“Ah, don’t talk to me of music; that is one of my passions. I remember a long time ago when I went to the opera—not in a box of stalls, but right up in the gallery—to hear ‘Les Huguenots’ or ‘Le Prophèté’—I delighted in Meyerbeer—the seats were four francs apiece. I had probably pawned my best coat to get there; but there I was, and I never think of those costly evenings without remembering how I enjoyed them, and felt a certain sense of gratification that I have never experienced since.”
Sardou’s inspiration to follow literature began with an incident which has often been related. In a mood of wretchedness caused by poverty and the caging of his ambitious soul in a bleak garret, he stood in a doorway near the College of Medicine to escape the rain and his thoughts turned to suicide. Obsessed with this desire, he walked into the storm. A water-carrier, who instantly took his place of shelter, exclaimed:
“Ah, my friend, you do not know when you are well off.”
An instant later a block of granite fell from the building—which was under construction—and killed the water carrier. Sardou accepted his escape from death as an omen that he was destined to live and to become great. Immediately he began those several years of desperately hard work in which he served apprenticeship for his future career.
Of this period of Sardou’s life a writer who knew him well said:
“Only those who have known the sting of bitter want can fully appreciate the agony of the intellectual student’s career. The eager brain, the famished body, the long night-watches and hideous nightmares, the struggle to make both ends meet, to keep body and soul together, the continual battle with poverty, pride, ambition, hope and despair. Sardou’s young life was such a struggle. He possessed a valiant soul, and he did not give way; the more he had to work against, the harder he worked, and every new trial fell like a pointless dart against the steel armor of his resistance. He determined to become some one, and he realized that the bridge which spans greatness and nothingness is knowledge.”
Desperate but enthusiastic, Sardou toiled with his pen upon articles for a great variety of publications, receiving poor pay, which he supplemented with fees received for tutoring. He was a tireless student. When he wrote upon topics pertaining to history or to literature, he spoke with authority. The Middle Ages, the Reformation and the great events of the past which made and unmade nations and their policies appealed to his poetic temperament. He toiled day and night, and amassed an amount of erudition seldom possessed by any but scholars of renown. In the meantime he was working upon his first plays.
“These were the occasions when I could not afford sardines and dry bread,” said Sardou, “and I had to go to bed supperless.”
On April 1, 1854, the manager of the Odéon Théâtre attempted to produce Sardou’s play Le Taverne des Étudients, which the crowd hissed from the stage without witnessing it, and brought disappointment and sorrow to the young author. With the year 1857 came the earliest rewards for Sardou’s long years of labor: marriage and the route to success. Poverty, lonesomeness, the cramped quarters of a gloomy garret and the accompanying misery and hopelessness of an unrealized ambition were not enough: an illness of typhoid fever must bring despair as a climax. On another floor in the house resided Mlle. de Brécourt, an actress, and her mother. When the young woman heard that the quiet, studious young man whom she had often seen was likely to die, her pity was roused and she became his faithful nurse. In addition to saving Sardou’s life, she was the means of introducing him to Madame Déjazet, who established the Théâtre-Déjazet. In 1858 Sardou and Mlle. de Brécourt were married. Sardou’s plays found favor with Déjazet, whose talents proved adaptable for portraying his characters, and success followed success. In 1861 he was decorated with the Legion of Honor. Nine years after she had married Sardou—during which time she had seen her husband attain fame and wealth—Madame Sardou died. Sardou continued to work and his fame became international. Europe’s greatest theaters were producing his plays. In 1872 he was united in marriage with Mlle. Anna Soulié, daughter of the curator of the museum in Versailles. The marriage was extremely happy and the dramatist’s success continued. In 1877 Sardou was elected a member of the French Academy. Though immensely wealthy, Sardou resided simply at his villa in Marley-le-Roi near Versailles. He also had two country homes near Cannes, where his forefathers lived, and a residence in Paris, which he occupied principally for business purposes. Like Scott, Sardou had a great passion for books upon every subject, and his home at Marley, like Abbotsford, contained thousands of volumes. Honors from literary and art societies throughout Europe came to him. In making appointments to posts in which a knowledge of literature and the fine arts were important qualifications, the French government consulted with Sardou, who was considered an authority. The productive years of his life were serene ones. He was very generous, always ready to encourage the aspirant, and had no jealousies. His was a remarkable personality. The late Edmondo de Amicis thus describes him:
“Sardou looked a little like Napoleon, a little like Voltaire and a little like the smiling portrait of a malicious actress which I had seen in a shop window on the previous day. He wore a large black velvet cap, below which fell long waving gray locks. He had a silk hankerchief round his neck and was wrapped in a wide dark-colored jacket, which looked like a demi-dressing gown. My attention was riveted by his strange face, without beard and colorless, with a long nose and pointed chin and irregular and strongly marked features, lighted up by two keenly sparkling gray eyes, full of thought, the glances of which correspond with the rapid motion of the thin and flexible lips, and the acute yet kindly expression of the whole face, sometimes illumined by a bright, slightly mocking smile, like that of a quite young man. He did not look more than 70 years of age, and when he spoke he seemed still younger. He spoke with the fluency of an actor who abuses that power. It was not necessary to question Sardou. He began to converse with a fluency, an ease and a vivacity of accent and gesture which forestalled all my questions and satisfied my curiosity with such an appearance of intimacy and confidence that I was at first quite stunned, uncertain whether I was in the presence of the most expansive and frankest man I had ever met or of the profoundest and cleverest actor that the human mind can imagine.”