These were the sensations I experienced during the first act.
“Mamma! What has happened to Mamma?” were my first words on leaving the stage. No one could tell me anything.
Croizette came up to me and said, “What’s the matter? I hardly recognise you as you are, and you weren’t yourself at all just now in the play.”
In a few words I told her what I had seen and all that I had felt. Frédéric Febvre sent at once to get news, and the doctor came hurrying to me.
“Your mother had a fainting fit, Mademoiselle,” he said, “but they have just taken her home.”
“It was her heart, wasn’t it?” I asked, looking at him.
“Yes,” he replied; “Madame’s heart is in a very agitated state.”
“Oh, I know how ill she is,” I said, and not being able to control myself any longer, I burst into sobs. Croizette helped me back to my dressing-room. She was very kind; we had known each other from childhood, and were very fond of each other. Nothing ever estranged us, in spite of all the malicious gossip of envious people and all the little miseries due to vanity.
My dear Madame Guérard took a cab and hurried away to my mother to get news for me. I put a little more powder on, but the public, not knowing what was taking place, were annoyed with me, thinking I was guilty of some fresh caprice, and received me still more coldly than before. It was all the same to me, as I was thinking of something else. I went on saying Mlle. de Belle-Isle’s words (a most stupid and tiresome rôle), but all the time I, Sarah, was waiting for news about my mother. I was watching for the return of mon petit Dame. “Open the door on the O.P. side just a little way,” I had said to her, “and make a sign like this if Mamma is better, and like that if she is worse.” But I had forgotten which of the signs was to stand for better, and when, at the end of the third act I saw Madame Guérard opening the door and nodding her head for “yes,” I became quite idiotic.
It was in the big scene of the third act, when Mlle. de Belle-Isle reproaches the Duc de Richelieu (Bressant) with doing her such irreparable harm. The Duc replies, “Why did you not say that some one was listening, that some one was hidden?” I exclaimed, “It’s Guérard bringing me news!” The public had not time to understand, for Bressant went on quickly, and so saved the situation.