For the next two years little Sarah was an invalid, capable of walking only a step or two at a time. She passed this period sitting in a great arm-chair, unable to move without pain, dreaming childish dreams of splendour for the future.
“Never once,” said Sarah in speaking of this period to me, “did I include in those dreams a suspicion that I would one day be an actress. I had never seen the inside of a theatre, and although many actors and actresses were among the friends constantly in and out of my mother’s home at 22, rue de la Michodière—a rather meretriciously furnished flat with gilded salons and musty bedrooms—I was shy with them and they with me, and learned little from their conversation.
“In fact, the stage and all appertaining to it remained a deep mystery to me for nearly ten years after my accident. My actual going on the stage was an accident—or rather the solution of a problem which had worried my mother almost to death.”
How this came about will be described in a later chapter.
At seven years of age, Sarah Bernhardt had so far recovered that she could walk and move without difficulty, and there was serious discussion about sending her to school. Her volatile mother, absent for the most part during Sarah’s convalescence, nevertheless resented the presence of the child in her home as irksome, and chafed to place her where she would be in good hands and could do without maternal supervision and attention.
As a matter of fact, at the age of seven Sarah could neither read nor write, and had never heard of arithmetic!
When her mother explained that she was to go to live in a place where there were hundreds of other little girls, who were to become her playmates, Sarah was overjoyed. During the terrible two years when she could not run about like other children, Sarah had had no playmates whatever; and, during her airings in her mother’s or her aunt’s carriage, had often wistfully watched other and luckier little girls rolling hoops along the gravelled paths of the Champs Elysées, or in the fields which then fringed what is now the Boulevard de Clichy. She had been an intensely lonely child from her infancy and could scarcely contain her happiness at the thought that at last she was to be as other children, and have little friends with whom she could talk and play as an equal.
Probably the main reason for sending Sarah away at this juncture was the fact that Julie was again about to become a mother.
It may be as well to state here that Julie Bernhardt was the mother of four children including a boy who died. Sarah was the first, Jeanne the second, and Régine the third. More will be told hereafter concerning these two turbulent sisters of the actress. They both lived unfortunate lives and died still more unfortunate deaths.
A report of Sarah’s parentage that has won considerable credence was published by a weekly Paris newspaper in 1886, and re-published again as recently as April 8, 1923, by La Rampe, a Paris theatrical paper. I quote from the latter: