SARAH BERNHARDT AND HER MOTHER.
I was very sad and not at all well. I refused to learn anything except the catechism and Scripture, and I wanted to be a nun.
My mother begged to have my two sisters baptized with me; Jeanne, who was then six years old, and Régina, who was not three, but who had been taken as a boarder at the convent, with the idea that her presence might cheer me a little.
I was isolated for a week before my baptism and for a week afterwards, as I was to be confirmed the week after my baptism.
My mother, Aunt Rosine Berendt, and Aunt Henriette Faure, my godfather, Regis Lavallée, M. Lesprin, Jeanne’s godfather, and General Polès, Régina’s godfather, the godmothers of my two sisters, and my various cousins all came and revolutionized the convent. My mother and my aunts were in fashionable mourning attire. Aunt Rosine had put a spray of lilac in her bonnet “to enliven her mourning,” as she said. It was a strange expression, but I have certainly heard it since used by other people besides her.
I had never before felt so far away from all these people who had come there on my account. I adored my mother, but with a touching and fervent desire to leave her, never to see her again, to sacrifice her to God. As to the others I did not see them. I was very grave and rather moody. A short time previously a nun had taken the veil at the convent and I could think of nothing else.
This baptismal ceremony was the prelude to my dream. I could see myself like the novice who had just been admitted as a nun. I pictured myself lying down on the ground, covered over with a heavy, black cloth, with its white cross, and four massive candlesticks placed at the four corners of the cloth. And I planned to die under this cloth. How I was to do this I did not know. I did not think of killing myself, as I knew that would be a crime. But I made up my mind to die like this, and my ideas galloped along so that I saw in my imagination the horror of the Sisters and heard the cries of the pupils and was delighted at the emotion which I had caused.
After the baptismal ceremony my mother wished to take me away with her. She had rented a small house with a garden in the Boulevard de la Reine, at Versailles, for my holidays, and she had decorated it with flowers for this fête day, as she wanted to celebrate the baptism of her three children. She was very gently told that, as I was to be confirmed in a week’s time, I was not to be isolated until then. My mother cried, and I can remember now, to my sorrow, that it did not make me sad to see her tears, but quite the contrary.
When everyone had gone and I went into the little cell, in which I had been living for the last week and was to live for another week, I fell on my knees in a state of exaltation and offered up to God my mother’s sorrow.
“You saw, O Lord God, that mamma cried and that it did not affect me.” Poor child that I was, I imagined in my wild exaggeration of everything that what was expected from me was the renunciation of all affection, devotion, and pity.