I will be frank. I had made up my mind not to do it: not for fear of giving offence to the dead, for ’twas from this very glorious clay that I had the truth with permission to publish it, but from respect to the living. Sarah Bernhardt not only left a son, Maurice Bernhardt; she left grandchildren and great-grandchildren, little ones whom I have watched joyously at play in the Parc Monceau, unknowing that at that very moment the great battle for life was being staged in the drab little house on the Boulevard Pereire. She had made up her mind that the sorrows which were hers should never blemish these innocent ones.
And yet—what a fallacy, what a heartrending fallacy it is to believe that such things can be concealed, or that, being concealed, they do not fester in their hiding-places!
Scarcely had the last, sad curtain been rung down on that greatest of real-life dramas than the scavengers of literature—those grisly people who lurk in the night of life, dealing in calumny and lies—began delving into the past of Sarah Bernhardt, just as the real chiffoniers, those horrible old women of the dawn, delve into the dustbins of Paris, seeking for Heaven knows what filth.
The mystery of her birth was Sarah’s great secret. Insatiable, the greedy public desired to rend this secret and to tear it into little bits. Literary ghouls fell upon the great woman’s reputation and fought over it. They disinterred legends that Sarah, while living, had successfully and scornfully proved untrue. They sent out lies by the bushel, secure in the knowledge that the Golden Voice, which alone could brand them, was stilled for ever.
Perhaps it was to be expected that the first of these legends came from Germany, a country that Sarah scorned and once refused to visit, although she had been offered a million marks to do so; a country, moreover, which had claimed Sarah as its own on more than one occasion.
In 1902 the Berlin Lokal Anzeiger published a “revelation” of the birth of Sarah Bernhardt. She was born, said the inspired writer, at Frankfort. Her father was a German, her mother a Fleming. She had been taken to France when a tiny child and there abandoned by her parents.
“We are aware,” said the Lokal Anzeiger, “that Sarah herself claims to have been born in Paris. Our only retort to this is: let her produce her birth certificate!”
They knew, of course, that Sarah’s birth was never registered. Later I will tell you why.
Sarah Bernhardt was interviewed about these statements at the time they were published. As always, she refused to comment on the extraordinary story, and contented herself with referring inquiring journalists to her Memoirs, entitled “Ma Double Vie,” which had been published some years before.
In these Memoirs Sarah told an infinitesimal fraction of the truth. She said that she was born on October 22, 1844, at number 5, rue de l’Ecole de Médecine, in Paris. This was the only mention she made of the circumstances of her birth, and it was true.