Not content with this almost superhuman labour, she was arranging to play with the Guitrys, at the Théâtre Edouard VII. when, just before Christmas 1922, she was seized with an attack of her old enemy, uremia.
I was among those who called at the little house in the Boulevard Pereire on the night of December 31, when it was thought that she must die. But she rallied, and though all her friends and her family and she herself knew that it was but a temporary reprieve, she insisted on going back to work. Not this time, on the stage, but in her own house before the motion-picture camera.
A syndicate organised by a young American in Paris and directed by another American, Leon Abrams, made her an offer of, I think it was, 5,000 francs per day. She was, as usual, penniless, and the offer was a godsend.
She posed for the film, with her chimpanzee, in the studio at the rear of her house.
So needy was she that, just before lapsing into unconsciousness for the last time, she demanded that the moving-picture men should be admitted to the bedchamber.
“They can film me in bed,” she said, her voice scarcely audible, so weak was she. “Now, don’t object,” as Professor Vidal remonstrated, “they pay me 5,000 francs each time I pose!”
Her insistence on fulfilling her contract to play in this cinema play was, according to the doctors, the cause of her last collapse. It was more than her strength could stand. She was really dying when she faced the camera on the last two occasions. But her indomitable will triumphed over her body almost to the last, and, until the dreadful malady paralysed her, she continued acting.
My tears are falling as I write these last lines. They are difficult sentences to fashion. I am no poet, and words could not add to the drama of that night when the divine Call-boy came for Sarah Bernhardt.
She died at five minutes past eight o’clock, her snow-white head pillowed in the arms of her son, Maurice.
“Be a good boy ... Maurice.” These were her last words.... The curtain descended....