While I was in London I learned that I had lost my lawsuit, with its ... “Inasmuch as” ... “Nevertheless” ... etc. ... “declares hereby that Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt loses all the rights, privileges, and advantages resulting to her profit, from the engagement which she contracted with the company, by authentic decree of the 24th March, 1875, which condemns her to pay to the plaintiff in his lawful quality, the sum of 100,000 francs damages....”
I gave my last performance in London the very day that the papers published the result of this unjust verdict. I was applauded and the public overwhelmed me with flowers.
I had taken with me, as artistes, Mme. Devoyod, Mary Jullien, Kalb, my sister Jeanne, Pierre Berton, Train, Talbot, Dieudonné—all artistes of worth. I played all the pieces which I was to play in America.
Vitu, Sarcey, and Lapommeraye had said so much against me that I was stupefied to learn from Mayer that they had arrived in London to be present at my performances. I did not understand it at all. I thought that the Parisian journalists were leaving me in peace at last, and here were my worst enemies coming across the sea to see and hear me. Perhaps they were hoping, like the Englishman who followed the lion-tamer, to see him devoured by his lions.
Vitu, in the Figaro, had finished one of his bitter articles in these words:
“But we have heard enough surely, of Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt!
Let her go abroad with her monotonous voice and her funereal fantasies!
Here, we have nothing new to learn from her talents or her caprices ...”
Sarcey, in an equally bitter article, apropos of my resignation at the Comédie, finished with these words: