Sure enough, when the curtain fell for the evening, Sarah accosted Pierre in the wings, and said to him:
“Ecoutes! I don’t feel well to-night; I will go home alone with Blanche.” Blanche was her maid.
His protests only made her refusal to allow him to escort her the more emphatic and irritable.
“I tell you I am ill! I must go straight home to bed!” she asserted.
Hurrying through his dressing, Pierre ran to the stage entrance, where he hid in the door-keeper’s box and watched. He had waited some time when word was brought to him that Sarah had left—by the front door. Hurrying round to the front, Pierre was just in time to see her greet Sarcey, who was waiting there, with an affectionate kiss, and then mount into the same fiacre with him.
They drove away together, and from that day on Sarcey’s pen ceased to be dipped in vitriol and became impregnated with sugar, in so far as Sarah Bernhardt was concerned. Things continued thus until the inevitable break came, when Sarcey resumed his rôle of merciless critic. But by that time Sarah did not care. She was back at the Comédie Française, and not all the Sarceys in the world could have detracted from her glory nor torn the halo from her brow.
When Sarah quarrelled with Sarcey, she was greater than he.
Afterwards she attempted from time to time to renew her intimacy with Pierre Berton, but Berton, though remaining her friend and admirer, scrupulously kept on that footing and declined to return to his old status of doting lover and slave.
It was his last love affair until, the mother of his five children dying, he met and married me.