“I am afraid that you would lose on your bargain,” she said. “Nobody would believe that that was the leg of Sarah Bernhardt!”
In 1887 she made another Grand Tour of Europe, and in the following year left for a tour of the United States and Canada, which she repeated in 1889.
At the conclusion of this latter tour she took over the Porte St. Martin, where she distinguished herself chiefly in the rôles of Jeanne d’Arc and Cléopatra.
In 1893 she acquired the management of the Renaissance Theatre, and in 1894 launched there another great dramatist—Jules Lemaître, whose play, Les Rois, she starred in herself, and in which she obtained a great triumph.
Her friendship with Jules Lemaître was one of the most abiding and beautiful things in her life. It lasted from those successful days at the Renaissance right up to his death, which occurred only a few years before her own.
She helped and encouraged him in his dramatic work, appeared herself in several of his plays, and, in his declining years, invited him for long months to Belle Isle, her home on the shores of Brittany.
Jules Lemaître was the one man with whom she never quarrelled. His was such a perfect character, so sweet a spirit, that a dispute with him would have been impossible.
And now Sarah was growing old herself, even though her spirit was still young. When she produced Les Rois she was just fifty years old.
It was perhaps because her friendship with Jules Lemaître was a spiritual association, rather than a love affair, that it lasted so long. They adored each other, but their mutual interest lay in their work together.
Never a play of Lemaître’s was produced or a criticism of his published which Sarah did not see first; and never a literary effort of Sarah’s saw print without first having been subjected to the kindly criticism of Jules Lemaître.