“She is the sun, the moon and the stars!” he would exclaim. “She is Queen of the World! She is divine!”
Sometimes these verbal extravagances reached Sarah’s ears, but she never believed he had uttered them! This was comprehensible enough, for when he was with her his attitude was as different as possible.
On some occasions he actually treated her as an inferior! He would criticise her dress, her manner of doing her hair, her acting, her views on any subject, her deportment, her speech. He was always finding fault with her, and Sarah would fly into the most frightful rages when he carried his sarcasms too far.
A hundred times she would cast him from her, with stormy admonitions never to come near her again, a hundred times she declared violently that she could not bear the sight of him, despised him, and refused to take such treatment from anybody, let alone a “Greek Gypsy.” This was her pet piece of invective, for, as she was aware, it had the merit of piercing Damala’s thick hide. As a matter of fact, Damala was every inch an aristocrat, even though he was a particularly degenerate one.
In reply to these wild outbreaks on Sarah’s part, Damala would adopt a peculiarly irritating attitude. He would take her at her word, leave her, and then send a note to the effect that he was glad to have rid himself at last of such an incubus!
Then he would stay away from her until she came to him and begged to be forgiven. That was what he wished and liked; that was the pleasure his liaison with Sarah Bernhardt gave him—the idea of a proud and beautiful creature, idolised by two continents, crawling to him, Damala, on her knees, for forgiveness!
He would let people know about it, too.
“I had my proud Sarah on her knees last night,” he would say, “but I refused to forgive her; she has not yet been punished enough!”
What a brute the man was—but how well he knew women!
The worse he treated her, the more she became his slave. The more sarcastic he became, the humbler was she. It had from the first been a struggle between two arrogant natures, and Damala had won—for the time being. There came a day, however, when his victory seemed empty enough.