Within six months Sarah herself was at the Front, playing from an armchair for the poilus who were battling to check the invader.
She was then seventy-one years old.
CHAPTER XXXI
When she was asked by a journalist in 1898 to describe her “ideal” Sarah Bernhardt replied:
“My ideal? But I am still pursuing it! I shall pursue it until my last hour, and I feel that in the supreme moment I shall know the certainty of attaining it beyond the tomb.”
In these few words lie the expression of Sarah Bernhardt’s whole life.
Indefinable as perhaps her ideal was, it was the star that guided her throughout her long career. It was that grasping after the unattainable, that desire to take the one more step ahead, that culte du parfait, as Rostand expressed it, that inspired her battles and illuminated her art.
Shortly after she moved to the Boulevard Pereire, she purchased the Fort des Poulains, on Belle Isle-sur-Mer, on the coast of Brittany, and here she spent the summers of her convalescence, surrounded by faithful friends and members of her family.
She built a magnificent house at Belle Isle, and another building on the farm adjoining it. This she called “Sarah’s Fort,” and it was consecrated to the great tragedienne. Here she would spend hours in the company of her son, or with Jules Lemaître, or some other trusted friend, and here she was safe from the cares and worries of her business in Paris—for she still retained the active management of the Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt.