Doctors were sent for from a neighbouring village and hasty messages sent to Paris. The only one of the sisters to be found was Rosine, who sent a message to Julie at Brussels, and herself hurried to Brittany. Four days later Julie arrived in Baron Larrey’s coach, which had been driven at top speed all the way from Paris.
From this incident grew Sarah’s nickname, which remained with her all her childhood, “Flower-of-the-Milk.” She was three months recovering from the severe burns she had sustained, and until she died she bore scars to remind her of the accident.
For ever after, Sarah Bernhardt had a horror of fire. She could not bear even to look at one, and would shiver and turn pale when she heard the trumpets and bells of the fire brigade. Yet mother-love conquered this fear when, nearly twenty years later, her flat took fire and she dashed through a barrage of flames to rescue her own baby boy.
When little Sarah recovered, Julie proposed to the nurse, now a widow, that she should leave the Breton farm and live in Paris in a cottage Baron Larrey had taken on the borders of the Seine, at Neuilly. The nurse agreed, and a new existence began for the child on the fringe of the city, where her mother was earning a reputation as a gilded social butterfly.
CHAPTER IV
During the year which followed transfer of nurse and child to Neuilly-sur-Seine Sarah saw her mother but once, and then merely by chance.
Returning from a gay court party near St. Germain the coach, in which Julie was travelling with a resplendent personage the Comte de Tours, broke down just after it had crossed the bridge over the Seine and reached the outskirts of Neuilly. The nearest coach-builder was a mile distant, and while the coachman walked this distance, Julie bethought herself of the neglected child living only a few streets away. So she and the Count daintily picked their way to the cottage, and found Sarah revelling in her bi-weekly bath.
This bath was an extraordinary affair, because it took place in the same tub as the family washing—and probably other washing that the nurse solicited in order to eke out her income. On the principle of killing two birds with one stone, the nurse would make a warm tub of soap-suds, put the linen to be washed into it, and then hoist in baby Sarah!
The sight amused the Count and infuriated Julie, who gave the nurse a sound scolding. Sarah was hastily taken from the tub, dried, clothed and then handed to her fastidious mother, who fondled her in a gingerly way. But the baby failed to recognise the mother who had sacrificed so little for her sake, and burst into a storm of tears, pounding the finely-dressed lady with her puny little fists.