When it was proposed, in 1879, that the Comédie Française company go to London, Sarah refused to go along unless she be made Associate “à parte entière.”[25] Her proposal was rejected, and at a meeting of the Committee M. Got represented the feeling that prevailed among the directors of the theatre by crying: “Well, let her stay away! She is a regular nuisance!” Sarah finally gave in, however, and in reward was made “Sociétaire à parte entière.”[26]
On the first evening at the Gaiety, Bernhardt was to make her bow to England in the second act of Phèdre. Just before she went on she had one of her occasional bad attacks of stage fright, and could not remember her lines. “When I began my part,” she wrote, “as I had lost my self-possession, I started on rather too high a note, and when once in full swing I could not get lower again; I simply could not stop. I suffered, I wept, I implored, I cried out, and it was all real. My suffering was horrible.” The Telegraph next morning said: “Clearly Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt exerted every nerve and fiber and her passion grew with the excitement of the spectators, for when after a recall that could not be resisted the curtain drew up, Mr. Mounet-Sully was seen supporting the exhausted figure of the actress, who had won her triumph only after tremendous physical exertion, and triumph it was, however short and sudden.”
An American writer—probably Henry James—said at this time in the Nation: “It would require some ingenuity to give an idea of the intensity, the ecstasy, the insanity, as some people would say, of curiosity and enthusiasm provoked by Mlle. Bernhardt.... She is not, to my sense, a celebrity because she is an artist. She is a celebrity because, apparently, she desires, with an intensity that has rarely been equaled, to be one, and because all ends are alike to her.... She has compassed her ends with a completeness which makes of her a sort of fantastically impertinent victrix poised upon a perfect pyramid of ruins—the ruins of a hundred British prejudices and proprieties.... The trade of a celebrity, pure and simple, had been invented, I think, before she came to London; if it had not been, it is certain that she would have discovered it. She has in a supreme degree what the French call the génie de la réclame—the advertising genius; she may, indeed, be called the muse of the newspaper.”
But trouble was brewing, and the irrepressible Sarah was soon making difficulties for her confrères. She insisted on her right to give performances before private audiences on the nights she was not appearing with the company. Perrin had flown into a rage when he first heard of these performances, for it was the Comédie’s chief grievance against her that she would not rest. There came a day in London when Sarah sent word she was too tired to appear. A Saturday audience had to be dismissed at the last moment; it was too late to change the bill. A great commotion ensued among the company and in the Paris press. So many and varied were the attacks on her that she was on the point of resignation. She had brought to London a number of her sculptures and paintings and gave an exhibition, selling a few pieces, and entertaining at the gallery reception a group of aristocrats and celebrities—Gladstone and Leighton among them. She made a trip to Liverpool to buy more lions, and came back with a chetah, a wolf, and a half dozen chameleons to add to her menagerie. The members of the company thought she was ruining the dignity of “Molière’s House”; and all manner of stories were told. “It was said,” she wrote, “that for a shilling anyone might see me dressed as a man; that I smoked huge cigars leaning on the balcony of my house; that at the various receptions when I gave one-act plays, I took my maid with me for the dialogue; that I practiced fencing in my garden, dressed as a pierrot in white, and that when taking boxing lessons I had broken two teeth for my unfortunate professor.” These stories were only less dreadful than the tales told in Paris: that she had thrown a live kitten into the fire, and poisoned two monkeys with her own hands!
As a matter of fact, it is probable that Sarah was finding irksome the restrictions of the Comédie, was ambitious to earn more money and, as anxious for her exit from the company as were her jealous confrères, was only waiting for a chance to sever her contract. But contracts with the Française are not lightly broken. As Coquelin had told her: “When one has the good fortune and the honor of belonging to the Comédie Française one must remain there until the end of one’s career.” She had to watch her chance shrewdly.
Again returned to Paris, the company of the Comédie revived, on April 17, 1880, Augier’s L’Aventurière. From whatever cause—pique at being assigned a part she disliked in a play she detested, a temporary suspension of her usual power, or, as she says herself, illness that prevented proper study of her part,—she failed rather miserably. Even the usually indulgent Sarcey said: “Her Clorinde was absolutely colorless”; and the other critics, to a man, wrote scathing reviews. Sarah saw her chance, as she thought, and determined that this would be her last performance at the Comédie. The morning after the fiasco she wrote to Perrin:
“Monsieur l’Administrateur:
“You made me play before I was ready. You gave me only eight stage rehearsals, and there were only three full rehearsals of the piece. I could not make up my mind to appear under such conditions, but you insisted upon it. What I foresaw has come to pass, and the result of the performance has even gone beyond what I expected. One critic actually charges me with playing Virginie in L’Assommoir instead of L’Aventurière! May Emile Augier and Zola absolve me! It is my first rebuff at the Comédie, and it shall be my last. I warned you at the dress rehearsal. You have gone too far. I now keep my word. When you receive this letter I shall have left Paris. Be good enough, Monsieur l’Administrateur, to accept my resignation as from this moment.
Apr. 18, 1880. Sarah Bernhardt.”
An immense commotion at once arose, as if some tremendous political upheaval had occurred. Sarah took train and disappeared in the country, just as on a similar occasion, years before, she had suddenly gone off to Spain. The press, her fellow players, and the author of the play all poured upon her head a shower of abuse. M. Sarcey prophesied: “She had better not deceive herself. Her success will not be lasting. She is not one of those artistes who can bear the whole weight of a piece on their own shoulders, and who require no assistance to hold the public attention.”[27] The Comédie took legal action against her, and a few months later, when the suit was tried, Sarah was formally deprived of her standing as sociétaire, of her portion of the reserve fund, amounting to more than eight thousand dollars, and in addition had to pay the Française damages of twenty thousand dollars. She hadn’t the money, but she soon earned it, on her first American tour.
So ended, for good and all, Bernhardt’s connection with the government theatres; so abruptly did she turn a corner in her remarkable career. From her retirement Sarah announced, absurdly enough, that she would renounce the stage, and live by painting and sculpture, for these, she said, brought her thirty thousand francs ($6,000) a year. As a matter of fact, within two weeks she signed a contract with Henry E. Abbey, who post-haste crossed the ocean for the purpose, to go to America. His English agent, Jarrett, had long been importuning her to go. Now she was glad to accept.[28]
Sarah’s wanderings now began—those wanderings that have carried her up and down the world, made her name familiar everywhere, brought her riches and (in William Winter’s sonorous phrase) “such adulation and advocacy as have seldom been awarded to even the authentic benefactors of human society.” First she played a month in London, giving the pieces she was preparing for the American tour, and scoring a tremendous success, artistic, financial and social. A newspaper writer said at this time: “It has been said here that English society is not so eager this season to make her a social goddess as it was last; but it would hardly be possible for a woman to be more thoroughly besieged than is Sarah—that is the name by which people generally fondly call her. To see her is almost as difficult as to see the Queen—I dare say for people not connected with the artistic world even more so. Sarah lives very comfortably—even luxuriously—and entertains lavishly. It seems to me that the only lack of attention that she could possibly complain of is that the Queen has not yet left her card, and that is a complaint she must share with many people.”