“They took me for your boy pupil, and gave me a bed with the cow in the barn!” she told him.
During the first twenty-five years of her career, Sarah Bernhardt earned considerably more than £200,000. Most of this was made after she left the Comédie Française to become her own manager. At the Porte St. Martin, when she leased it, her profits were 400,000 francs annually.
But she made her largest sums on tour. Altogether she brought back from the United States alone considerably more than six million dollars.
But she was one of the most extravagant women who ever lived. She nearly always spent more than her income, and, when she was in debt and besieged by creditors (as often happened) she would organise another Grand Tour of America, or Australia, or Brazil, or Europe—anywhere that promised her sufficient money.
This was the real reason for her repeated tours, which made her internationally famous.
She was still, despite the fact that she was advancing towards middle age, wonderfully beautiful and full of high spirits.
In fact, these high spirits sometimes translated themselves into practical jokes, the point of which we might be pardoned sometimes for not seeing.
When I was a young girl, and none too rich, she saw me with my shoes sodden from walking in the rain.
“Let me put them to dry,” she exclaimed, removing them gently. Then, in a burst of her peculiar humour, she threw them in the fire! And I had to walk home in my stockinged feet. She promised to buy me another pair of shoes, but I am bound to say that she never did.
When Catulle Mendès gave Sarah the principal part in Les Mères Ennemies, he was the friend of Augusta Holmes, the celebrated composer. They were both poor, and with his first profits from the piece Mendès bought his friend a green cloth gown, with long sleeves and a high collar.