Now comes George Bernhardt, a famous German, who ought to know better than to pander to the scandal-mongers, and who states positively that Sarah’s father was his great-grandfather, George Bernhardt, and that her mother was a Gypsy woman for whom he experienced a temporary passion while living in Algeria.
But here he hedges. “At least,” he says, “family records tell of the existence of the child, and of the allegation that George Bernhardt was the father; but they also say that the assertion was denied by him, which leads to the probability that Sarah Bernhardt had no claim whatever on the name she bore.”
Frankfort, and now Algiers! A Flemish mother and a Gypsy mother! A fine haul for the scavengers!
Sarah had to fight rumours of this kind on several occasions during her lifetime. In a scurrilous book which was written many years ago it was asserted that she “never knew who her father was.”
This, as might be expected, was untrue. Sarah not only knew who her father was, but knew him well. Though she never lived with him, he visited her frequently, especially when she was at school in the Convent at Grandchamps, and when he died he left her a portion of his fortune.
Sarah herself starts her Memoirs with this reference to him: “My father was travelling in China at the time—why, I do not know.”
Here, then, was the answer to the problem that had been bothering me: it was clearly better to tell the truth once and for all, and to set at rest all doubts concerning this much-debated question of Sarah Bernhardt’s birth, than to let every newspaper scavenger have his own way with it, prolong the agony, and incidentally contrive, by unscrupulous inference, to cast a shadow much blacker than the importance of the matter justified.
To aid me in coming to this decision I had the knowledge that Sarah herself, in telling the story to me many years ago, was aware that one day it would be made public, and wished things so. She knew that in time to come she would belong to history, and also how little of history is founded on actual fact. The last thing she wanted was for the facts of her life to be at the mercy of imaginative chroniclers, who would have nothing to base their story on except rumour.
Thus she told it to me, and thus I tell it to you. Let the world decide.