“Yes,” said Sarah. “I must make money, and the Americans seem to have it all!” Even at this period that was the generally accepted idea!
“Madame,” said Irving, “what you say saddens me extremely! America is a country of barbarians! They know nothing about the theatre, and yet they presume to dictate to us! If I were you I would not go to America, madame! What you will gain in dollars, you will lose in heart-throbs at their ignorance of your art!”
Irving himself, however, went to America a few years later.
Sarah brought back from the United States six hundred thousand francs, a variety of animals—including a lynx, which bit her chambermaid and had to be killed a week after its arrival in Paris—a profound respect for American enterprise, and the reputation she had long been hoping to make for La Dame aux Camélias.
When Alexandre Dumas was told of her intention to play La Dame in New York he cried disgustedly: “That’s it! Try my play on the barbarians!”
As a matter of fact, Booth’s Theatre, where Sarah opened in America, was filled on the first night with almost the entire French colony in New York, which was a considerable one. Practically the only Americans there were the critics, and a few wealthy society people who held regular boxes. The play chosen for the first night was Adrienne Lecouvreur.
The next day Abbey, the impresario, rushed into Sarah’s bedroom—Sarah usually received her business folk in the morning while still in bed—waving a bundle of papers. His face wore the look of one stricken by some grievous blow.
Stopping short, he gave Sarah a look of indescribable anguish, and then sat abruptly down and mopped his face. He could not speak.
Sarah sat up in bed, fright on her countenance.
“What is it? What is it? The theatre has been burned down, and my costumes are destroyed?”