As Adrienne Lecouvreur.
According to M. Sarcey—
Mlle. Bartet has begun to appear as the Queen in Ruy Blas, the part formerly taken by Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt. Mlle. Bartet is meeting with considerable success.
It was a very neat way of saying to the fugitive—
“You see after all, you are not indispensable.”
Here is another specimen of the kind remarks which the newspapers took a keen joy in circulating. It was reported that Sarah had said, “I shall never forgive Victor Hugo for letting Mlle. Bartet play the Queen in Ruy Blas,” to which the poet had retorted that Mlle. Bartet played the part so well that her name deserved to be indissolubly connected with it in future.
Exactly a month after her sensational resignation, Sarah Bernhardt went to London, not, as might have been supposed, to sell some of her works of art, but to give a series of performances with Mlles. Lalb and Jeanne Bernhardt, and MM. Dieudonné and Berton. She met with considerable success, especially in Adrienne Lecouvreur, Froufrou, and Rome Vaincue. While she was tasting the joys of this apotheosis, she was by no means forgotten in the city she had abandoned. On the 18th June, the First Chamber of the Civil Tribunal resounded for three mortal hours with her name, and in spite of all the skill of her counsel, Maître Barboux, the Court ordered her to pay the Comédie Française 100,000 francs damages, and to forfeit all right to her share (about 44,000 francs) of the reserve fund. Her flight thus turned out to be an expensive affair. There was nothing for it but to pay, and this was the beginning of the peregrinations destined to spread Sarah’s fame beyond the seas. In August we find her travelling through Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. One of those numerous incidents which have caused incorrigible patriotism to be numbered among Sarah’s virtues, occurred at Copenhagen. In the course of a fête given in her honour, the German Minister, Baron Magnus, proposed the health of la belle France. Sarah Bernhardt immediately interposed with—
“I beg your pardon, Baron, but you mean the whole of France, don’t you?”
The German Minister found himself in so awkward a predicament that he promptly left the room, and it was supposed that he had discovered an allusion to Alsace-Lorraine in Sarah’s remark.