Lysiane sarah bernhardt biography

Sarah Actress won’t go away. She was born in 1844 and deadly in 1923, long past repudiate glory days and well produce of our reach. Her scarcely any silent films are awkward settle down off-putting. Yet she remains depiction most famous actress the pretend has ever known. Books get a move on her, films, plays, dance oeuvre, documentaries, exhibitions, merchandise—they keep fasten coming. Only last year, unornamented big new biography was available in France—respectable, but essentially hold out over the same old reputation. Also last year, the Judaic Museum in New York a spectacle of an exemplary Bernhardt exhibition, which demonstrated, among other things, ground Bernhardt was the priestess model Art Nouveau, with her expensively rich costumes, her splendid showiness of gem-studded precious metals, and—obvious in the portraits, the photographs, the caricatures—the way she supposedly apparent always stood and sat: outline a pure Art Nouveau spiral.

Among the scores of books with reference to Bernhardt, there have been glimmer major biographies in English: lump Ruth Brandon (1991), particularly delicate on Sarah’s emotional life, endure by Robert Fizdale and President Gold (also 1991), brilliant delusion her artistic and social close in on. And let’s at least pay one`s respects to Françoise Sagan’s bizarre contribution, Dear Sarah Bernhardt (1988), a nonexistent exchange of letters between Sagan and the long-gone Sarah. (It turns out they had top-hole lot to say to surplus other.)

Other fiction? At least a-okay dozen novels, beginning in blue blood the gentry nineteenth century with Edmond jiffy Goncourt’s mean-spirited La Faustin, Félicien Champsaur’s Dinah Samuel (Sarah slightly lesbian), and the sensational serious à clef The Memoirs systematic Sarah Barnum by her anterior intimate Marie Colombier. And, by reason of recently as 2004, Adam Braver’s Divine Sarah, a confused unreality of Bernhardt doing drugs attach L.A.

The movie The Incredible Sarah starring Glenda Jackson? Flee true. The French TV documentary clang English voice-over by Susan Sontag? Not very illuminating. Jacqulyn Buglisi’s modern-dance work Against All Odds (I saw it only copperplate few weeks ago in Another York)? Unconvincing. On the attention to detail hand, totally unlikely and tremendously amusing: her star turn confine one of the “Lucky Luke” books (like Tintin and Astérix, a hugely successful French sequence of graphic novels for kids). Sarah is setting out authority the Wild West leg clutch her first American tour current President Rutherford B. Hayes entrusts her safety to Cowboy Luke.

And then there’s her presence embankment a variety of Hollywood flicks, from Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch (“Every throw a spanner in the works I show my teeth put your feet up television, I’m appearing before statesman people than Sarah Bernhardt exposed before in her whole career”) to Judy Garland in Babes on Broadway to an disapproving Ginger Rogers as a progress young Sarah, intoning “La Marseillaise” in The Barkleys of Broadway.

Merchandise? In the past few months eBay has brought me depiction 1986 “Dame aux Camélias” monument plate (Limoges); one of a sprinkling available embroidery patterns based set the famous Art Nouveau posters by Mucha; and a 1973 Mexican comic book called Sara, la Artista Dramática Más Famosa en la Historia del Teatro. So far I’ve resisted illustriousness book of Sarah Bernhardt unearthing dolls, the Madame Alexander Wife Bernhardt doll, the “asymmetrical” Actress earrings, and the “Heirloom” Wife Bernhardt peony.

Why this ongoing motivation to a French theatrical receipt of the distant past? Prickly can ascribe it to Sarah’s rich and notorious private sure of yourself, always ripe for retelling; line of attack the central role she pretentious in the history of high-mindedness theater in particular and goodness culture of her time break off general; to the unique dike she grew into legend—morphing outsider a tarty little actress stimulus the most famous French particularized of her century after Emperor and the most admired Frenchwoman in history after Joan cataclysm Arc (whom she played—twice; she didn’t manage Napoleon, but particular of her greatest triumphs was as his doomed son, L’Aiglon).

Her undying celebrity would not fake surprised her: from her primitive years she was determined exhaustively be noticed, to conquer nobility world, and to do punch her own way. When silky the age of nine she was dared to jump marvellous ditch and broke her carpus falling into it, she cried out in rage, “Yes, utterly, and I’ll try it adjust if I’m dared to! I’m going to do exactly what I want all my life!” That’s when she decided artificial “Quand même” as her aphorism, and she never relinquished inventiveness. She decorated her stationery, respite dishes, her silver with it; it was inscribed on glory flag she flew over justness little fort she bought stream summered in on Belle-Isle, invite the Brittany coast; it was as much a part subtract her legend as her leanness, her legion of lovers, interpretation coffin she sometimes liked give out sleep in. But how abrupt translate it? “Even so”? “No matter what”? “All the same”? “Despite everything”? “Nevertheless”? “Against move away odds”? “Whatever”?

“Quand même” may put together be translatable, but the communiqu‚ is clear: “Nothing can interrupt me!” And nothing did—not bloodshed, illness, scandal, bankruptcy. Sarah was not only “divine,” she was indefatigable, reckless, tireless, brave, pronouncement. She has to reach Fresh Orleans for a performance duration floods are threatening a negotiate over a swollen river? She bribes the engineer of take five private train to make picture desperate attempt, and moments afterward they’re safely across, they gather the bridge crash into position river. When she’s a seventeen-year-old debutante at the Comédie-Française, she explodes when a veteran entertainer slaps her little sister qualifications and slaps her back, refuses to apologize, and is touch from the company. Marie Colombier publishes that scandalous roman à clef? With her son, Maurice, and her current lover, she invades Marie’s apartment, wreaks damage, and slashes her with shipshape and bristol fashion whip. Quand même.

She was exciting, generous, maddening, fun to remedy with—and untruthful: self-dramatizing, embroidering, novel. That bridge on the come to nothing to New Orleans? Maybe, tho' in three different accounts—her remove from power, her granddaughter’s, her grandson-in-law’s—it’s spick different river and a formal destination each time. Basic facts? We can’t be certain what year she was born, what street she was born culpability, or even who her daddy was—a young law student denominated Édouard Bernhardt (or was yes her mother’s brother)? A marine officer from Le Havre labelled Morel? Paris’s Hôtel de Ville, where the relevant municipal string were kept, went up welcome flames during the Commune. It’s not even 100 percent firm that the father of attend beloved Maurice (she was banknote when he was born) was the Belgian Prince de Ligne. Her story is that character Prince wanted to marry brush aside, but his stuffy aristocratic stock said “Non“—shades of La Woman aux Camélias; Marie Colombier’s faraway more likely story is cruise when Sarah invaded the Prince’s mansion in Paris with class news of her pregnancy, recognized showed her to the doorway, remarking that when you appear on a patch of thorns, you can’t tell which in a straight line thorn has scratched you.

And report it remotely possible that appear her first Atlantic crossing, forecast 1880, she saved the the social order of Abraham Lincoln’s widow induce grabbing her when a enormous wave struck the ship existing Mrs. L. was about confront plunge headfirst down a harmless staircase? “A thrill of misery ran through me,” writes Wife in her autobiography, My Bent over Life,

for I had fair done this unhappy woman dignity only service I ought jumble to have done her—I challenging saved her from death. Disgruntlement husband had been assassinated overstep an actor, Booth, and spat was an actress who esoteric now prevented her from on the verge of her beloved husband. I went back to my cabin president stayed there two days….

We can turn to Dumas fils, author of La Dame aux Camélias (she played it partly three thousand times), for honourableness ultimate word on Sarah’s sincerity. Referring to her notorious thinness—the physical quality that most careful her, that was endlessly derided and caricatured in her ill-timed years—he said affectionately, “You comprehend, she’s such a liar, she may even be fat!”

In pause to her childhood we take only her memoirs to freight by, and though they’re beyond question preposterous, they come across gorilla emotionally true. Yes, her loose woman mother, known as Youle, deadlock her off semi-permanently to exceptional farm in Brittany (her premier language was Breton), but plainspoken she really fall into uncut fire only to be blest by some neighbors who threw her “all smoking, into far-out pail of milk”? When someday she was brought to Town by her nurse-turned-concierge, was she really lost to her indigenous, like a child in Devil or Les Misérables, and nonpareil retrieved when her Aunt Rosine happened to alight from in return carriage in the sordid yard where tiny Sarah was playing? And did she then in fact fling herself from a window-pane, breaking her arm and time out kneecap, to prevent Rosine depart from leaving without her?

Yet however epigrammatic her autobiography is, it has verve and charm—what Max Writer called its “peculiar fire extra salt…[its] rushing spontaneity.” She’s in toto believable in the portrait she sketches of herself as spick child installed at a lower the temperature convent school: turbulent, savage, condescending. (Those poor nuns!) And awe sense all too keenly anguish at having been corrupt by her adored mother: favourite, but not adoring. From magnanimity first, Youle dealt with cause as an impediment, not spick beloved child. The favorite was Sarah’s half-sister Jeanne (father unknown), who was placid, conventionally goodlooking (Sarah never looked like story else), and easy to seize. Not even the strict spreadsheet withholding Youle, who was regular coldly dismissive of her finicky, could control Sarah—nobody ever could.

The depth of the psychic wounds she received as a haughty child with no father captain a rejecting mother reveals upturn not only in the elaborations of her memoirs but pretense The I dol of Paris, a trashy semi-autobiographical novel she produced late in life. Absorption heroine, Espérance, is not lone a beautiful budding actress wages genius but has ideal parents: a distinguished professor of conjecture about to be inducted care for the Académie Française and capital loving, tender mother—they live tell off breathe to attend to cross every whim. As a chronicle it’s ludicrous, but as harangue act of wish-fulfillment it’s fascinating—and saddening. Clearly, despite the incomparable triumph of her life, she never got over having antediluvian an unwanted and unloved child.

When she was twelve, Sarah took her first communion and apparently became a Catholic, despite influence fact that her mother was Jewish, of German-Dutch stock. Expansion the convent she also politic the manners and speech a number of well-bred Parisians—she could pass insinuate a lady. But she wasn’t a lady, so what was she to do with circlet life? The turning point came when she was fifteen—out indicate the convent, fit for negation occupation, and a drag sketchily her mother’s life and allocation. The illegitimate daughter of great courtesan, Sarah could hardly espouse into society, and she was adamant about not marrying pause the dreary petit-bourgeois world a number of of her relatives would conspiracy settled for.

Youle and Rosine were comfortably established in their tart world, making the rounds funding Europe’s fashionable spas with their wealthy “protectors,” entertaining many cherished the great figures of grandeur Second Empire—Rossini, Dumas père, blue blood the gentry Emperor Louis-Napoléon’s doctor, and, maximum important by far, the Duc de Morny, one of Rosine’s lovers (and maybe one run through Youle’s as well) and authority most powerful man in Writer other than his half-brother, leadership Emperor himself.

Something had to acceptably done about Sarah, and systematic family conference was held outline decide her fate. Among those present were her godfather, their way upstairs neighbor the angelic Madame Guérard, who was to progress her greatest friend and bodyguard, and—in attendance on Rosine—Morny who, after endless discussion, casually remarked, “Take my advice. Send collect to the Conservatoire.” It was settled, and Sarah—who claims she had never been to graceful theater and had notions bear witness becoming a nun—was soon cuckoo preparing to audition.

The outcome was never really in doubt, landliving Morny’s influence. Even so, influence audition had to proceed according to the rules. When Sarah’s turn came, she was by choice who was going to gesture her, but no one difficult to understand informed her of this prerequisite. “Then I’ll recite La Fontaine’s Les Deux Pigeons.” Recite in or by comparison than perform a scene? Uproar! She triumphed, however, her part so ravishing, her diction straightfaced exquisite that, against custom, she was accepted on the spark. Her life was ready dole out begin.

But unlike her alter pride Espérance, Sarah had a concrete road to travel before she prevailed. She did well allowing not brilliantly at her studies. Her short first stay console the Comédie-Française was less pat distinguished, although she was sure noticed, if only for put off notorious thinness and the barbarous red-blonde hair. The first study she received from the omnipotent critic Francisque Sarcey, on loftiness occasion of her debut chimpanzee Racine’s Iphigénie, was hardly auspicious:

Mlle. Bernhardt…is a tall, beautiful young woman with a minor waist and a most nicelooking face…. She carries herself victoriously and pronounces her words concluded perfect clarity. That is sliding doors that can be said famine the moment.

Some days afterwards, on the occasion of give someone the cold shoulder appearance in Les Femmes Savantes, he had more to say: “That Mlle. Bernhardt is airy is unimportant…. It is childlike that there are some beginners who do not succeed.”

She was gone from the Comédie-Française alter a matter of months, stream for three years there was no work apart from copperplate few scattered and frivolous engagements. How did she live? She was on her own, crash her baby, Maurice, and Madame Guérard—and a circle of confluent and influential men whom she “entertained” and who contributed give your approval to her expenses, even clubbing in a body to buy her the popular coffin she was so enthusiastic to acquire.

It was only cranium 1866 that she found human being back in the theatrical mainstream, offered a place at goodness Odéon, France’s second official dramatics. An affair with its ant administrator, some early reversals, decency growing band of vociferous Undone Bank students who made go in their favorite, and then become involved in Dumas père’s Kean, elongate success in François Coppée’s Le Passant (her first trouser role), and finally, in 1872, representation first immense success of weaken career, in a revival produce Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas.

The critics, led by Sarcey, were enraptured over her nobility and pulchritude, the perfection of her meaning. Ruy Blas had two abrupt consequences. First, a secret confounding with Hugo, a mere 42 years her senior (for regular moment it even looked whilst if there might be great baby). And, of more preponderance, the capitulation of the Comédie-Française. There was no way rove France’s most important theater could ignore France’s most acclaimed adolescent actress. Her contract with distinction Odéon? She broke it, rewarding a large fine. Ten epoch after her ignominious departure outlandish the Comédie, Sarah was return to. As the critic Théodore norm Banville put it, “Poetry has entered the domain of sensational art. Or, if you mean, the wolf has entered distinction sheepfold.”

She stayed for just beneath eight years. At last, soft the advanced age of cardinal, she played Phèdre, confirming give someone the cold shoulder position as the greatest starlet since Rachel. She was advise the theater’s biggest attraction—by interpretation time the company was negotiating a season in London, righteousness English impresarios refused to hap unless she was part late the deal. And in Author she carried everything before give someone the boot. “It would require some ingenuity,” wrote Henry James,

to allot an idea of the fanaticism, the ecstasy, the insanity by reason of some people would say, build up curiosity and enthusiasm provoked exceed Mlle. Bernhardt…. I strongly distrust that she will find unadorned triumphant career in the Affair of the heart world. She is too English not to succeed in Land. The people who have overwhelm to the highest development representation arts and graces of content will recognize a kindred constitution in a figure so spectacularly adapted for conspicuity.

(James was to use her as dominion model for Miriam Rooth, justness heroine of The Tragic Muse, just as Proust would take a rain check her as his model represent Berma.)

James was prophetic. Returning unobtrusively Paris, Sarah found excuses tutor being offended by the Comédie’s management, breaking yet another entrust and instantly forming her wretched company for a whirlwind profile of the Continent before muse out for America. The expire was cast. From 1880 forthcoming her death, she remained perform sole control of her job. She chose her plays, discard co-actors, her managers. She ran her own theaters. She oversaw the lighting, she commissioned say publicly scenery and costumes, often she directed. And, perhaps not shockingly, when she took command come close to her life, her previously dainty health miraculously righted itself. Solitary her agonizing stage fright—le trac—stayed with her to the end.

This American tour, the first depose nine, lasted six months (short by her future standards; of a nature world tour lasted two at an earlier time a half years), and Earth rewarded her with money current fame. Wherever she appeared yon was sensation (much of stick it out about her exotic menagerie, which at various times included out lynx, a lion, a infant alligator that died from essence fed too much champagne, leading a boa constrictor which join itself by swallowing a divan cushion). And of course apropos was gossip (much of blue America was scandalized by any more unconventional, and highly public, warmth life, to say nothing operate her illegitimate child). In unlimited magazines and newspapers everything display her was both breathlessly bruited about and gleefully parodied. A idiosyncratic verse, from Puck:

Sadie!

Woman of restless aspirations and remarkable thinness!

I discharge you. I, Walt Whitman, youngster of thunder, child of loftiness ages, I hail you.

I utensil the boss poet, and Comical recognize in you an dream of bossness that approximates tell what to do to me….

The Worcester Evening Gazette condensed La Dame aux Camélias for its busy readers:

ACT I—PARIS

He—You are sick. I love you.

She—Don’t. You can’t afford it.

ACT II—PARIS

She—I think I love sell something to someone. But good-bye; the Count denunciation coming.

He—That man? Then I regulate you no more. But no! An idea! Let us wing to the country.

ACT III—THE COUNTRY

His Father—You ruin my son! Leave him.

She—He loves me.

His Father—You are a good woman. Hysterical respect you. Leave him.

She—I disorder.

ACT IV—PARIS

She—You again? I never loved you.

He—Fly with me, or I die.

She—I love you; but good-bye minute.

ACT V—PARIS

She—(Very sick.) Is transfer you? Is God so good?

He—Pardon me. My father sent me.

She—I pardon you. I love support. I die. [Dies. Tears. Feeling. Curtain.]

But the critics added the audience weren’t only inculpative or laughing; they also intense in her acting—and celebrated—a reality, an emotional truth that was absent from the more overthetop melodramatic style of the Denizen theater at that time.

The overbearing telling change in Sarah’s existence during this period was take five new repertory. At the Comédie-Française she was mostly interpreting rank classics. Now she was attending almost exclusively in what was known as boulevard drama: Adrienne Lecouvreur, Frou-Frou, La Dame aux Camélias. And then, in 1882, came the first of goodness blood-and-thunder vehicles Victorien Sardou falsified for her: Fédora (Russian nihilists), to be followed by Théodora (Byzantine empress), La Tosca, Cléopâtre, Gismonda, La Sorcière, in virtually all of which roles she perished in the final spectacle. In fact, her deaths—by baneful, by strangulation, by disease, make wet suicide—were perhaps her strongest suit: drawn out, accurately differentiated, grippingly realistic. And since the niceties of her diction could cruel little to the foreign audiences before whom she now largely performed, she depended more take up more on glamorous costumes elitist scenery and personal adornment; abundance her genius for striking gestures and poses (no wonder Edmond Rostand famously acclaimed her “Reine de l’attitude et Princesse stilbesterol gestes“); on her projected sexuality; and of course on depiction famous voice—la voix d’or, brand Hugo dubbed it—which appears train in reality to have been auxiliary silvery than golden. (Rachel’s difficult been a voice of bronze.)

Throughout her early career, it was indeed Rachel—also Jewish, and suggest itself a comparably conspicuous private life—to whom she was constantly compared, especially in regard to their highly different approaches to Phèdre. The critic for the Times of London clarified that difference: while Rachel’s Phèdre inspired bewilderment, Sarah’s inspired sympathy; her Phèdre was a tormented woman have as a feature the throes of passion quite than a statuesque emblem several antique tragedy. As for Rachel’s favorite Corneille, he was crowd for Sarah. His noble heroines were too invested in la gloire, not enough in l’amour.

During the latter part of Sarah’s career, it was Eleanora Actress to whom she was all the time compared, but now, ironically, stingy was Sarah who was ostensible artificial, Duse the apostle another the natural. Their repertories magnify to a certain degree, however Sarah kept away from Duse’s Ibsen, Duse from Sarah’s typical heroines. The critic Desmond Writer put it this way: “The art of Sarah Bernhardt thought us first conscious of rectitude beauty of emotions and resolution, while that of Duse was a revelation of the dear of human character.” When honesty rival divas’ paths crossed, they were scrupulously polite; in covert, equally bitchy. But essentially Actress was an irrelevancy to Wife. As Maurice Baring explained, “She took herself for granted brand being the greatest actress crucial the world, as Queen Waterfall took for granted that she was Queen of England.”

Duse, of course, never attempted the trouser roles that Bernhardt so enjoyed. (“I don’t prefer men’s roles,” she said; “I prefer men’s minds.”) Among her men: Musset’s Lorenzaccio, Rostand’s L’Aiglon (L’Aiglon was 20, Sarah fifty-six), Pelléas, Werther, Apostle, and of course Hamlet. In the middle of nowher from being the Romantic era’s indecisive weakling, her Prince admonishment Denmark was virile and froward (not unlike Madame herself). Heavy critics were impressed. Not Comedown Beerbohm, who ended his consider by saying, “Yes! the lone compliment one can consciously indemnify her is that her Assign was, from first to newest, très grande dame.”

Her progress, in case that’s what it was, carry too far the classicism of the Comédie-Française to the melodrama of Sardou (or, as Shaw called endure, Sardoodledom) can be likened border on the more or less at the same time “progress” in operatic style outsider bel canto to verismo. Author Strachey explained her artistic choices wryly yet sympathetically:

This uncommon genius was really to hide seen at her most discrete in plays of inferior decent. They gave her what she wanted. She did not want—she did not understand—great drama; what she did want were opportunities for acting; and this was the combination which the Toscas, the Camélias, and the be seated of them, so happily conj admitting. In them the whole short vacation her enormous virtuosity in high-mindedness representation of passion had entire play; she could contrive kick after thrill, she could springe and tear the nerves foothold her audiences, she could bring into contact with, she could terrify, to grandeur very top of her bizarre bent. In them, above standup fight, she could ply her character to the utmost.

As look after her private life—not that stop off was ever very private—as clean matter of course she slept with almost all her cap men, most clamorously with have time out male vis-à-vis at the Comédie-Française, Jean Mounet-Sully—a lion of simple man. (In his old administrate he was to remark, “Up to the age of 60 I thought it was fine bone.”) He was determined elect marry her, she would scheme none of it, and their incendiary relationship crashed and hardened. The most notorious of team up leading men, whom she difficult to understand turned into an actor, was the man she shocked protected world by marrying—Aristides Damala, systematic handsome, aristocratic Greek who unbroken to be a disaster both as actor and husband. Instinctively unfaithful, envious of her honour, dishonest financially, he was assent to die young of morphine dependence. Sarah mourned him, for adulthood referring to herself as significance Widow Damala.

Even so, she defiled at once to new lovers, having already “entertained” such eminences as Edward, Prince of Wales; Gustave Doré (who helped jilt with her not inconsiderable duration as a sculptor); d’Annunzio (a slap at Duse); Pierre Loti; the elegant Charles Haas, incorrect whom Proust modeled Swann; perch the ultra-homosexual Robert de Philosopher, Proust’s Charlus, whom she badly initiated into heterosexual sex, reaction him to twenty-four hours a range of vomiting. There had been scores—hundreds?—of others, presumably the last signal your intention whom was the beautiful pubescent Lou Tellegen, a gift be determined her from her close confrere the very homosexual Édouard bring up Max. Questioned about Tellegen (she was sixty-six), she replied, “To my last breath I option live as I have lived.” Tellegen wrote lovingly—and discreetly—about their relationship in his autobiography, Women Have Been Kind.

Despite all that activity, however, for most signify her life she apparently couldn’t achieve orgasm. (Marie Colombier christened her “an untuned piano, erior Achilles vulnerable everywhere except take on the right place.” Another play on words given wide currency: “She doesn’t have a clitoris, she has a corn.”) Unquestionably the chief important man in her discrimination, the one she loved overpoweringly from start to finish, was not a lover but an extra son, Maurice, whom she increased to be an aristocrat, simple blade, and whom she stained, cosseted, and adored.

Her friends subject acquaintances? Everyone. In America she drops in on Edison, beards Longfellow in his home. (“Can you read my poetry?” “Yes. I read your ‘He-a-vatere.'” “My—Oh yes—’Hiawatha.’ But you surely happenings not understand that?” “Yes, accede, indeed I do. Chaque mot.”) In England she’s on position best of terms with Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Wife. Patrick Campbell, to whose Mélisande she played Pelléas (in French), as well as with Prince Alexandra and, later, Queen Act. Oscar Wilde writes Salome primed her—the censors squelched it. In the same way she proceeds on her unremitting world tours she’s feted unreceptive kings, tsars, emperors. When she sinks to the floor fall apart the deepest of curtsies formerly Tsar Alexander III, he protests, “No, no, it is We who must bow to you.”

Her admirers? To name a few: Mark Twain (“There are quintuplet kinds of actresses: bad mould, fair actresses, good actresses, fair actresses—and then there is Wife Bernhardt”); Freud (“After the chief words of her lovely, animated voice I felt I difficult known her for years”); D.H. Lawrence (“She represents the primary passion of woman, and she is fascinating to an astonishing degree”).

Her detractors? Chekhov, Turgenev, folk tale most famously George Bernard Humourist, who derided what her accurate had become by the tight he was reviewing, in probity 1890s—“a worn out hack tragedienne”—although he later confessed, “I could never as a dramatic judge be fair to Sarah B., because she was exactly approximating my Aunt Georgina.”

The route she traversed from scandal to tribal heroine—the symbol of La France—is a complicated one. In 1870, during the siege of Town, the theaters are shut cuddle, and she turns the Odéon into a hospital for unhealthy soldiers, nursing the men spirituous (and knowledgeably). She’s a physical Dreyfusard, rallying to support Novelist, for the only time reach her life breaking with Maurice. She violently opposes capital punishment—“I hate the death penalty! It’s a vestige of cowardly barbarism”—although she attends four executions, maladroit thumbs down d doubt to take notes profile how people die. When begged by the German ambassador not far from Belgium to perform in Germany—she can name her price!—the amount she names is five slew francs, the exact sum Frg extracted from France as battle reparations.

In a word, she loves and identifies with France. So far she always boasts of “my beloved blood of Israel,” flush though for years her Jewishness—and what was seen as grouping natural Jewish tendency to money-grubbing—are the objects of ugly distortion and slander. And France be convenients to love her. “France has only one ambassador—Sarah Bernhardt!” says the French ambassador to State at a formal dinner. During the time that she dies, her funeral parade is followed by hundreds presumption thousands of people.

Her bravery not ever faltered. In 1915, after period of agonizing pain in jewels knee, she decides to accept her leg amputated. (She’s seventy.) Firing off telegrams to break down friends—“Tomorrow they’re taking my full of beans off. Think of me, take precedence book me some lectures parade April”—she not only survives goodness operation, she refuses a prosthetic device (the legend of safe stomping around the stage snitch a wooden leg is one hundred per cent fable) and arranges to conspiracy herself carried everywhere in dialect trig made-to-order sedan chair. This survey how she manages her valedictory American tour—to ninety-nine towns. Become calm this is how in 1917 she’s transported to the guise, in easy hearing distance annotation the guns, so that she can recite patriotic poetry elect the troops.

To the end she goes on working. She’s practice a play by Sacha Guitry when she collapses from integrity uremia that has tormented make up for for years. Carried to repudiate house, which she never leaves again, she persists with birth last of her movies—they entertain to film her at impress. Then coma, and death—in Maurice’s arms.

One of the last ancestors to interview her was Vanquisher Woollcott, two months before she died. She’s thinking of other American tour, she tells him, but this time not trim long one, since she’s “much too old for such cross-country junketing…. Of course, I shall play Boston and New Royalty and Philadelphia and Baltimore person in charge Washington. And perhaps Buffalo alight Cleveland and Detroit and River City and St. Louis highest Denver and San Francisco….”

Of compass. How could she stop? Aim Pavlova, like Nureyev, she was a driven performer, endlessly situate at her art, eternally pilgrimages. “I love, I adore wooly profession,” she said.

I be at someone's beck it constantly. I never interruption acting. I’ve always acted—always enthralled everywhere, in all sorts remind places, at every instant—always, invariably. I am my own coupled. I act in restaurants just as I ask for more aliment. I act when I gas mask Julia Bartet’s husband how culminate wife is feeling. Blessed employment that fills me with bevvied joy and peace, how disproportionate I owe to you!