Maurice Rostand is a peculiar individual to look at, and there are many stories about him; but there is no doubt about it—he is Edmond Rostand’s son and a worthy successor of his great father. Maurice Rostand is a genius. And Sarah Bernhardt was the first to recognise genius in him, as she had been the first to recognise it in his father.
Let me read to you what Maurice Rostand wrote the day that Sarah Bernhardt died:
“Since yesterday, Poesy and her Poets are in mourning. The muse of Shakespeare and of Musset carries crêpe upon his shoulder of gold! Phèdre has died a second time! And a poet feels in the shadows about him a thousand wounded heroines who cry; and their immortal verses, like useless bees, search in vain for lips whereon to rest!
“Permit me, however, to render homage to Her who has taken with her to a radiant tomb all the lyricism of an epoch! Permit me to render homage to the living poesy of Sarah Bernhardt!
“Yes, she herself was the théâtre poétique! The heroes of poets, on the dangerous road of the centuries are in danger of succumbing, and more than one disincarnated heroine would not reach the far country without the helping hand of genius such as Hers.
“To affirm their existence, it is necessary from time to time that a heart of fire and passion cause their passions and their pains to live again. Lorenzaccio, the young débauché, for having one night taken this voice of crystal, is launched to more than eternity! The sister of Ariane and her great sob of bête divine fills the world more profoundly.
“The Poets are not so niggardly that they do not recognise to what horizons a voice like that can hurl their songs. You knew it, Musset? You knew it, my father!... Thou knowest it, my heart.
“I write on the first midnight of her death, her first glacial night, when shaken by Her I have contracted from her passage an insulation which is the proof itself of her astra. This insulation the whole of an epoch has received, and the trace of her passage has glorified the poets, even when she was not saying their verse. The beauty and the genius of Sarah Bernhardt made the shadow of Herself penetrate into all the arts she epitomised. Who knows in what measure the genius of Gabriele d’Annunzio has not warmed itself at that Great Flame? I have recognised in more than one of these sisters of voluptuousness and of fever She who was Divinity in La Ville Morte! One finds her everywhere. Here in a poem by Swinburne; there in prose by Wilde, in an arabesque by Beardsley, in a motif by Claude Debussy, in a song of Maeterlinck....
“Burn, immortal tapers, before her great Memory!”
Who shall say that this was not the voice of Edmond Rostand, living again through the charmèd pen of his son?
CHAPTER XXX
Sarah signed the lease with the civic authorities of Paris to run the Théâtre de l’Opéra Comique, on the Place du Châtelet, in November, 1898. She immediately changed the name to Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, and on January 18, 1899, she opened it with Adrienne Lecouvreur.
This was a curtain-raiser, so to speak, and it soon gave place to L’Aiglon, which has been consistently included in that theatre’s répertoire ever since.
By a singular irony of coincidence L’Aiglon was being played at the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt on that sad night, the twenty-sixth of March, 1923, when the world of art and drama was thrown into mourning by her death.
It was at the Théâtre de l’Opéra Comique, it will be remembered, where Sarah saw her first play as a little girl. And it was there that she played her last.