CHAPTER III
No. 5, rue de l’Ecole de Médecine was a weird, queerly-leaning tenement house in a black little side-street just off the Boulevard St. Germain, near the Boulevard St. Michel, in the heart of the students’ quarter of Paris. It was a poor dwelling, at best, with a crumbling façade, ornamented with some scarcely-discernible heraldic device which told of past dignity. It had a low, wide doorway, with one of its great oak, iron-studded doors askew on its hinges, so that a perpetual draught whistled up the stone-flagged corridor that loomed darkly, like a cave, from the street to the crumbling stairs. A four-story building ... each floor was just a trifle more weather-beaten, more decrepit, than the next. On the ground floor, next to the loge du concierge, was a wineshop, smelling of last night’s slops, where the brown-aproned proprietor leaned against his little wooden bar and filled new bottles with the dregs that had not been drunk the day before; next to the wineshop stood a cobbler’s stall, with the tap-tap of the cobbler’s wooden mallet resounding through the street to the courtyard at the rear; and next to the cobbler’s, the stall of a marchand des frites, whose only merchandise was sliced potatoes fried in olive oil.
On the first floor was the appartement of the wine-dealer; on the second and third, logements for students—students who, returning nightly from the cafés of the Boul’ Mich’, enlivened the aged edifice with their cries.
And on the fourth floor of this building, on this twenty-second day of October, 1844, in a modest flat of three rooms—bedroom, sitting-room and kitchen—was born the baby who afterwards became Sarah Bernhardt.
Her mother, then a beautiful young woman in her late teens, was named Julie Bernard, but sometimes she called herself Judith Van Hard. Among her intimates she was affectionately known as Youle.
It was eight o’clock at night. Youle was lying in bed, her mass of red-gold hair tumbling over her shoulders and down under the sheets. Her eyes of sapphire-blue were closed, and her breathing hard and spasmodic. Her features were drawn; her face pale.
Three other persons were in the room. One was a man—the doctor, busy packing up his instruments. The other was a young friend, Madame Guérard. The third was a tiny atom of humanity, barely a foot long and weighing certainly not more than half a dozen pounds. This infant’s head was covered with a fuzz of reddish hair resembling the mother’s; its tiny mouth was open and its little lungs were working at top-blast.
The temper for which Sarah Bernhardt was later to become notorious was making its first manifestation.
The delivery had been difficult, and Julie was not asleep but unconscious. Thus, though the baby cried all night, the mother did not awaken, and in the morning Mme. Guérard sent off to the nearest synagogue for a Jewish priest.
But when the doctor came the crisis had passed; the girl on the bed had recovered consciousness and was already fondling her child. From then on her recovery was rapid, and before little Sarah had properly got her blue eyes open or begun to take an interest in things around her, the beautiful little Jewish girl was back at her work-table in the sitting-room, trimming hats for which she was paid a few sous each by the clients whose houses she visited in turn every week.