“La mode!” she exclaimed indifferently. “Je m’en fiche de la mode! Let fashion follow me!”
And frequently fashion did. Sarah was thin, narrow-chested, bony in places and walked with a stride. The fashion was for plump women, of rounded and gracious line. Sarah remained totally indifferent to the fashion, and within a few years she found herself a leader of the mode, with plumpness and bouffonerie beating a protesting retreat.
When she was forty, her arms had grown so thin that they had to be concealed, even with evening dress, so she invented the shoulder-length glove, which immediately jumped into fashion.
She launched several kinds of corsets, one of which still bears her name. Her footwear was seized on and copied extensively. She was the first woman in France to wear high leather buttoned boots with an ordinary street dress.
She was the first woman to bid her dressmaker insert jewels in her slippers. She was the first woman to wear ostrich plumes as an ornament to her evening coiffure. She was the first woman audaciously to defy convention, and receive her friends in her painter’s garb of silken pyjamas!
She did this, she did that, she did anything she pleased. Whenever anybody started a great outcry against her, others would shrug their shoulders and exclaim, “Mais, c’est Sarah!” She was Sarah. That was answer enough. If ever a woman in France has been a law unto herself, it was Sarah at that time—a whole lexicon of law, in fact.
Naturally, she got into numerous scrapes. She was thrice sued for debt, as a result of her lavish expenditure during the building of her house in the rue Fortuny. Whenever she saw anything she liked, she could not rest until she had acquired it. Her salary at the Comédie was only 20,000 francs a year—only £800, even at that time—yet with this, and the small sums left her by her father and by several relatives, she managed to live in a style and with an ostentation surpassed by but few persons of her age.
The furniture in her house had been acquired absolutely regardless of cost, and a lot of it was taken away again when she did not pay for it. Dealers were glad to sell things to her, and to take their money as and when she paid them, for the fact that Sarah Bernhardt had bought an article was certain to start a fad for it.
Her dresses, her hats and her shoes never cost her anything. In later years I even heard it stated that her dressmaker actually paid her to wear his creations! It was a triumph for any dealer to be able to say, “Sarah Bernhardt bought one like that,” or, “Sarah Bernhardt was wearing one like that yesterday,” or, “Sarah Bernhardt has one in her dining-room.”
The mural decorations and the works of art in her house, fortunately, did not cost Sarah anything. They were mostly gifts of such great friends as Georges Clairin, Louise Abbema—of whose paintings, when she died, Sarah possessed more than eighty—Sir Edward Burne-Jones—who had been caught in the siege of Paris, and had then met and fallen captive to Sarah—Ernest Duez, Théodore Fantin-Latour, Maxime Guyon, Hector Giacomelli, Réné Raoul Griffon, Graham Robertson, Luc Olivier Merson, Germain Fabien Brest, John Lewis Brown, Robert Fleury, Vastagh Gezah, Alfred Stevens, and many other great and famous artists of the brush.