She was exasperated by Sarah’s attitude towards the life she herself loved so well. Julie would remain for hours at table, surrounded by wits and half-wits, dandies and hangers-on at court, proud in the assumption that she was an uncrowned queen. At such parties Sarah would sit speechless, unable or unwilling to join in the coarse sallies of her mother’s guests. Her mother used constantly to refer to her in the presence of others as “That stupid child,” or “That queer little creature.”
When she had an exceptionally important personage to entertain, Julie would forbid Sarah to show herself, fearful that her daughter’s “stupidity” would injure her own chances.
As constantly as she blamed Sarah, she praised and lavished affection on Jeanne, her “little Jeannot.” Jeanne seemed to take naturally after her mother in all things, and when she grew older she even surpassed her mother by the frivolous way in which she lived.
The sad story of Jeanne will be told later, but it may be said that she had none of Sarah’s vast intelligence, none of her good taste, none of her tremendous capacity for affection. Jeanne was without talent—a pretty but vapid shell. Her father was not, of course, Edouard Bernhardt.
Régine, on the other hand, took after Sarah, who practically brought her up. But Régine had Sarah’s temper and wild, erratic temperament without Sarah’s talent and Sarah’s stubborn will. Where Sarah was firm and unyielding, Régine was merely obstinate. Where Sarah was clever, Régine was only “smart.” She was a “pocket edition of Sarah,” as her mother once remarked, without Sarah’s depth of character.
Two months after Sarah attained her sixteenth birthday, her mother moved to No. 265, rue St. Honoré, not far from the Théâtre Français—better known as the Comédie Française—and Sarah delighted in loitering about the stage entrance and making friends with the actors and actresses who passed in and out.
Sometimes she passed whole afternoons and evenings thus employed. Occasionally she would run errands for her idols, to be recompensed by a free ticket to the balcony. On one never-to-be-forgotten occasion Jules Bondy, one of the actors, took the eager little red-head into the theatre itself and installed her on a case in the wings, from which she could see the play without herself being seen. It was Molière’s Le Médecin Malgré Lui, and from that time dated Sarah’s love for the works of the actor-playwright to whom the Comédie Française is dedicated.
In later years Sarah played Molière several times, but she made no notable success in this author’s works.
Sarah always longed to be a comédienne; she might have been a great one, in fact, but for her greater gifts for tragedy, which prevented managers from risking her appearance in lighter drama. Great comédiennes of merit are less rare than great tragediennes. In fact, I doubt whether there is living to-day an actress who will ever be called Sarah Bernhardt’s equal in tragedy.
Shortly after the household moved, Sarah fell down the stairs and broke her leg. An infection developed and it was two months before she was able to walk. When she finally recovered she was thinner than ever—a veritable skeleton. Her face maintained its eerie beauty, the large blue eyes retained their occasional fire, but the flush of fever relieved her habitual pallor and beneath her neck her body was little more than a bag of bones.