This theatre was then in the Place du Chatelet, and little did the child dream, as she entered it, that twenty-five years later she herself would lease it from the city and call it the “Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt”—which is its name to-day. Thus, the last theatre in which she acted was also that in which she saw her first play.
Sarah fell an immediate victim to the theatre. The piece she saw that night—Sarah herself did not remember its name—held her enthralled. It was necessary for her companions to drag her away after the curtain had fallen on the last act.
She had been transported to a new world, an unreal sphere of delight. For days, for weeks thereafter she spoke of little else. She besieged her mother with demands to be taken to the theatre again. The latter, however, was too wrapped up in her own pleasure-loving life to take much heed in the desires of her wilful daughter.
One day Sarah went off to the art school, where she was learning to paint—her ambition to become a nun was almost forgotten now, and she would spend feverish hours in preparation for the career she was convinced was ahead of her as a great portrait-painter—and did not return until the next morning.
All that night searchers hunted throughout the city for the truant; the police were informed and it was even suggested that the Seine should be dragged, for it was remembered that to come home from the art school, which it was ascertained she had left at the usual hour, it was necessary for her to cross the Pont Neuf.
At nine o’clock the next morning a tired, sleepy and very dirty Sarah returned to her mother’s flat and, in reply to a storm of questions and reproaches from her almost frantic mother, explained that she had spent the night in the Opéra-Comique.
She had gone there direct from her art school and had succeeded in entering the theatre unobserved. Hiding under a seat in one of the galleries, she had waited until the play began and had then appropriated a chair. After the play, seized with panic, she was afraid to go out with the rest of the audience and had hidden herself again, only leaving when the doors were opened to the cleaners in the morning.
After that the Duke gave her regular tickets for the theatre, and she saw many plays. Frequently she would visit the same theatre a dozen times, learn several of the parts by heart and surprise her friends by reciting them.
It was at this period of her life that Sarah began to have friends of the opposite sex, but she assured me that she loved none of them.
“I had no foolishness of that kind in my head!” she told me on one occasion. “My mother’s house was always full of men, and the more I saw of them the less I liked them.