Sarah threw her arms about his neck and kissed him before the entire company. Before nightfall all theatrical Paris knew that Sarah Bernhardt and Pierre Berton were again lovers.
By now thousands of wounded were arriving in Paris, and the temporary hospitals were totally inadequate. Great canvas hospitals were erected on the fortifications, but these had to be withdrawn into the city as the German advance continued. There was an appalling lack of trained nurses, and almost as great a lack of doctors and surgeons.
The theatres were closed, and Sarah disappeared for two weeks. When she re-appeared, it was in the uniform of a nurse. She had earned her brevet from working in one of the temporary hospitals, and even in that short time had learned not a little of the art of caring for wounded.
Her next act was to ask permission from the Comte de Kératry to re-open the Odéon as a hospital. This permission was readily accorded, but no beds or supplies were forthcoming, and it took all her energy and influence to procure these.
She was alone in Paris. Her son had been sent to Normandy, and her mother and aunts had left at the same time, presumably for Normandy but in reality for England and Holland, whither they took the baby boy. While Sarah imagined her son safely in a small village near Havre, he was really in London, and later at Rotterdam.
During the siege of Paris her family left Rotterdam and went into Germany, and at the very moment when Sarah was caring for the wounded with untiring and devoted energy, her baby boy, in charge of her mother and aunts, was living in the country of the enemy at Wiesbaden. This she did not discover until after the siege was raised. It certainly is the best possible confirmation of the nationality of her mother’s family.
CHAPTER XIII
Sarah grew to know at least two members of the revolutionary government extremely well. One was Jules Favre, who was given the portfolio of Foreign Affairs, and the other Rochefort, the notorious editor of La Lanterne, who was taken out of prison by the mob on the night the Empire was overthrown.
Two more opposite characters it would be hard to imagine. Favre was a man in middle life—calm, rigidly upright, a thinker and a statesman. Rochefort was little better than a literary apache, and was the idol of the worst quarters of Paris. His speeches were calculated to appeal to the baser instincts of the mob; those of Favre were the measured words of a lawyer. Rochefort, if he had ever seized the reins of power, might have been another Marat; while Jules Favre, if he could not save France from mutilation and humiliation at the hands of Germany, at least aided her in retaining her honour and self-respect.