Yet she confided in me. She was at times hard-pressed for somebody to whom she could tell her secrets. She knew that I would keep my promise never to relate them during her lifetime, and I know she told them to me because she realised that one day even the most intimate details of her life would belong by right to posterity.
This great actress with Jewish, German, French and Flemish (and probably also Gypsy) blood in her veins, was born into that condition of life which even to-day spells ruin, hate, despair and poverty for the great majority. In those days illegitimacy was almost an insuperable obstacle to recognition and success.
To the fact that the union of her mother and father was never blessed by holy matrimony may with justice be ascribed the impunity with which she was assailed during the first forty or fifty years of her life by all manner of critics, high and low. No less than three books or pamphlets were written attacking her before she had attained her fortieth year.
Articles in the Parisian press were sometimes so virulent as to be inconceivable, when it is remembered that the object of their venom was the world’s greatest actress, the “Divine Sarah.” Every blackmailing penny-a-liner in Paris essayed to make Sarah pay him tribute at some time or another. I do not think that she ever paid, but I do know that the fits of rage and despair into which she was thrown after reading these attacks often made her so ill that for days her understudy was obliged to play her part.
Her long fight to keep the truth of her birth from being published is known. In telling me one day of the sordid circumstances to which she owed her appearance in the world she pledged me to secrecy during her lifetime. I have kept that pledge, and it is only because she gave me express permission to write this book after her death, and because it is time that the world knew the true story of this extraordinary genius, that I tell it now.
The “Divine” Sarah was divine only in her inspiration; the “immortal” Sarah was immortal solely in her art. The real Sarah, the Sarah whom her intimates knew and adored, was not so much a divinity as an idol; a woman full of vanity and frailty, dominated since birth by ambitious egoism and a determination to become famous.
She was the supreme woman of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but it was not her supremacy or her position at the pinnacle of theatrical success that made her lovable. She was loved, not because she was a saint but because she was not a saint; for to err is human and to be human is to be loved. Even on the stage her art was natural—she did not pose, she lived.
In the history of the Christian world only one other woman was born under a greater handicap than was Sarah Bernhardt, and few women ever rose to a similar fame. Yet Sarah, even at the height of her career, did things which were justly condemned by strict-living people and would not have been tolerated in anyone else’s case.
Consider this woman. She was born to an unwed Jewish mother whose birth-place was Berlin. Her father was a French provincial lawyer, a profligate, who afterwards became a world-traveller.
She was born a Jewess, baptized a Catholic. By birth she was French, and by marriage she was Greek.