“Give me your handkerchief!” she replied promptly.
Vanderbilt was much taken aback, but took out his handkerchief and gave it to her.
Sarah thanked him. “I shall keep this always,” she told him, “in memory of the time I made Vanderbilt cry!”
When she got back to Paris, she had it framed and hung on the wall of her boudoir, but on one of the several occasions that her furniture was seized for debt, she lost it, and Vanderbilt had meanwhile died.
Theodore Roosevelt, then a very young man, was another of those who met Sarah Bernhardt during her first visit to New York. He was a firm friend of hers until he died, and invariably visited her when he was on one of his trips abroad.
A letter from Roosevelt, extolling her genius, was one of the few she kept and had framed. It hung until the day of her death in the little ante-chamber outside her bedroom.
In this letter the former President said in one passage: “I have altered my plans so as to arrive in Paris after you return from Spain. I could not come to Paris and miss seeing my oldest and best friend there.”
During her tour of America in 1892, Sarah had dinner with Roosevelt, and she loved to recount the experience to her friends on her return to Paris.
“An unforgettable character!” she would say, and then would add: “Ah, but that man and I, we could rule the world!”
They came near to doing it, he on one side as President of the United States, and she, on the other, as the uncrowned Queen of Paris.