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During the year which followed transfer of nurse and child to Neuilly-sur-Seine Sarah saw her mother but once, and then merely by chance.

Returning from a gay court party near St. Germain the coach, in which Julie was travelling with a resplendent personage the Comte de Tours, broke down just after it had crossed the bridge over the Seine and reached the outskirts of Neuilly. The nearest coach-builder was a mile distant, and while the coachman walked this distance, Julie bethought herself of the neglected child living only a few streets away. So she and the Count daintily picked their way to the cottage, and found Sarah revelling in her bi-weekly bath.

This bath was an extraordinary affair, because it took place in the same tub as the family washing—and probably other washing that the nurse solicited in order to eke out her income. On the principle of killing two birds with one stone, the nurse would make a warm tub of soap-suds, put the linen to be washed into it, and then hoist in baby Sarah!

The sight amused the Count and infuriated Julie, who gave the nurse a sound scolding. Sarah was hastily taken from the tub, dried, clothed and then handed to her fastidious mother, who fondled her in a gingerly way. But the baby failed to recognise the mother who had sacrificed so little for her sake, and burst into a storm of tears, pounding the finely-dressed lady with her puny little fists.

The Count thought it a fine joke, and laughed uproariously. “She is just like her mother, Youle!” he remarked, twirling his fine moustache.

Julie handed her tempestuous child back to the nurse.

“If that is the way she behaves when her mother comes to see her,” she said, “I shall not come again.”

She kept her word to such good purpose that, eighteen months later, when the nurse married for a third time, and desired to take the child with her to her new home, letters to Julie’s address were returned undelivered. The errant mother had not even thought it worth her while to keep her child’s nurse informed of her movements.

The nurse’s new husband was a concierge, one of those indispensable people who open the doors of Paris buildings, lose letters, clean stairs, quarrel with flat-owners, and generally make themselves as much of a nuisance as possible. This particular specimen was a big, upstanding man with sandy hair, about forty years of age, or ten years younger than his bride.

He was then concierge at Number 65, rue de Provençe, in the heart of Paris, near where the Galeries Lafayette, the great stores, now stand. It was a dingy building, mostly devoted to commerce, and the concierge occupied one room on the first floor. This one room was bedroom, sitting-room and kitchen combined.

There was only one bed, a big four-poster, jammed against the window. There was also one kitchen table, on which he ate his meals; two chairs in varying stages of decrepitude; a small coal stove screened from the bed by a heavy velvet curtain—soiled legacy of some opulent tenant—and another small table, on which stood a wash-basin and pail. When water was wanted it was necessary to fetch it from a pump in the street.

It was into this sordid environment that little Sarah, “Flower-of-the-Milk,” now almost five years old, was brought willy-nilly by her foster-mother. There was no room to put a cot for the child, so she shared a fraction of the bed. She was quickly put to work by her new lord, who soon initiated her into the mysteries of floor-washing and door-knob polishing, while it was generally la petite Sarah, when water was wanted, who was commissioned to stagger down the stairs with the empty pail and return with the full one.

Living with two adults in this ill-ventilated, badly-lighted room—the sole window was one about twice the size of a ship’s port-hole—and forced to do work which might well have proved too much for a child twice her age, it is small wonder that Sarah was frequently ill.

She lost appetite and colour, and grew weak, while the anæmia, which the bracing air of the country had almost cured, returned. Her eyes grew listless and had large puffs under them, so that neighbours, who pitied the child, prophesied that her days would soon be over.

Her only playmate, almost as unhappy as herself, was another little girl named Titine, the daughter of a working jeweller, who lived on the floor above; her playgrounds were the busy streets of Paris; her language the argot of the slums. No one dreamed of sending her to school, which was not then compulsory.

There is very little doubt that the world would never have known Sarah Bernhardt if this state of affairs had lasted another year. The child was fast going into tuberculosis, and could not even summon strength for the fits of temper that had distinguished her up till this time.

I have said that her only playmate was Titine, the daughter of the jeweller, but there was another for a month or so—the son of the butcher at the street corner.

One afternoon the janitor’s wife returned from an errand and heard screams coming from the loge. Hastening there she discovered the butcher’s son, aged six, stripped to the waist, and the diminutive Sarah laying on to him with a strap.

“I am playing at being a Spaniard,” she said in explanation, Spaniards having then a great reputation in France for cruelty. The incident is interesting in the light of later incidents in her career, when charges of callousness and cruelty were brought against her. For myself I have never doubted that a streak of the primitive existed in Sarah. But, unlike others, I believe that she was the better for it, for out of it grew her single-mindedness and her will to conquer.

During all this time Sarah’s mother gave no sign of life, despite repeated efforts on the part of the old nurse to find her. In fact, the child’s board had not been paid for nearly two years and, with her delicate health, she was becoming a charge which the couple could ill afford. Deliverance from this state of affairs came unexpectedly. One day Rosine, Sarah’s aunt, paid a visit to a neighbouring house. Sarah, who was playing in the courtyard of the building at the moment her aunt arrived, immediately recognised her, although the two had not met for more than a year.

“Tante Rosine! Tante Rosine!”

The extravagantly dressed woman turned, hardly believing her ears.

“It is not?—why, it is Sarah, the daughter of my sister Youle!”

“Yes, yes! It is I, Sarah! Oh, take me away—take me away! They suffocate me, these walls—always walls! I cannot see the sky! Take me away! I want to see the sky again, and the flowers...!”

Sarah’s cries had attracted a crowd, and much confused Rosine hurried the child into the concierge’s room, and was there overwhelmed by the old nurse’s explanations.

Something seemed to tell Sarah that she was not to be taken away at that moment.

“Oh, take me with you—take me with you! I shall die here!”

It was the cry of a desperate child fighting for her life, and it visibly wrenched at the heart of Tante Rosine. Yet—take her with her? How could she? What would her friend, the companion whom she lived with and who paid for her fine gowns and hats, say, if she brought home this little child of the gutter?

“Well,” she conceded, as the woe-begone child clung convulsively to her skirt, “I will come back to-morrow, and take you away.”

But with that curious intuition that characterises most children, Sarah sensed that she was about to be abandoned for a third time. She flung herself on the bed, sobbing, as her nurse accompanied her aunt down the stairs to the street below, where a fine equipage of boxwood and plush, prancing horses and liveried footmen was in waiting.

Rosine got into her carriage, dabbing a lace handkerchief at her eyes. She had a tender heart and was firmly resolved to write to Youle at once—Julie was in London—and make her take her child.

The footman regained his seat, the coachman clucked to his horses and the equipage moved away. But before it had gone two feet there was a heartrending wail and shriek, followed by a chorus of affrighted shouts, and a body came hurtling past the coach to the pavement. It was Sarah. The child had attempted to jump from the tiny first-floor window into the coach as it passed.

When Sarah awoke she found herself in a great, clean bed, surrounded by kind faces. She was at the home of her aunt in the rue St. Honoré. She had a double fracture of her right arm, and a sprained left ankle.

Julie, who was sent for immediately, arrived three days later, together with numerous other members of Sarah’s family. For the first time in her brief existence, Sarah found herself a person of importance.

For the next two years little Sarah was an invalid, capable of walking only a step or two at a time. She passed this period sitting in a great arm-chair, unable to move without pain, dreaming childish dreams of splendour for the future.

“Never once,” said Sarah in speaking of this period to me, “did I include in those dreams a suspicion that I would one day be an actress. I had never seen the inside of a theatre, and although many actors and actresses were among the friends constantly in and out of my mother’s home at 22, rue de la Michodière—a rather meretriciously furnished flat with gilded salons and musty bedrooms—I was shy with them and they with me, and learned little from their conversation.

“In fact, the stage and all appertaining to it remained a deep mystery to me for nearly ten years after my accident. My actual going on the stage was an accident—or rather the solution of a problem which had worried my mother almost to death.”

How this came about will be described in a later chapter.

At seven years of age, Sarah Bernhardt had so far recovered that she could walk and move without difficulty, and there was serious discussion about sending her to school. Her volatile mother, absent for the most part during Sarah’s convalescence, nevertheless resented the presence of the child in her home as irksome, and chafed to place her where she would be in good hands and could do without maternal supervision and attention.

As a matter of fact, at the age of seven Sarah could neither read nor write, and had never heard of arithmetic!

When her mother explained that she was to go to live in a place where there were hundreds of other little girls, who were to become her playmates, Sarah was overjoyed. During the terrible two years when she could not run about like other children, Sarah had had no playmates whatever; and, during her airings in her mother’s or her aunt’s carriage, had often wistfully watched other and luckier little girls rolling hoops along the gravelled paths of the Champs Elysées, or in the fields which then fringed what is now the Boulevard de Clichy. She had been an intensely lonely child from her infancy and could scarcely contain her happiness at the thought that at last she was to be as other children, and have little friends with whom she could talk and play as an equal.

Probably the main reason for sending Sarah away at this juncture was the fact that Julie was again about to become a mother.

It may be as well to state here that Julie Bernhardt was the mother of four children including a boy who died. Sarah was the first, Jeanne the second, and Régine the third. More will be told hereafter concerning these two turbulent sisters of the actress. They both lived unfortunate lives and died still more unfortunate deaths.

A report of Sarah’s parentage that has won considerable credence was published by a weekly Paris newspaper in 1886, and re-published again as recently as April 8, 1923, by La Rampe, a Paris theatrical paper. I quote from the latter:

“Edouard Bernhardt, grandfather of Sarah Bernhardt, was a Jew. He fulfilled the functions of chief oculist to the Court of Austria. He came to St. Aubin-du-Corbier, in Brittany, and there married the Marquise de la Thieulé du Petit-Bois de la Vieuville, by whom he had four daughters and one son: Julie, Rosine, Agathe, Vitty and Edouard. The Marquise died and Edouard Bernhardt married, secondly, Madame Van Berinth, who had been governess to his children. Rosine and Julie (mother of Sarah Bernhardt) ran away to Havre, where they obtained work as saleswomen in a confectionery establishment. Their father sent for them, and they fled to London. Shortly afterwards they returned to Havre, where Julie lived as the wife of a man named Morel, a ship-builder. They had fourteen children, of whom Sarah, born at Paris, 125, Faubourg St. Honoré, on October 23, 1840, was one.”

This seems circumstantial but it is absolutely inaccurate. I give it here, together with the evidence to contravert it, because so many people believe the above to be the true story of Sarah’s birth.

The rebutting evidence consists, first, in Sarah’s own denial, which was published almost immediately after the story itself, and, secondly, in the fact that the certificate of her baptism, in which the truth was certainly given, states that she was born, not in the Faubourg St. Honoré, but in the rue de l’Ecole de Médecine—not on October 23, 1840, but on October 22, 1844; that her father was not “Monsieur Morel,” but George Bernhardt; and that her mother was not “Julie Bernhardt” but Julie Van Hard.

And, as I have said, Julie had only four children, not fourteen!

The same paper (La Rampe) says that Sarah was baptised at the age of eight years. When she was eight, Sarah was still a Jewess and at the school of which we shall shortly give an account. Sarah was baptised, under the name of Rosine, five years later, at the Grandchamps Convent, Versailles.

When she was seven, then, and five months before Jeanne was born, Sarah was taken to Madame Fressard’s school, at 18, rue Boileau, Auteuil. The building still exists, but it has been turned into a private sanatorium.

Sketch of Thérèse Meilhan (afterwards Mme. Pierre Berton) by Georges Clairin, 1881.

The journey to Auteuil, which one can now make from the rue St. Honoré in twenty minutes by underground railway or in half an hour by tramway or motor-bus, was then quite a formidable affair. Paris was left behind at the Avenue Montaigne, and from there the way lay along the banks of the smiling Seine, with only a roadside estaminet bordering what is now one of the most aristocratic streets of all Paris. It took over an hour for the coach to reach the rue Boileau, in the little village of Auteuil. Sarah, needless to say, was enchanted with the journey and with the happy prospects ahead of her.

It was quite a ceremony, the installation of Sarah in her new home. Besides Julie and Aunt Rosine, there was a General and another man, who represented Sarah’s father, then absent in Lisbon. They were very pompous and important, and inclined to exaggerate the wealth that was so evident in the rich trappings of Aunt Rosine’s coach.

After much talk and negotiation, during which the party gathered around a bottle of wine opened by Madame Fressard, Sarah was formally entered on the books of the school as a pupil.

Amongst other things Julie insisted on presenting Madame Fressard with eight large jars of cold cream, with which she gave orders that Sarah was to be massaged every morning. Another order concerned Sarah’s mass of curly hair. It was not to be cut or trimmed in any way, but to be carefully combed night and morning. And when Madame Fressard ventured a slight protest at all these injunctions, Julie only waved her hand with a large gesture, saying:

“You will be paid—her father is wealthy!”

The exact sum contributed by George Bernhardt towards Sarah’s maintenance was four thousand francs annually.

During all the conversation that attended her installation as a pupil at the Auteuil school, Sarah remained mute, too shy to say a word.

“What a stupid child!” said Aunt Rosine, who was years before she gained a very high opinion of Sarah.

“Naturally stupid, I’m afraid!” sighed her mother, languidly.

Only Madame Fressard, the stranger in the group, came to the forlorn little creature’s aid:

“Well, she has your eyes—so intelligent, madame!” she said.

And with this the party left in their flamboyant coach, each scrupulously kissing the child farewell at the gate, and each, without any doubt at all, exceedingly glad to be rid of her.

Sarah was at last at school.