“Cut it off!” she said.
When they laid her on the operating table, they tried to cheer her with words of encouragement, but Sarah’s brave smile shone wanly.
“I have already faced death seven times,” she said. “If this is when my light is to go out, I shall not be afraid!”
She was in a terrible condition, not only physically but financially. The operation was a success, but she had not a cent with which to pay the clinic or the doctors. The Rothschilds and their friends finally came to the rescue.
“All my life, it seems, I have been making money for others to spend!” she said, but with no complaint in her voice.
She faced her future then, penniless after the millions she had earned, and with one leg, as courageously as she had returned to face a jeering Paris after her first visit to London.
By the irony of fate her sick-room at Bordeaux was filled with flowers worth literally thousands of pounds, that had been sent from all quarters of France by her worshippers.
“If I only had the money these flowers cost!” she remarked resignedly.
The war was on, and the ambulance in which she was being taken to the station on her way back to Paris overtook regiment after regiment of soldiers on their way to the Front.
“La glorieuse blessée,” the papers called her, and the soldiers thronged about the ambulance and her car on the train, taking the flowers that decorated their bayonets and throwing them at the indomitable genius who sat inside it with tears in her eyes.