Julie Van Hard, or Bernard, was a Flemish Jewess born of a struggling lower-middle-class family in Berlin. Her father, originally from South Holland but a naturalised German, had worked in a circus, but had forsaken this occupation to go into the retail grain and seed business, first in Hanover and then in Berlin. Her mother was a German dressmaker and a great beauty. When Julie was thirteen, her father died and left her only a handful of marks with which to complete her education.
Instead of doing so she chose to leave school, and became an apprentice in a big Berlin millinery establishment. After working there a little more than a year, she fell in love with a non-commissioned officer in a cavalry regiment, who seduced and then callously left her. When the affair came to the ears of the girl’s employer, she was discharged in disgrace.
After that she left Berlin and went to Frankfort, where she kept herself for a few months by making hats (at which she was very clever) and singing on occasion in cafés-concert. She was a lovely child, even in the poor dresses she could afford, and having a talent for music, had been taught the piano by her mother. She displayed, however, little of the great histrionic ability which was to develop in her daughter. In fact, Sarah Bernhardt never completely satisfied herself from which side of the family she derived her talent. Her father’s relations, from what little she learned of them, were comfortable, mediocre middle-class people in the French provinces—with German or Dutch connections, to be sure, but with no “acting blood” as far as she could discover.
The Van Hard family, however, was an offshoot of the Kinsberger clan, who owned circuses and theatres in Northern Europe before Napoleon’s day, and who later developed into wholesale dealers in grain. When Napoleon invaded Poland, in fact, a Kinsberger supplied him with grain for his horses. The exact relationship of this Kinsberger to Sarah she never properly knew, but he was probably a cousin of her grandfather.
Away back therefore in this maternal line, there probably existed someone with a talent for the theatre. Whether the ancestor in question ever used it is not on record. We know that her grandfather was a performer in a Dutch circus, but we do not know whether he was a clown or an animal-tamer.
In Frankfort, Julie Bernard, the modiste, met a young Frenchman, a courier in the diplomatic corps, and a wild love affair followed, which culminated in the girl following the young man to Paris. There they continued their liaison for less than a month, however, since the courier’s parents, people of noble birth, stepped in and forbade him ever to see the little German girl again. He left her without warning, and without money.
For weeks afterwards little Julie, a stranger in a strange land and speaking little French, lived as best she might. Paris is a hard city now, for the unprotected girl; it was harder then. Often the German waif came perilously near starvation. Once, according to a story that she later on in life related to Jeanne, her second daughter, who told it to Sarah, she tried to commit suicide by throwing herself under the wheels of a passing coach. But she had misjudged the distance and the wheels passed within inches of her.
What she did to eke out a bare living in those terrible days we do not know. It is unlikely that she ever confided the whole story to her daughters—even to Jeanne, her favourite. What is known is that she continued to make hats whenever she could save sufficient sous to buy the material, and perhaps she sang or danced in the cabarets of the quarter; but this is unlikely, because of her ignorance of French. Whatever she did, no one now can blame her.
Eventually, she struck up an acquaintance with a law student, who was registered on the books of the University of Paris as Edouard Bernhardt. The family name of this man, according to what Sarah learned later, was de Thérard, and his baptismal name was “Paul.”
The exact reasons for the dual nomenclature I cannot give. Sarah herself knew of the matter only vaguely. I suggested that de Thérard was the student’s right name, but that he carried on his liaison with Julie under the name of Bernhardt. Sarah admitted this was a plausible inference, but insisted that the attorney for her father’s estate always referred to him as Bernhardt.