Sarah’s morbidity continued to be one of her chief characteristics however. She delighted in going to funerals; and visiting the Morgue, that grim stone building with its fearful rows of corpses exposed on marble slabs, was one of her favourite diversions.
Death had a weird fascination for her. Shortly after she entered the Comédie she had a love affair with an undertaker’s assistant, but she broke off her engagement to him when he refused to allow her to be present at an embalming.
She used to describe the robe she wished to be buried in: “Pure white, with a crimson edging, and with yellow lilies embroidered about the girdle.”
The crimson edging and the embroidery were absent when she was finally laid to rest.
Later on we shall hear again of this morbid streak in the divine actress—how she designed and even slept in the very coffin in which she was buried; how once she shammed dead in her dressing-room at the Odéon to such purpose that a hearse was sent for and the curtain rung down, while a tearful director announced her demise!
Her notorious temper had not left her. If anything, it was more violent than ever. The stage door-keeper at the Comédie on one occasion called her “Young Bernhardt,” omitting the honorary prefix of “Mademoiselle.” Without a word she broke her parasol across the man’s head. Seeing him bleeding, she hurried for water, tore her silk petticoat into pieces, and bathed and bound his wound.
Twenty years later, when her name was beginning to echo round the world, this same door-keeper came to her house and told her that he had lost his position through infirmity and was now at the end of his resources.
With one of those gestures of munificence which mark the tragédienne’s career like flashes of light, Bernhardt turned to her secretary and instructed him to buy the old man a cottage in his native Normandy, and to place a sufficient sum in trust to keep him for the remainder of his life.
Bernhardt made many enemies during her first years on the stage, and some of them remained her adversaries until their deaths. She outlived almost all of them.
The afternoon of her début at the Comédie was a matinée exclusively for professional folk and critics. One of the latter, an old and embittered man named Prioleau, was credited with being almost as powerful as Sarcey. He was the doyen of the critics, and as such occupied a privileged position in the wings.