As Adrienne Lecouvreur.
She returned to Paris, but left again almost immediately. On the 10th September she was at Nantes, and afterwards she appeared at Bordeaux, Toulouse, Lyons, and Geneva. She excited wild enthusiasm everywhere. Medals bearing her image and superscription, Sarah Bernhardt bracelets and collars, photographs and biographies were sold in the streets. At Lyons, the Khedive’s son unsuccessfully offered £80 for a stage-box. The Old World soon ceased to afford sufficient scope for her activity. On the 16th October, 1880, she realized a long-cherished desire, and sailed from Havre to America on a tour, under Mr. Abbey’s management. She took with her all her company, her servants, and twenty-eight trunks containing innumerable dresses and particularly one which she was to wear in La Dame aux Camélias. This wonderful toilette had cost £480, and fifty work-girls, so the story ran, had toiled for a whole month to embroider the camellias on the mantle. Mr. Abbey had promised the actress a small fortune: £100 for every performance, plus half the receipts above £480. Sarah extended her journey to nearly every part of the States. From the date of her début at New York, on 10th November, she was incessantly on the move. She appeared at Boston, Hartford, Montreal, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, etc. Her répertoire included Adrienne Lecouvreur, Froufrou, Hernani, Phèdre, Le Passant, and La Dame aux Camélias. She became the proprietor of a tame alligator, who soon succumbed to the champagne diet she inflicted on him. At length, on the 16th May, 1881, she landed in triumph at Havre, and was greeted by a cohort of friends from Paris, and by a crowd estimated, somewhat rashly perhaps, by the Figaro, at 50,000 persons. She had earned £36,800 in one hundred and sixty-six performances. Out of this sum she handed £4000 over to her agent, Jarrett, and £16,000 to her legal representatives in Paris. Her travelling expenses amounted to about £8000, so that after paying all her debts she was left with a balance of £8800. She brought back from America not only this respectable sum, but something else: the remembrance of great ovations, unprecedented triumphs, and adventures in which she invariably preserved her dignity. One day she happened to enter a Protestant church and heard the minister denounce her as an “imp of darkness, a female demon sent from the modern Babylon to corrupt the New World.” Before the day was over, the clergyman received this note—
My dear confrère,
Why attack me so violently? Actors ought not to be hard on one another.
Sarah Bernhardt.
Mme. Sarah Bernhardt in travelling costume, during her first American tour.
On her return to France, she treated her compatriots to such a surprise as only a grand seigneur could have conceived. She was urged by a charitable association at Havre to give a performance in aid of the funds, and two days after landing she performed La Dame aux Camélias—the same play which had been applauded all over the world for a year before under the name of Camille, but which she had never yet performed in France. When she appeared as Marguerite Gauthier, on the 18th of May, 1881, before the Havre public and many of her Paris friends, including Halanzier, Lapommeraye, Clairin, Busnach, Abbéma, and many others, her reception was a perfect triumph. And yet Dumas had said of the part, “It is not made for her!”
After her long journey it might have been supposed that she would rest on her laurels for a time, but she did nothing of the kind. In June she was in London, and arrangements were soon in progress for a long European tour, to commence in October. Before that date she accomplished another French tour under the management of M. Félix Duquesnel, who undertook to give her £2800 for thirty-five performances of Hernani and La Dame aux Camélias, between August 27th and October 4th, with Paul Mounet as Hernani and Angelo as Armand Duval. M. Duquesnel was the same manager who, years before, paid her six pounds per month out of his own pocket at the Odéon. He was now getting his money back, with interest. Her French tour completed, she started again, almost without waiting to take breath, on her great European expedition, under the management of Mr. Jarrett, who had accompanied her to America. She visited Russia, Spain, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway: the whole of Europe, in fact, except Germany, that country being expressly omitted from the contract. She opened her tour at the Mint Theatre, Brussels, the King of the Belgians making a hasty return to the capital from his country seat in the Ardennes to see her. At Vienna she organized an exhibition of her works of art. She next entered Russia, and reached Moscow on the 10th December. The last sentence of the following telegram published in the newspapers gives a fair idea of the sensation she excited—
Moscow, December 10.—Sarah Bernhardt is extremely hoarse and cannot perform this evening. General consternation prevails.
