To her horror, Sarah discovered that nobody knew whether her baby had been saved or not!
There had been nobody but Maurice in the flat when she had left it for the theatre that night, with the exception of the charwoman, who had long since gone. The grandmother and Régine were both absent in the country. Unless one of the firemen had seen and rescued the child, therefore, there was every chance that it was inside the burning building.
The flat was of peculiar construction, because of the angle of the two streets. One end of it was disconnected from the other by a passage-way which had doors at both ends. The fire had started on the rue Auber side, and though it had spread upwards and downwards, it had not jumped across the court in the rear, or worked around the corner to the Boulevard Haussmann side, in which was the nursery.
Sarah took all this in at a glance. Her intense horror and dread of fire was not even thought of. Brushing aside those who tried to hold her back, she dashed into the Boulevard Haussmann entrance, ran up the stairs and into her flat. Groping her way through the smoke to the nursery, she found her son safe and sound in a deep sleep. She wrapped him in a blanket and came down with him into the street. There she collapsed, and was ill for two days.
When she was well enough to hear the news, they told her that the whole building had been burned down and that, but for her courageous intervention, her child would undoubtedly have been burned to death.
The best proof that Sarah even then possessed a number of jealous enemies was the statement openly made in the theatrical world that, weighed down with debt, she had caused the fire herself in order to collect the insurance.
This story, which has since been still more widely spread, is refuted by the following two facts: first, if Sarah had caused the fire, she would hardly have left her baby to run the risk of being burned to death; secondly, she had not yet paid the premium on the insurance, and it was consequently null and void. Instead of her collecting from the insurance company, it was this company, La Foncière, as the proprietor of a flat set on fire through carelessness, which collected from Sarah.
She was forced to pay the fabulous sum of forty thousand francs in damages, which she was enabled to do by the proceeds of a benefit performance at the Odéon, at which Adelina Patti, then at the height of her fame, sang.
The receipts of this benefit were more than the necessary forty thousand francs, and with the remainder Sarah was able to take a flat at No. 4, rue de l’Arcade. It was furnished, however; and Sarah was still without the means to furnish a flat for herself until her late father’s man of affairs came and proposed to arrange a cash payment to her out of her father’s estate providing, she would insure her life in his favour for 250,000 francs. This was done, and Sarah rented a large flat at the corner of the rue de Rome, almost opposite the one which had been burned. This she was careful to insure immediately.
The other episode for which Sarah was much criticised was her famous practical joke at the Odéon, after a quarrel with Duquesnel.