Damala always declared this version to be true—that it was Sarah who proposed to him and not he to her. Moreover, in fits of temper, he would tell her so before the whole company.
“If I had not been crazy I would not have been caught so easily!” he would cry, beating the air with his arms.
By marrying Damala, Sarah thought to bind him to her. It was the supreme mistake of her life. Instead of keeping him she lost him.
She simply exchanged a lover for a husband, and many women have found to their cost what that means. Sarah’s disillusionment came only three weeks later.
Until the marriage, Damala had been more or less faithful to Sarah—as faithful as a nature like his allowed. But he had scarcely stepped down from the altar with his bride, than he began betraying her right and left.
He demanded that she should change her stage name to “Sarah Damala” in his honour, and when she refused he walked out of the house and disappeared.
Performances had to be abandoned during the three days he was away. Sarah was absolutely frantic. She was ready to believe anything—that he had deserted her for good, that he had fallen into the Thames, that he had run away to France, that he had committed suicide, that he had gone away with another woman.
This last theory—and Sarah would rather have lost an arm than that it should have been found true—was the correct one. Damala, previous to his marriage and unknown to Sarah, had struck up a friendship with a Norwegian girl whom he had met on board ship. It was with her that he spent those three days, scarcely a week after his marriage to Sarah.
Paris, which had gasped at the news of the wedding, was in spasms of mirth at this new unhappiness which had overtaken Sarah. It so perfectly agreed with what everyone had predicted.
“She is mad!” said Auguste Dane, the writer, when he heard of the marriage through a letter that Berton wrote to me. “He will leave her within a week!”