A list of the men whom Sarah Bernhardt loved and by whom she was loved reads like a biographical index of the great Frenchmen of the nineteenth century. It includes actors, painters, sculptors, architects, cartoonists, poets, authors, and playwrights, but not one idle rich man or rich man’s son!
It is to be doubted whether Berton, Chilly or Duquesnel helped her to furnish the flat in the rue Auber, and it is therefore somewhat of a mystery how she managed to assemble the strange setting which framed her at this period of her life. Her taste was all Louis XV., and quaint bowlegged chairs and tables were scattered round her in great disorder.
Sarah’s was ever a careless nature and, being extremely imperious as well as chronically penniless, she could not keep a maid. She had her aged grandmother living with her for a period, and she had taken her baby from its hired nurse and installed him in a nursery at her own home. The child took up the grandmother’s time, and the household work seldom got done, except when Régine, Sarah’s wild and hoydenish little sister, could be persuaded upon to do her share.
“I shall never forget my first visit to Sarah’s flat,” said my husband to me once. “It was on a Saturday afternoon; we were going over a part together, and I had promised to finish the recital at Sarah’s home. I arrived about three o’clock, and was met at the door by a tumble-haired whirlwind in an old chemise and skirt, whom I with difficulty recognised as Régine, Sarah’s little sister. Régine looked as if she had not had a wash for a week, and perhaps she hadn’t. She had great smudges of grime on her face, and her hands were black.
“She dragged me into the salon, and here I got another shock, for the room was in the most frightful mess you can imagine. Empty wine bottles rolled about on the carpet; the remains of a meal stood partly on the mantelshelf and partly on the table, all mixed up with sheets of manuscript, which I saw were books of the plays which Sarah had appeared in. Photographs in gilt frames were here and there, most of them tumbled on their faces, and over all was a thick layer of dust. I had to dirty two of my handkerchiefs before one of the chairs could be trusted not to soil my trousers.
“From another room a baby kept up a wail, and I could hear Sarah talking to it, trying to calm it. Sarah’s child was then nearly five years old, but had the development of a normal child of three.
“When Sarah finally appeared, it was in a long smock covered with paint and grease. Her hair was done anyhow, and her wide-set eyes sparkled with fun as she viewed my distaste for her surroundings.”
During all the time Sarah and he remained intimate friends, Pierre told me, he could never bring himself to set foot again in her home.
“It spoiled all my conceptions of her,” he said. “In the theatre she was such a fairylike, delightful creature. One could not help loving her. But at home——!”
One night, after a gay supper following the theatre, Sarah returned home to find her flat, in a building situated at the corner of the rue Auber and the Boulevard Haussmann, in flames. The fire had started in her own apartment, from a candle incautiously left burning by a maid-of-all-work who occasionally came to clean up. The blaze had been discovered shortly before midnight, and at one o’clock in the morning, when Sarah arrived, it was still confined to three rooms of the flat, but showed symptoms of spreading, in spite of the efforts of the firemen.