“So be it!” she cried cheerfully. “Jean told me that I should hear your poem, and if you cannot read it to me anywhere except in my carriage, why you may do it there!”
And she got into the carriage with him, and it drove off—much to our amusement, of course.
But we were not astonished. Nothing that Sarah Bernhardt did had the power to astonish us any more.
The poem which Rostand read to Sarah as they drove about in her carriage—it was the first of a score of similar rides, for which it established the precedent—was part of his play, La Princesse Lointaine, one of the sweetest poetical dramas ever penned.
Sarah produced it six months later and it was a great success. In fact, it made Rostand as a playwright, and paved the way for his triumph in L’Aiglon.
He was enormously grateful to Sarah and his gratitude was the foundation of his love for her.
Sarah’s association with the Rostands did not cease with the death of the great Edmond. When he died he directed that if ever his famous property, Arnaga, near Biarritz, was sold, Sarah Bernhardt should be given the first opportunity to acquire it. But when it finally went under the hammer it was bought by a South American, and this happened a few weeks after Sarah died.
When it was first put up for auction there were no bidders, since the reserve price had been set at two million francs.
“I am too poor even to purchase a lot in a cemetery,” Sarah said at the time, and, in fact, she was at that moment having difficulties over payments for work on the tomb built for herself at Belle Isle—a tomb in which she will perhaps never lie because, five days before her death, the property was sold. There is talk now that the purchasers, who are transforming the property into a Bernhardt Museum, will petition that her body may be brought to its ordained resting-place.
Sarah early recognised the budding genius in the boy Maurice Rostand, son of Edmond. She encouraged him in every way, and she returned to the stage after the Great War in order personally to appear in his La Gloire, which is conceded by critics to be a masterpiece.