“How long will it last?” she inquired of the makers when they delivered the coffin.
“For centuries!” replied they.
“It will need to last at least one, for I am determined to disappoint the doctors and live to be a hundred!” she answered.
She delighted to be photographed lying, dressed in different costumes, in her coffin. More than fifty different photographs and sketches were made of her in this situation. On occasions, when guests came to her house for tea, she would serve it to them on the coffin.
Once she held a mock funeral. The rosewood coffin with its golden ornaments was brought with much pomp and ceremony into the studio-salon at the rear of her apartment, and Sarah, dressed in a long white robe and with a lily in her hand, climbed into it and lay at full-length as though dead.
While I played the “Funeral March” by Chopin on the piano, the poet Robert de Montesquiou ceremoniously placed lighted candles around the coffin; while the other guests, who included Jeanne Bernhardt, Madame Guérard and Madame de Winter, kept up a monotonous chant, reminiscent of the burial service.
She carried the coffin everywhere with her. It was a sight to see it loaded on top of the ancient carriage in which she was wont to make her provincial trips. At hotels in which she stayed, the coffin was invariably taken into her bedroom before she herself would enter it, and placed in the accustomed position at the foot of the bed.
On one occasion when we were touring the South of France, the personnel of a hotel at Nîmes struck sooner than permit the coffin to be brought into the hotel. The superstitious proprietor was in tears, and swore that the funereal object meant unhappiness to his family and bad luck to his business.
Nothing daunted, Sarah insisted on the coffin being brought in, and then called together the members of the troupe.
“You and I,” she said to me, “will be the cooks. You,” indicating Pierre Berton (then my husband), “will be the waiter.”