“Edouard Bernhardt, grandfather of Sarah Bernhardt, was a Jew. He fulfilled the functions of chief oculist to the Court of Austria. He came to St. Aubin-du-Corbier, in Brittany, and there married the Marquise de la Thieulé du Petit-Bois de la Vieuville, by whom he had four daughters and one son: Julie, Rosine, Agathe, Vitty and Edouard. The Marquise died and Edouard Bernhardt married, secondly, Madame Van Berinth, who had been governess to his children. Rosine and Julie (mother of Sarah Bernhardt) ran away to Havre, where they obtained work as saleswomen in a confectionery establishment. Their father sent for them, and they fled to London. Shortly afterwards they returned to Havre, where Julie lived as the wife of a man named Morel, a ship-builder. They had fourteen children, of whom Sarah, born at Paris, 125, Faubourg St. Honoré, on October 23, 1840, was one.”
This seems circumstantial but it is absolutely inaccurate. I give it here, together with the evidence to contravert it, because so many people believe the above to be the true story of Sarah’s birth.
The rebutting evidence consists, first, in Sarah’s own denial, which was published almost immediately after the story itself, and, secondly, in the fact that the certificate of her baptism, in which the truth was certainly given, states that she was born, not in the Faubourg St. Honoré, but in the rue de l’Ecole de Médecine—not on October 23, 1840, but on October 22, 1844; that her father was not “Monsieur Morel,” but George Bernhardt; and that her mother was not “Julie Bernhardt” but Julie Van Hard.
And, as I have said, Julie had only four children, not fourteen!
The same paper (La Rampe) says that Sarah was baptised at the age of eight years. When she was eight, Sarah was still a Jewess and at the school of which we shall shortly give an account. Sarah was baptised, under the name of Rosine, five years later, at the Grandchamps Convent, Versailles.
When she was seven, then, and five months before Jeanne was born, Sarah was taken to Madame Fressard’s school, at 18, rue Boileau, Auteuil. The building still exists, but it has been turned into a private sanatorium.
Sketch of Thérèse Meilhan (afterwards Mme. Pierre Berton) by Georges Clairin, 1881.
The journey to Auteuil, which one can now make from the rue St. Honoré in twenty minutes by underground railway or in half an hour by tramway or motor-bus, was then quite a formidable affair. Paris was left behind at the Avenue Montaigne, and from there the way lay along the banks of the smiling Seine, with only a roadside estaminet bordering what is now one of the most aristocratic streets of all Paris. It took over an hour for the coach to reach the rue Boileau, in the little village of Auteuil. Sarah, needless to say, was enchanted with the journey and with the happy prospects ahead of her.
It was quite a ceremony, the installation of Sarah in her new home. Besides Julie and Aunt Rosine, there was a General and another man, who represented Sarah’s father, then absent in Lisbon. They were very pompous and important, and inclined to exaggerate the wealth that was so evident in the rich trappings of Aunt Rosine’s coach.