“I have always hated the piano!” Sarah told me once in 1890. “I think it is because Mlle. Clarisse, my teacher, used to rap me on the fingers with a little cane she carried to mark the tempo. Whenever I hit a false note, down would come the cane, and then I would fly into a fury, charge the poor lady like a small tigress and try to pull her hair out. She did not remain to teach me very long and she was never replaced!”
The next candidate to Sarah’s hand was a worthy glove-maker, named Trudeau. He was wealthy, as wealth was counted then, and while not precisely the son-in-law Julie would have wished, he would doubtless have been welcome enough in the family had he succeeded in breaking down the barriers Sarah had erected before her heart.
Sarah’s chief objection to Trudeau was that he was too fat. Then, again, he was smooth-shaven, and it was accounted very ugly in those days not to have a moustache. Clean-shaven men, on entering a theatre, would often receive a jeering reception from the audience. The hirsute fashion of that period was long side-whiskers, a short, double-pointed beard, and a pointed, waxed moustache.
Julie did not urge her daughter to marry Trudeau. She probably knew that any such effort would have been doomed to failure from the start. Trudeau, however, laid determined siege to the young girl for several months, during which he sent her, among other expensive gifts, a brooch of the sort that was afterwards known as a “la Vallière.” This brooch was among those recently sold by auction in Paris.
To all his many proposals of marriage, however, Sarah turned a deaf ear. She would taunt him about his figure, which was short and broad, and above all she would jeer at his lack of a moustache.
“Never will I marry a man who cannot grow hair on his face!” she once declared.
He persisted, until one day Sarah called him a “fat old pig” and threw the contents of a glass of champagne in his face. Then he accepted his congé, and went out of Sarah’s life for ever.
Following Trudeau came a chemist, who had a shop at the corner of the Boulevard and the rue de la Michodière. He had been captivated by the red-haired long-legged youngster who used to come to him to have prescriptions filled. I do not recall the name of this man, but I know that when Sarah refused him he consoled himself less than a month later by marrying a widow. Years later Sarah broke a parasol over his head, when he refused to promise not to supply her sister Jeanne with morphine.
Sarah Bernhardt.