“‘I am going for a long journey and do not expect to return for eight or ten months. When I come back we will consider what is best to be done.’
“Kissing me again, he took his departure and Madame Fressard drew me to her.
“‘I should think you would love your father very, very much,’ she said. ‘He is such a handsome man!’
“‘How can I love him?’ I replied wonderingly. ‘I have never seen him before.’”
A year later Bernhardt had not returned from South America, but he sent Julie a letter, in which he urged that Sarah should be taken from Madame Fressard’s preparatory school and sent to a convent; he suggested Grandchamps Convent, at Versailles. He had written to the Superior, he said, explaining the circumstances, and the latter had replied that if little Sarah was sponsored by one other gentleman, preferably one in Paris, the matter could be arranged. Julie at once asked the Duc de Morny, who agreed to sponsor the child.
In the same letter Bernhardt said that he had made his will, in which he left 20,000 francs to Sarah, providing she had married before the age of twenty-one.
“I do not intend my daughter,” he wrote coldly, “to follow the example of her mother.”
Until she was twenty-one the income from the 20,000 francs was to pay for Sarah’s schooling. Her mother was to pay for her clothes.
Although the letter said that Bernhardt did not expect to return to France for several months, he actually caught the next boat to that which carried his letter, and arrived in Paris just after Sarah had been withdrawn from the school at Auteuil.
This had not been effected without a storm of protest on Sarah’s part. The two years had passed happily at Madame Fressard’s, and she feared the future, surrounded by strange and cold relatives.