“When is the operation to be?” I asked.
“On Wednesday. Don’t forget to come and see me when I am convalescent. I will tell you all sorts of fine stories, so that you won’t get bored.”
The operation was perfectly successful, and on the 1st of May, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, who was then quite out of danger, was allowed to see her friends on condition that they should be very few and their visits very short. As one of these friends, I spent half-an-hour in the sick-room.
The hospital, situated in the Ternes quarter of Paris, is a species of small private house with a courtyard in front, and is as little like a medical establishment as can be imagined. The patient’s room, scrupulously neat and clean, was on the first floor, overlooking a small garden containing a few large trees. The great artiste was lying on a small iron bed, her fair hair completely covering her pillow. She was smiling and gay, as usual; perhaps a little paler than her wont, that was all. My mind involuntarily reverted to Lady Macbeth, Doña Sol, Maria de Neubourg, Phèdre, and Froufrou, and I thought of all the triumphs, heroic ardour, wild passion and divine melancholy of thirty years of art and crowded life abruptly cut short and laid low under the surgeon’s knife. But the wonderful vitality of this rare creature, who has always vanquished every combination of adverse circumstances, had once more got the better of misfortune.
“I kept on telling myself every day,” she said, “that this is the price I have to pay for the great day I had two years ago. I always said something of this kind was bound to come. Ask Seylor if I didn’t.”
Mlle. Seylor, Mme. Sarah Bernhardt’s faithful companion, who has not been absent from her a day for the last ten years, had just entered the room.
“Didn’t I tell you so, Seylor?” the patient continued. “When you kissed me and said how happy you were over my ‘glory,’ as you called it, didn’t I say, ‘Everything has its bad side as well as its good. See if I don’t pay dearly for to-day!’”
And a shadow of melancholy came over the great artiste’s features, but soon disappeared. As the song of a bird arose from the garden, she exclaimed—
“Listen to that blackbird; isn’t it delightful? He sings every morning just as if he had been put there on purpose for me.”
Speaking of the operation, she said—