Sarah was then eighteen years old. From that day on she was free of maternal control, and a few weeks later she secured a minor part at the Gymnase. After playing this, she was promised a leading part in a play called Launching a Wife, but this promise was not kept. In her anger, Sarah left the theatre, packed her trunk, and, with less than a thousand francs, left suddenly for Spain.
In Madrid she developed a passion for bull-fighting. At one moment, according to Caroline, her maid, she became engaged to Juan Lopez, a famous matador, but at a dinner given to celebrate the engagement, which was attended by famous personalities of the corrida, Lopez drank too copiously of the strong vintages of Spain, and Sarah, disgusted, left him and the dinner party and returned to her hotel. This incident decided her return to Paris, and, borrowing the necessary money from the manager of the hotel, who had known her father, she left the next day.
This was the first of two mysterious visits Sarah paid to Spain. Of the second, which occurred some eleven years later, practically nothing is known.
Now began the most painful period of Sarah Bernhardt’s life. No longer able to face the daily tirades of her mother and her aunts, who called her lazy, idle and wilful, she left the former’s flat and took one of her own in the rue Duphot, close by the Madeleine.
She drifted away from her family and the friends of her childhood and made questionable acquaintances in the fast-living set where her beauty, originality and wit made her much sought after. She became a well-known figure in certain salons and in the restaurants à la mode.
Now and again she played small parts in various theatres, but long intervals occurred between the occasions on which she worked. Her figure remained excessively slender, boyish and agile. It never became really full, but its slenderness was less noticeable after she had given birth to her son, Maurice. It then to some extent rounded out, only to become thin again when she was forty, at which epoch she invented the shoulder-length glove to conceal the skeleton-like outline of her arms.
The birth of her son was the event which changed Sarah’s whole life. It gave her something to live for. Until then she had been a wilful, spoiled, eccentric girl, given to tremendous fits of temper which were invariably followed by prolonged periods of despondency.
She had few intimates, and the friends who gathered round her were not of the sort likely to set her feet in the right direction. She had spells of strenuous energy, which would be succeeded by fits of laziness lasting sometimes for months, during which time she would live parsimoniously on small sums borrowed from stage acquaintances or from her mother’s friend, the Duc de Morny, who still remained faithful to the child for whom he had done so much.
Nothing, unless it was her eccentricity, distinguished her from the hundreds of other lovely girls at that time adorning the Paris stage. She had given up her attempts at painting, after moderate successes gained at several salons; the passion for modelling had not yet seized her, and, although she had undoubtedly immense talent for acting, she neglected to develop it, with the result that her theatrical engagements were few and far between.
She and her young sister Jeanne, then aged only fourteen, would often be seen at public balls of the better class, dancing with a cohort of young men, amongst whom were included some of the wildest members of society. She was frequently a guest at smart but somewhat questionable entertainments in the homes of titled acquaintances, whose riches were expressed in the luxury and the beautiful women with whom they surrounded themselves, and in the amount of rare wines they and their friends consumed.