“I have nothing to add to my previous opinion of Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt, who, it appears, had some success with the noisy students the other night. Her voice is exquisite, certainly, but she is just as certainly not an actress.”
The original means Sarah took to humble Sarcey and to bring him to her side will be described in the next chapter. Meanwhile, he remained her most bitter and most persevering critic.
Sarah Bernhardt in a Scene from La Tosca with Pierre Berton, when their Romance was at its Height.
CHAPTER XI
Out of a multitude of aspiring actresses Sarah Bernhardt, at the age of twenty-four, had jumped into celebrity practically in a single night. The success of Kean continued; the theatre was packed night after night. Berton, hitherto the greatest figure on the stage of the Odéon, himself had to bow before the woman whose genius he had been the first to perceive.
Their intimacy continued, though necessarily in secret, on account of Berton’s other attachments. Success turned Sarah’s shock head a little, but for many months she remained faithful to the loyal man who had befriended her and had made her victory possible. Their idyll was the talk of the theatre. No one then dreamed how bitterly she would turn against him in later years.
She had no lack of other admirers. They flocked round her. There was Jules Garnier, and most notable of all perhaps François Coppée, whose genius Sarah discovered in an odd way.
She was dining in the house of a friend and was introduced to a small, pale-faced young man, whose wealth of dark hair was smoothed back from his brow. “He had,” Sarah told me later, “the eyes of a dreamer and the head of a saint.”