at all realizing how true the remark is. And when we find ourselves suddenly confronted with an epic narrative such as yours; with such a series of battles and victories, expeditions and conquests, weviii stand amazed. We expected that there was more to tell than we knew, but not quite so much more! Yes, here is something we had quite forgotten, and here again is something more! All the early struggles and difficulties and unfair opposition! All the adventures and freaks of fancy! Twenty triumphs and ten escapades on a page! You cannot turn the leaves without awakening an echo of fame. Your brain reels. There is something positively alarming about this impetuous feminine hand that wields sceptre, thyrsus, dagger, fan, sword, bauble, banner, sculptor’s chisel, and horsewhip. It is overwhelming. You begin to doubt. But all this is told us by Huret, or, in other words, by History,

and we believe. No other life could ever have been so full of activity. The poet I was used to admire in her the Queen of Attitude and the Princess of Gesture; I wonder now whether the other poet I am ought not to still more admire in her the Lady of Energy.

What a way she has of being both legendary and modern! Her golden hair is a link between her and fairyland, and do not words change into pearls and diamonds as they fall from her lips? Has she not worn the fairy’s sky-blue robe, and is not herix voice the song of the lark at heaven’s gate? She may be an actress following an impresario, but she is none the less a star fallen from the sky of the Thousand and One Nights, and something of the mysterious blue ether still floats about her. But just as the enchanted bark gives way to the great Atlantic liner, just as the car drawn by flying frogs and the carriage made out of a pumpkin vanish before the Sarah Bernhardt saloon-car, so in this story of to-day, intelligence, independence, and intrepidity have replaced the miraculous interventions in the tales of long ago. This heroine has no protecting fairy but herself. Sarah is her own godmother. Inflexible will is her only magic wand. To guide her through so many strange and wonderful events to her final apotheosis, she has no genius but her own.

It seems to me, Jules Huret, that the life of Mme. Sarah Bernhardt will perhaps form the greatest marvel of the nineteenth century. It will develop into a legend. To describe her tours round the world, with their ever-changing scenes and actors, their beauties and absurdities, to make the locomotives and steamers speak, to portray the swelling of seas and the rustling of robes, to fill up the intervalsx of heroic recitative with speaking, singing, shouting choruses of poets, savages, kings, and wild animals: this would need a new Homer built up of Théophile Gautier, Jules Verne, and Rudyard Kipling.

All this, or something like it, courses through my brain while my attack of giddiness wears off. Now I feel better; I am myself again, and I try to decide what to say to you, my dear friend, in conclusion. After reflection, here it is—

I have had an attack of vertigo. There is no doubt about that. But all these things that I have known only in the telling—all these journeys, these changing skies, these adoring hearts, these flowers, these jewels, these embroideries, these millions, these lions, these one hundred and twelve rôles, these eighty trunks, this glory, these caprices, these cheering crowds hauling her carriage, this crocodile drinking champagne—all these things, I say, which I have never seen, astonish, dazzle, delight, and move me less than something else which I have often seen: this—

A brougham stops at a door; a woman, enveloped in furs, jumps out, threads her way with a smile through the crowd attracted by the jingling of the bell on the harness, and mounts a winding stair;xi plunges into a room crowded with flowers and heated like a hothouse; throws her little beribboned handbag with its apparently inexhaustible contents into one corner, and her bewinged hat into another; takes off her furs and instantaneously dwindles into a mere scabbard of white silk; rushes on to a dimly-lighted stage and immediately puts life into a whole crowd of listless, yawning, loitering folk; dashes backwards and forwards, inspiring every one with her own feverish energy; goes into the prompter’s box, arranges her scenes, points out the proper gesture and intonation, rises up in wrath and insists on everything being done over again; shouts with fury; sits down, smiles, drinks tea and begins to rehearse her own part; draws tears from case-hardened actors who thrust their enraptured heads out of the wings to watch her; returns to her room,

where the decorators are waiting, demolishes their plans and reconstructs them; collapses, wipes her brow with a lace handkerchief and thinks of fainting; suddenly rushes up to the fifth floor, invades the premises of the astonished costumier, rummages in the wardrobes, makes up a costume, pleats and adjusts it; returns to her room and teaches the figurantes how to dress their hair; has a piece readxii to her while she makes bouquets; listens to hundreds of letters, weeps over some tale of misfortune, and opens the inexhaustible little chinking handbag; confers with an English perruquier; returns to the stage to superintend the lighting of a scene, objurgates the lamps and reduces the electrician to a state of temporary insanity; sees a super who has blundered the day before, remembers it, and overwhelms him with her indignation; returns to her room for dinner; sits down to table, splendidly pale with fatigue; ruminates her plans; eats with peals of Bohemian laughter; has no time to finish; dresses for the evening performance while the

manager reports from the other side of a curtain; acts with all her heart and soul; discusses business between the acts; remains at the theatre after the performance, and makes arrangements until three o’clock in the morning; does not make up her mind to go until she sees her staff respectfully endeavouring to keep awake; gets into her carriage; huddles herself into her furs and anticipates the delights of lying down and resting at last; bursts out laughing on remembering that some one is waiting to read her a five-act play; returns home, listens to the piece, becomes excited, weeps, accepts it, finds shexiii cannot sleep, and takes advantage of the opportunity to study a part!

This, my dear Huret, is what seems to me more extraordinary than anything. This is the Sarah I have always known. I never made the acquaintance of the Sarah with the coffin and the alligators. The only Sarah I know is the one who works. She is the greater.

Edmond Rostand.

Paris, April 25, 1899.

xv

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1

SARAH BERNHARDT

On the 10th February, 1898, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt telephoned to me to come and see her. The occasion was a serious one. She told me that on the following day she would leave her house in the Boulevard Pereire and enter a private hospital in the Rue d’Armaillé, where she was to undergo a painful operation. For some time past she had suffered from a dull, aching pain, and during a performance of Les Mauvais Bergers, in which she had to fall flat on her face, she experienced a sharper pang than usual. She ought to have at once begun to take care of herself and avoid all fatigue, but when she returned to her dressing-room, her first act was to fall on her face again to make sure that what she had felt was not mere imagination. She went on making sure in this way through the remaining forty performances of Les Mauvais Bergers. Finally, however, she called in Dr. Pozzi, who immediately discovered serious2 internal trouble, and informed her that an operation must be performed in June. In spite of this, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt organized a provincial tour; but

her condition suddenly became worse, and Dr. Pozzi decided that the operation must take place almost immediately.

A few days before the date fixed, the actress decided to break the news to her son. She did this on the eve of his duel with M. Champsaur, of which, of course, he had not told her.

“You can imagine what a blow it was to him,” Mme. Sarah Bernhardt remarked to me.

“Were you not afraid?” I asked—I don’t exactly know why, the great artiste being as gay and alert as usual.

“Afraid?” she replied. “No; there’s no danger with Pozzi. It’s just a stroke of bad luck,” she added bravely, with a smile. “I had a wonderful run of success last year, too much in fact, and now this is a set-off.”

“When is the operation to be?” I asked.

“On Wednesday. Don’t forget to come and see me when I am convalescent. I will tell you all sorts of fine stories, so that you won’t get bored.”

The operation was perfectly successful, and on the 1st of May, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, who was then quite out of danger, was allowed to see her friends on condition that they should be very few and their visits very short. As one of these friends, I spent half-an-hour in the sick-room.

3 The hospital, situated in the Ternes quarter of Paris, is a species of small private house with a courtyard in front, and is as little like a medical establishment as can be imagined. The patient’s room, scrupulously neat and clean, was on the first floor, overlooking a small garden containing a few large trees. The great artiste was lying on a small iron bed, her fair hair completely covering her pillow. She was smiling and gay, as usual; perhaps a little paler than her wont, that was all. My mind involuntarily reverted to Lady Macbeth, Doña Sol, Maria de Neubourg, Phèdre, and Froufrou, and I thought of all the triumphs, heroic ardour, wild passion and divine melancholy of thirty years of art and crowded life abruptly cut short and laid low under the surgeon’s knife. But the wonderful vitality of this rare creature, who has always vanquished every combination of adverse circumstances, had once more got the better of misfortune.

“I kept on telling myself every day,” she said, “that this is the price I have to pay for the great day I had two years ago. I always said something of this kind was bound to come. Ask Seylor if I didn’t.”

Mlle. Seylor, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt’s faithful companion, who has not been absent from her a day for the last ten years, had just entered the room.

“Didn’t I tell you so, Seylor?” the patient continued. “When you kissed me and said how happy you were over my ‘glory,’ as you called it, didn’t I4 say, ‘Everything has its bad side as well as its good. See if I don’t pay dearly for to-day!’”

And a shadow of melancholy came over the great artiste’s features, but soon disappeared. As the song of a bird arose from the garden, she exclaimed—

“Listen to that blackbird; isn’t it delightful? He sings every morning just as if he had been put there on purpose for me.”

Speaking of the operation, she said—

“It lasted an hour and a half, but I did not feel the slightest pain either then or afterwards. I have had no fever at all. At the present moment my temperature is not above 97°. For two days the chloroform rather annoyed me, and I had touches of nausea, but that was all. The only pain I had was what I inflicted on my son by running the risk. Poor boy! it’s the first time I have ever made him suffer of my own free will!”

My eyes wandered round the room. Apart from a few roses and orchids, there was nothing on the mantelpiece and tables but portraits of Maurice Bernhardt as a child, as a youth, and as he is to-day. There was also a marble bust of him.

“Look!” said Sarah, “there are his first shoe and his first shirt.”

Hanging from the corner of a mirror were a tiny little white patent-leather shoe, all shrivelled by time, and a shirt that might have fitted a doll.

“They never leave me,” she added. “When I travel, I take them with me, and I felt I must5 have them here. I believe they bring me good luck.”

Before taking leave I inquired as to the probable duration of the convalescence.

“At the end of the week,” was the reply, “I shall be able to get up. Within ten days I shall take a walk in the garden, and within a fortnight I am to go to St. Germain and complete my convalescence at the Pavillon Henri IV. Come and see me soon and we will talk.”

I took advantage of the permission, and in the course of my visits I was able to take down, from the great artiste’s own lips, the information contained in these pages, by far the greater part of which information will be new to the public.

“I was born in Paris,” Mme. Sarah Bernhardt told me, “at No. 265 Rue St. Honoré, in the house also occupied by my old friend, Mme. Guérard, who is still bright and hearty in spite of her seventy-six years. She saw me come into the world, and she was present at the birth of my son Maurice, and of my grand-daughter.

“My mother, as you know, was a Dutch Jewess. She was fair, short, and round, with a long body and short legs, but she had a pretty face and beautiful blue eyes. She spoke French badly, and with a strong foreign accent. She had fourteen children, among them being two pairs of twins. I was the eleventh child. I was put out to nurse with a concierge, and the arrangement worked well enough as6 long as I was quite small; but I began to find my confinement wearisome, and one day, when I was at the window of the concierge’s room—you know those little arched windows that are still to be seen in the entresols of old houses—I saw my mother coming in through the porte-cochère, and I fell out of the window in my haste to reach her! She realized the situation, and I was taken home, where I remained several years with my mother and7 sisters. My education had to be thought of, and as my father insisted on my being baptized, I was sent to the Augustinian convent at Grandchamp, Versailles. Thus, at the age of twelve I became a Christian, was baptized, received my first communion

on the following day, and was confirmed on the day after with three of my sisters. I became very pious. I was seized with an extraordinary, passionate adoration for the Virgin. For a long time I cherished a tiny gold image of her which some one had given me. One day it was stolen, to my great grief.

“I was both reserved and fractious. My mother had little love for me; she preferred my sisters. I was seldom taken out. Sometimes I was left at the convent during the holidays. I used to feel sad at being thus neglected, but the feeling of depression soon wore off, and the spirit of fun in my nature got the upper hand. One day, when we heard that all the schools in France, except ours, had been given bonbons on the occasion of the baptism of the Prince Imperial, I proposed to several other girls that we should run away, and I undertook to manage it. Being on good terms with the sister in charge of the gate, I went into her lodge and pretended to have a hole in my dress under the armpit. To let her examine the hole I raised my arm towards the cord communicating with the gate, and whilst she was looking at my dress I pulled the cord, my accomplices rushed out, and I followed them. Our8 entire stock of provisions, ammunition, and sinews of war consisted of a few clothes, three pieces of soap in a bag, and the sum of seven francs fifty centimes in money. This was to take us to the

other end of the world! A search had to be made for us, and as the good sisters could hardly undertake it, the police were set on our track. There was not much difficulty in finding us, as you may imagine. We were questioned, and Amelia Pluche—I9 shall never forget the traitress’s name—denounced me as the ringleader. I was sent home in disgrace, but, nevertheless, returned to the convent.

“On another occasion, I remember, I had climbed on to the wall separating the convent from the cemetery. A grand funeral was in progress, and the Bishop of Versailles was delivering an address to quite a crowd. I immediately began to gesticulate, shout, and sing at the top of my voice so as to interrupt the ceremony. You can imagine the scene—a child of twelve sitting astride a wall, and a bishop interrupted in the midst of a funeral oration! The scandal was great, and I was again expelled. My mother did not at all approve of these escapades, and I was severely scolded, but, owing no doubt to influence, I was received in the convent once more. Some time afterwards, having been sentenced to three days’ solitary confinement for some offence, I climbed up to the top of a chestnut-tree in the garden. They sought for me in vain, and then set the watch-dog to find me. He promptly sat down at the foot of the tree and barked. My retreat was thus discovered, but there was no way of getting me down. The only man in the convent was an old gardener, who would not

trust himself at such a height, and the ladders were too short. To all the sisters’ commands and threats I merely replied: ‘I will die here! I want to die here!’ Finally they had to promise on oath that10 I should be let off my three days’ confinement, and I came down with the agility of a monkey. I was very good at gymnastics. My mother, knowing me to be delicate, urged me to take all sorts of exercise. I remember that the only prizes I ever got at the convent were for history, composition, and gymnastics.

“On my departure from Grandchamp came the question, What was I to do? I was religious, in spite of my wayward and passionate temperament. The patron saint of the convent, St. Augustin, whose portrait was displayed in every room, was my first passion, which he shared with the Virgin. I was strongly inclined to become a nun, but my ideas in this direction underwent a change soon after my departure from the convent. My mother provided me with a finishing governess, Mlle. de Brabander—a very superior woman, who had educated the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia. Mlle. de Brabander adored me. My mother had considerable difficulty in deciding what to do with me. In spite of my youth I was asked in marriage by a neighbouring glover, then by a tanner, and finally by a chemist, from whom I used to buy medicines. I refused them all! One of my mother’s friends was the Duc de Morny, and he suggested that I should try the stage as a profession. My mother thought I was not sufficiently pretty; I was too thin, she considered. Nevertheless, she decided to adopt the

duke’s suggestion. The story of my admission to11 the Conservatoire has often been told. I came with a letter of recommendation from the Duc de Morny, and I had scarcely recited two verses of La Fontaine’s fable of The Two Pigeons, when Auber signed to me to stop and come to him.

“‘Is your name Sarah?’ he asked.

“‘Yes, sir.’

“‘Are you a Jewess?’

“‘By birth, sir, but I have been baptized.’

“‘She has been baptized,’ said Auber to the jury, ‘and it would have been a pity for such a pretty child not to be.’ Turning to me, he added, ‘You said your fable very well and you have passed.’