“Chère, chère amie: Allow me to remain, my charming little friend, in the shadow, where I can see so much clearer than I would if smothered in honours!”
In another letter a few days afterwards he said:
“You know well that you have instilled into me an ideal of beauty too partial to be of service to the world, which makes me prefer to avoid worldly strife and ambitions.”
Throughout her career Sarah Bernhardt seemed to have possessed this God-given faculty of elevating the ideals and ennobling the ambitions of men. The influence she exerted on her century in matters of art was incalculable. To painters she would say: “If you love me, then paint a masterpiece and dedicate it to me!” To poets she would say: “If it is true that you love me, you will write a poem about me that will live when we both are dead!” And true it is that numbers of famous verses to anonymous beauty had their inception in the ideal which Sarah Bernhardt had succeeded in creating.
Alexandre Dumas fils once told me: “She drives me mad when I am with her. She is all temperament and no heart; but when she is gone, how I work! How I can work!”
Georges Clairin threw down his tools in his studio one day, interrupting work on a great mural painting he was doing for Sarah Bernhardt’s house, and went in search of Sarah. When he had found her, he remained half an hour in silent contemplation of her face. Finally, he jammed his round black velvet artist’s cap on his head, turned on his heel without a word and, returning to his studio, worked savagely on his painting until it was finished.
“Before,” he told me, “it used to be absinthe; now it is Sarah!”
Where other actresses prided themselves on their influence in politics—there was a time when affairs of state were habitually settled in the salons of the reigning beauties—Sarah, consciously or unconsciously, exerted her influence on men of letters and art.
She would not look at a man unless he was doing something useful with his life. She despised idlers, and was ever at work herself. Not that she was of severe or strictly moral character. Far from it. But she used her beauty and her undisputed hold on men in the finest way possible: namely by inspiring and creating idealism in the minds of the clever men who loved her. That may have been the secret of her hold on men.
It became an axiom in the theatrical world: “If you want an introduction to So-and-so (naming a prominent author, playwright, or artist), go and ask Sarah Bernhardt.”