My mention of this first press criticism of Sarah’s work brings to mind the day she brought me, a little girl, into the library at her house 11, Boulevard Malsherbes, and showed me four fat volumes each filled with newspaper clippings, and another one only just begun. On a chair was stacked a collection of envelopes each dated, containing other clippings, and these Sarah showed me how to paste in the book. It was a great honour for me.
Later in the afternoon Maurice Bernhardt, then a small boy, came in and helped me, but I remember that he was more of a nuisance than a help, and he ended by tipping over the paste-pot and making a mess which I had to clean up.
When she died Sarah possessed many of these fat volumes of press-clippings, from every country in the world. It was said that if all the newspaper notices she received during her career could have been placed end to end, they would have reached around the world, and that if all the photographs printed of her could have been stacked in a pile, they would have reached higher than the Eiffel Tower.
Somebody even calculated once that the name Sarah Bernhardt alone had been printed so often in newspapers and magazines, and on bills, programmes and the like, that the letters used would bridge the Atlantic, while the ink would be sufficient to supply the needs of The Times for two months!
I cannot vouch for this, but there can be no doubt whatever that, if the number of times one’s name is printed is a criterion, Sarah Bernhardt was by far the most famous person who has ever lived. For nearly sixty years never a day went by without the words “Sarah Bernhardt” being printed somewhere or other. When she returned from her American tour in 1898, the press-clippings she brought back with her filled a large trunk.
The interesting point in all this is that only a very few writers concerned themselves with her painting and sculpture. Out of all the millions of articles written about her, a bare sixty or seventy concern her capabilities outside the theatre.
If little was known of Sarah the artist, still less was known of Sarah the woman. That is why this book is written.
Thousands of people who loved her as an actress never knew that she had been married! Those who knew that she was a Jewess born were few indeed. Nothing was known of her intimate home life, of her affaires du cœur, of her attempts at authorship, of the many plays she either wrote or revised.
In all the multitudinous clippings in that wonderful collection of hers, how many reveal the fact that Sarah Bernhardt was a certificated nurse? How many persons know that she once studied medicine and was highly proficient in anatomy? How many know that she was a vegetarian, and often said that her long life was due to her horror of meat? How many know that, for many long years, until infirmity intervened, Sarah Bernhardt, the Jewess born, was a practising Catholic, seldom missing her Sunday attendance at Mass?
Is it not extraordinary that so little should really have been known of the most famous woman in the world? Is it not amazing that Sarah was able to conceal her home life under the glorious camouflage of her stage career?