Throughout her life she was, first, an actress; secondly, a mother; thirdly, a great, a tempestuous lover.
She was a sculptress of extraordinary merit; she was a painter whose pictures were exhibited in the Paris Salons before she became famous as an actress; she was a writer with many books to her credit.
A temperamental morbidity was, I think, supreme in her character, although many who knew her placed ambition first. After these came mother-love, vanity, affection and malice. She made more enemies than friends; more people feared her than loved her; yet her life was replete with great sentimental episodes with some of the most famous men of her time.
The happiest period of her life was during the infancy of her son Maurice; her greatest joy was in his abiding affection. The bitterest period of her life was her old age, when she was surrounded by jackals whose affection for her was chiefly purchased by the money she mistakenly lavished on them; and who reduced her to such a penniless condition that, practically on her death-bed, she was forced to pose for an American film company, so that her debts and funeral expenses might in part be covered.
Fifty years of constant association taught me the truth about Sarah Bernhardt. Others might have known her longer, but none knew her better. None certainly could speak with greater authority of her intimate life. I had the details of her birth, her life, and her loves that are here set forth from her own lips, and from the lips of others who figured in her career.
The first time I met Sarah Bernhardt will live in my memory for ever. A child of eight, I was taken to visit the actress—then beginning to taste the first fruits of success—in her loge at the Odéon Theatre.
I remember my fright as we crossed the vast, cavernous stage, on our way to the stairs which led to the dressing-rooms. Enormous pieces of scenery looked as though they might topple on one at any moment. Cardboard statues, which to my childish imagination seemed forbidding demons, leered at me from the shadows. Rough, uncouth scene-shifters, acolytes of this painted Hades, jostled me as we passed. The great height of the stage, ending in a gloomy mystery of ropes, pulleys and platforms which hinted at occult rites, awed me and made me feel smaller than I really was (and I was very small!).
From time to time voices, bawling from the gloom but whence exactly I neither knew nor could discover, echoed and re-echoed through the shadows. The curtain was up, and beyond the darkened proscenium I could faintly discern the four-storied auditorium, awesome in its resounding emptiness.
Whom could we be going to visit here, I wondered, and clung tighter to my mother’s protecting skirts, while she inquired her way of a black-coated gentleman, who appeared with disconcerting suddenness as we reached the foot of the stairs. But I dared not voice the question, and now we mounted a bewildering number of steps, each bringing a more mysterious vista than the last.
Finally we reached the top of the stairs and my mother led me down a long passageway, lined with doors which had once been painted white but which were now a dirty cream colour. Some of these doors had simply numbers; others bore a name inscribed on a piece of pasteboard, inserted in a metal holder.