I played all the pieces which I was to play in America.
Vitu, Sarcey, 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 could no longer understand what it all meant. 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 with 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, à propos of my resignation at the Comédie, had finished in these terms:
“There comes a time when naughty children must go to bed.”
As to the amiable Lapommeraye, he had showered on my devoted head all the rumours that he had collected from all sides. But as they said he had no originality, he tried to show that he also could dip his pen in venom, and he had cried, “Pleasant journey!” And here they all came, these three, and others with them. And the day following my first performance of Adrienne Lecouvreur, Auguste Vitu telegraphed to the Figaro a long article, in which he criticised me in certain scenes, regretting that I had not followed the example of Rachel, whom I had never seen. And he finished his article thus:
SARAH BERNHARDT AS “ANDROMAQUE”
By Walter Spindler