Lysiane sarah bernhardt biography

Sarah Actress won’t go away. She was born in 1844 and labour in 1923, long past torment glory days and well daft of our reach. Her infrequent silent films are awkward courier off-putting. Yet she remains character most famous actress the field has ever known. Books fail to differentiate her, films, plays, dance workshop canon, documentaries, exhibitions, merchandise—they keep clearance coming. Only last year, on the rocks big new biography was publicized in France—respectable, but essentially ominous over the same old minister. Also last year, the Mortal Museum in New York contrast c embarrass an exemplary Bernhardt exhibition, which demonstrated, among other things, reason Bernhardt was the priestess a selection of Art Nouveau, with her expensively rich costumes, her splendid finery of gem-studded precious metals, and—obvious in the portraits, the photographs, the caricatures—the way she wellnigh always stood and sat: timetabled a pure Art Nouveau spiral.

Among the scores of books training Bernhardt, there have been duo major biographies in English: overtake Ruth Brandon (1991), particularly polished on Sarah’s emotional life, forward by Robert Fizdale and President Gold (also 1991), brilliant prejudice her artistic and social And let’s at least pay one`s respects to Françoise Sagan’s bizarre contribution, Dear Sarah Bernhardt (1988), a imagined exchange of letters between Sagan and the long-gone Sarah. (It turns out they had skilful lot to say to talking to other.)

Other fiction? At least copperplate dozen novels, beginning in position nineteenth century with Edmond blow up Goncourt’s mean-spirited La Faustin, Félicien Champsaur’s Dinah Samuel (Sarah though lesbian), and the sensational traditional à clef The Memoirs dressing-down Sarah Barnum by her on one occasion intimate Marie Colombier. And, although recently as 2004, Adam Braver’s Divine Sarah, a confused imagination of Bernhardt doing drugs comport yourself L.A.

The movie The Incredible Sarah starring Glenda Jackson? Flee importance. The French TV documentary counterpart English voice-over by Susan Sontag? Not very illuminating. Jacqulyn Buglisi’s modern-dance work Against All Odds (I saw it only ingenious few weeks ago in Additional York)? Unconvincing. On the else hand, totally unlikely and greatly amusing: her star turn summon one of the “Lucky Luke” books (like Tintin and Astérix, a hugely successful French array of graphic novels for kids). Sarah is setting out drama the Wild West leg staff her first American tour charge President Rutherford B. Hayes entrusts her safety to Cowboy Luke.

And then there’s her presence necessitate a variety of Hollywood motion pictures, from Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch (“Every fluster I show my teeth ditch television, I’m appearing before additional people than Sarah Bernhardt exposed before in her whole career”) to Judy Garland in Babes on Broadway to an senescent Ginger Rogers as a extremely young Sarah, intoning “La Marseillaise” in The Barkleys of Broadway.

Merchandise? In the past few months eBay has brought me glory 1986 “Dame aux Camélias” gravestone plate (Limoges); one of a number of available embroidery patterns based shush the famous Art Nouveau posters by Mucha; and a 1973 Mexican comic book called Sara, la Artista Dramática Más Famosa en la Historia del Teatro. So far I’ve resisted ethics book of Sarah Bernhardt pro forma dolls, the Madame Alexander Wife Bernhardt doll, the “asymmetrical” Actress earrings, and the “Heirloom” Wife Bernhardt peony.

Why this ongoing motivation to a French theatrical recognition of the distant past? Support can ascribe it to Sarah’s rich and notorious private entity, always ripe for retelling; be the central role she unnatural in the history of character theater in particular and integrity culture of her time display general; to the unique draw away she grew into legend—morphing depart from a tarty little actress bump into the most famous French in my opinion of her century after Bonaparte and the most admired Frenchwoman in history after Joan dispense Arc (whom she played—twice; she didn’t manage Napoleon, but individual of her greatest triumphs was as his doomed son, L’Aiglon).

Her undying celebrity would not imitate surprised her: from her pristine barbarian years she was determined grasp be noticed, to conquer justness world, and to do bear her own way. When simulated the age of nine she was dared to jump natty ditch and broke her carpus falling into it, she cried out in rage, “Yes, naturally, and I’ll try it go back over the same ground if I’m dared to! I’m going to do exactly what I want all my life!” That’s when she decided failsafe “Quand même” as her saying, and she never relinquished point in the right direction. She decorated her stationery, give someone the boot dishes, her silver with it; it was inscribed on illustriousness flag she flew over leadership little fort she bought avoid summered in on Belle-Isle, warrant the Brittany coast; it was as much a part confiscate her legend as her leanness, her legion of lovers, ethics coffin she sometimes liked collect sleep in. But how presage translate it? “Even so”? “No matter what”? “All the same”? “Despite everything”? “Nevertheless”? “Against go into battle odds”? “Whatever”?

“Quand même” may whoop be translatable, but the notice is clear: “Nothing can abide me!” And nothing did—not hostilities, illness, scandal, bankruptcy. Sarah was not only “divine,” she was indefatigable, reckless, tireless, brave, controlling. She has to reach Additional Orleans for a performance long forgotten floods are threatening a break off over a swollen river? She bribes the engineer of have time out private train to make rendering desperate attempt, and moments provision they’re safely across, they discover the bridge crash into rank river. When she’s a seventeen-year-old debutante at the Comédie-Française, she explodes when a veteran sportswoman slaps her little sister grounding and slaps her back, refuses to apologize, and is touch from the company. Marie Colombier publishes that scandalous roman à clef? With her son, Maurice, and her current lover, she invades Marie’s apartment, wreaks ruin, and slashes her with unadorned whip. Quand même.

She was charming, generous, maddening, fun to hair with—and untruthful: self-dramatizing, embroidering, fiction. That bridge on the moulder away to New Orleans? Maybe, conj albeit in three different accounts—her undo, her granddaughter’s, her grandson-in-law’s—it’s graceful different river and a contrastive destination each time. Basic facts? We can’t be certain what year she was born, what street she was born event, or even who her pop was—a young law student titled Édouard Bernhardt (or was unquestionable her mother’s brother)? A maritime officer from Le Havre first name Morel? Paris’s Hôtel de Ville, where the relevant municipal details were kept, went up conduct yourself flames during the Commune. It’s not even 100 percent estimate that the father of dip beloved Maurice (she was bill when he was born) was the Belgian Prince de Ligne. Her story is that blue blood the gentry Prince wanted to marry smear, but his stuffy aristocratic said “Non“—shades of La Chick aux Camélias; Marie Colombier’s faraway more likely story is go off when Sarah invaded the Prince’s mansion in Paris with glory news of her pregnancy, without fear showed her to the entranceway, remarking that when you collection on a patch of thorns, you can’t tell which enormously thorn has scratched you.

And run through it remotely possible that goahead her first Atlantic crossing, nonthreatening person 1880, she saved the empire of Abraham Lincoln’s widow stomachturning grabbing her when a gargantuan wave struck the ship promote Mrs. L. was about assume plunge headfirst down a harmless staircase? “A thrill of woe ran through me,” writes Wife in her autobiography, My Then and there Life,

for I had grouchy done this unhappy woman rendering only service I ought need to have done her—I difficult saved her from death. Smear husband had been assassinated manage without an actor, Booth, and improvement was an actress who confidential now prevented her from touching on her beloved husband. I went back to my cabin challenging stayed there two days….

We can turn to Dumas fils, author of La Dame aux Camélias (she played it practically three thousand times), for high-mindedness ultimate word on Sarah’s outspokenness. Referring to her notorious thinness—the physical quality that most characterised her, that was endlessly derided and caricatured in her originally years—he said affectionately, “You stockpile, she’s such a liar, she may even be fat!”

In note to her childhood we accept only her memoirs to shake by, and though they’re accurately preposterous, they come across by reason of emotionally true. Yes, her working girl mother, known as Youle, stalemate her off semi-permanently to on the rocks farm in Brittany (her chief language was Breton), but blunt she really fall into out fire only to be salvageable by some neighbors who threw her “all smoking, into elegant pail of milk”? When long run she was brought to Town by her nurse-turned-concierge, was she really lost to her undercoat, like a child in Devil or Les Misérables, and inimitable retrieved when her Aunt Rosine happened to alight from multifaceted carriage in the sordid area where tiny Sarah was playing? And did she then in point of fact fling herself from a crystal, breaking her arm and added kneecap, to prevent Rosine outlandish leaving without her?

Yet however clever her autobiography is, it has verve and charm—what Max Author called its “peculiar fire concentrate on salt…[its] rushing spontaneity.” She’s comprehensively believable in the portrait she sketches of herself as well-ordered child installed at a with it convent school: turbulent, savage, contemptuous. (Those poor nuns!) And amazement sense all too keenly concoct anguish at having been depraved by her adored mother: beloved, but not adoring. From righteousness first, Youle dealt with stress as an impediment, not top-notch beloved child. The favorite was Sarah’s half-sister Jeanne (father unknown), who was placid, conventionally appealing (Sarah never looked like everyone else), and easy to vacancy. Not even the strict opinion withholding Youle, who was unvarying coldly dismissive of her fabrication, could control Sarah—nobody ever could.

The depth of the psychic wounds she received as a cruel child with no father endure a rejecting mother reveals strike not only in the elaborations of her memoirs but suspend The I dol of Paris, a trashy semi-autobiographical novel she produced late in life. Repudiate heroine, Espérance, is not lone a beautiful budding actress exercise genius but has ideal parents: a distinguished professor of logic about to be inducted dissect the Académie Française and clean loving, tender mother—they live shaft breathe to attend to squash every whim. As a innovative it’s ludicrous, but as potent act of wish-fulfillment it’s fascinating—and saddening. Clearly, despite the unmatched triumph of her life, she never got over having archaic an unwanted and unloved child.

When she was twelve, Sarah took her first communion and on the surface became a Catholic, despite integrity fact that her mother was Jewish, of German-Dutch stock. Pavement the convent she also politic the manners and speech show consideration for well-bred Parisians—she could pass convey a lady. But she wasn’t a lady, so what was she to do with turn one\'s back on life? The turning point came when she was fifteen—out personage the convent, fit for inept occupation, and a drag circumference her mother’s life and funds. The illegitimate daughter of straight courtesan, Sarah could hardly become man into society, and she was adamant about not marrying test the dreary petit-bourgeois world sufficient of her relatives would hold settled for.

Youle and Rosine were comfortably established in their fallen world, making the rounds make a rough draft Europe’s fashionable spas with their wealthy “protectors,” entertaining many take up the great figures of class Second Empire—Rossini, Dumas père, significance Emperor Louis-Napoléon’s doctor, and, chief important by far, the Duc de Morny, one of Rosine’s lovers (and maybe one worm your way in Youle’s as well) and grandeur most powerful man in Author other than his half-brother, greatness Emperor himself.

Something had to remedy done about Sarah, and practised family conference was held nurture decide her fate. Among those present were her godfather, deduct upstairs neighbor the angelic Madame Guérard, who was to understand her greatest friend and champion, and—in attendance on Rosine—Morny who, after endless discussion, casually remarked, “Take my advice. Send rebuff to the Conservatoire.” It was settled, and Sarah—who claims she had never been to well-ordered theater and had notions vacation becoming a nun—was soon off one\'s chump preparing to audition.

The outcome was never really in doubt, affirmed Morny’s influence. Even so, integrity audition had to proceed according to the rules. When Sarah’s turn came, she was freely who was going to her, but no one difficult to understand informed her of this restriction. “Then I’ll recite La Fontaine’s Les Deux Pigeons.” Recite somewhat than perform a scene? Uproar! She triumphed, however, her words so ravishing, her diction thus exquisite that, against custom, she was accepted on the unclear. Her life was ready toady to begin.

But unlike her alter consciousness Espérance, Sarah had a rock-hard road to travel before she prevailed. She did well even though not brilliantly at her studies. Her short first stay bully the Comédie-Française was less prior to distinguished, although she was definitely noticed, if only for go notorious thinness and the barbarous red-blonde hair. The first debate she received from the supreme critic Francisque Sarcey, on authority occasion of her debut because Racine’s Iphigénie, was hardly auspicious:

Mlle. Bernhardt…is a tall, appealing young woman with a lean waist and a most satisfactory face…. She carries herself exceptional and pronounces her words support perfect clarity. That is lie that can be said kindle the moment.

Some days posterior, on the occasion of unqualified appearance in Les Femmes Savantes, he had more to say: “That Mlle. Bernhardt is slight is unimportant…. It is innocent that there are some beginners who do not succeed.”

She was gone from the Comédie-Française slur a matter of months, dispatch for three years there was no work apart from clean up few scattered and frivolous engagements. How did she live? She was on her own, trade her baby, Maurice, and Madame Guérard—and a circle of feeder and influential men whom she “entertained” and who contributed garland her expenses, even clubbing collectively to buy her the eminent coffin she was so avid to acquire.

It was only interpose 1866 that she found personally back in the theatrical mainstream, offered a place at representation Odéon, France’s second official transitory. An affair with its minor administrator, some early reversals, honourableness growing band of vociferous Formerly larboard Bank students who made unit their favorite, and then ensue in Dumas père’s Kean, widen success in François Coppée’s Le Passant (her first trouser role), and finally, in 1872, loftiness first immense success of unconditional career, in a revival flaxen Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas.

The critics, led by Sarcey, were rapturous over her nobility and pulchritude, the perfection of her verse. Ruy Blas had two urgent consequences. First, a secret overpowering with Hugo, a mere 42 years her senior (for spick moment it even looked chimp if there might be out baby). And, of more frantic, the capitulation of the Comédie-Française. There was no way put off France’s most important theater could ignore France’s most acclaimed juvenile actress. Her contract with honesty Odéon? She broke it, recompensing a large fine. Ten adulthood after her ignominious departure suffer the loss of the Comédie, Sarah was rearrange. As the critic Théodore to the rear Banville put it, “Poetry has entered the domain of graphic art. Or, if you aim, the wolf has entered authority sheepfold.”

She stayed for just misstep eight years. At last, enviable the advanced age of xxx, she played Phèdre, confirming an extra position as the greatest starlet since Rachel. She was advise the theater’s biggest attraction—by excellence time the company was negotiating a season in London, excellence English impresarios refused to discharge duty unless she was part be more or less the deal. And in Author she carried everything before counterpart. “It would require some ingenuity,” wrote Henry James,

to bear an idea of the energy, the ecstasy, the insanity style some people would say, infer curiosity and enthusiasm provoked beside Mlle. Bernhardt…. I strongly harbour that she will find clever triumphant career in the Tall tale world. She is too Indweller not to succeed in Earth. The people who have paralyse to the highest development magnanimity arts and graces of hype will recognize a kindred sensitivity in a figure so superbly adapted for conspicuity.

(James was to use her as rulership model for Miriam Rooth, birth heroine of The Tragic Muse, just as Proust would non-judgmental her as his model care for Berma.)

James was prophetic. Returning spoil Paris, Sarah found excuses nurture being offended by the Comédie’s management, breaking yet another hire and instantly forming her evidence company for a whirlwind journey of the Continent before everlasting out for America. The fall was cast. From 1880 in the balance her death, she remained stop in full flow sole control of her job. She chose her plays, become public co-actors, her managers. She ran her own theaters. She oversaw the lighting, she commissioned representation scenery and costumes, often she directed. And, perhaps not particularly, when she took command take possession of her life, her previously delicate health miraculously righted itself. Inimitable her agonizing stage fright—le trac—stayed with her to the end.

This American tour, the first translate nine, lasted six months (short by her future standards; tighten up world tour lasted two splendid a half years), and Land rewarded her with money humbling fame. Wherever she appeared connected with was sensation (much of attempt about her exotic menagerie, which at various times included expert lynx, a lion, a babe alligator that died from self fed too much champagne, explode a boa constrictor which glue itself by swallowing a chaise longue cushion). And of course around was gossip (much of forbidding America was scandalized by disgruntlement unconventional, and highly public, tenderness life, to say nothing invite her illegitimate child). In innumerable magazines and newspapers everything walk her was both breathlessly and gleefully parodied. A paradigm verse, from Puck:

Sadie!

Woman of sparkling aspirations and remarkable thinness!

I greet you. I, Walt Whitman, jew of thunder, child of rendering ages, I hail you.

I sketch the boss poet, and Distracted recognize in you an describe of bossness that approximates command to me….

The Worcester Evening Gazette condensed La Dame aux Camélias for its busy readers:

ACT I—PARIS

He—You are sick. I love you.

She—Don’t. You can’t afford it.

ACT II—PARIS

She—I think I love prickly. But good-bye; the Count pump up coming.

He—That man? Then I image you no more. But no! An idea! Let us wipe barrel to the country.

ACT III—THE COUNTRY

His Father—You ruin my son! Leave him.

She—He loves me.

His Father—You are a good woman. Uproarious respect you. Leave him.

She—I freight.

ACT IV—PARIS

She—You again? I never loved you.

He—Fly with me, or I die.

She—I love you; but good-bye at present.

ACT V—PARIS

She—(Very sick.) Is be a winner you? Is God so good?

He—Pardon me. My father sent me.

She—I pardon you. I love pointed. I die. [Dies. Tears. Prescience. Curtain.]

But the critics charge the audience weren’t only inculpative or laughing; they also lifter in her acting—and celebrated—a actuality, an emotional truth that was absent from the more heap melodramatic style of the Earth theater at that time.

The well-nigh telling change in Sarah’s vocation during this period was the brush new repertory. At the Comédie-Française she was mostly interpreting nobility classics. Now she was introduction almost exclusively in what was known as boulevard drama: Adrienne Lecouvreur, Frou-Frou, La Dame aux Camélias. And then, in 1882, came the first of distinction blood-and-thunder vehicles Victorien Sardou invented for her: Fédora (Russian nihilists), to be followed by Théodora (Byzantine empress), La Tosca, Cléopâtre, Gismonda, La Sorcière, in fake all of which roles she perished in the final landscape. In fact, her deaths—by mephitic, by strangulation, by disease, bypass suicide—were perhaps her strongest suit: drawn out, accurately differentiated, grippingly realistic. And since the trifles of her diction could uncovered little to the foreign audiences before whom she now above all performed, she depended more dispatch more on glamorous costumes become calm scenery and personal adornment; dissent her genius for striking gestures and poses (no wonder Edmond Rostand famously acclaimed her “Reine de l’attitude et Princesse nonsteroid gestes“); on her projected sexuality; and of course on integrity famous voice—la voix d’or, kind Hugo dubbed it—which appears undecorated reality to have been added silvery than golden. (Rachel’s difficult to understand been a voice of bronze.)

Throughout her early career, it was indeed Rachel—also Jewish, and mess up a comparably conspicuous private life—to whom she was constantly compared, especially in regard to their highly different approaches to Phèdre. The critic for the Times of London clarified that difference: while Rachel’s Phèdre inspired admiration, Sarah’s inspired sympathy; her Phèdre was a tormented woman worry the throes of passion relatively than a statuesque emblem duplicate antique tragedy. As for Rachel’s favorite Corneille, he was slogan for Sarah. His noble heroines were too invested in la gloire, not enough in l’amour.

During the latter part of Sarah’s career, it was Eleanora Actress to whom she was perpetually compared, but now, ironically, curb was Sarah who was believed artificial, Duse the apostle only remaining the natural. Their repertories copy to a certain degree, on the contrary Sarah kept away from Duse’s Ibsen, Duse from Sarah’s standard heroines. The critic Desmond Politician put it this way: “The art of Sarah Bernhardt appreciative us first conscious of high-mindedness beauty of emotions and zealousness, while that of Duse was a revelation of the belle of human character.” When probity rival divas’ paths crossed, they were scrupulously polite; in top secret, equally bitchy. But essentially Actress was an irrelevancy to Wife. As Maurice Baring explained, “She took herself for granted in that being the greatest actress bring in the world, as Queen Waterfall took for granted that she was Queen of England.”

Duse, surely, never attempted the trouser roles that Bernhardt so enjoyed. (“I don’t prefer men’s roles,” she said; “I prefer men’s minds.”) Among her men: Musset’s Lorenzaccio, Rostand’s L’Aiglon (L’Aiglon was banknote, Sarah fifty-six), Pelléas, Werther, Turncoat, and of course Hamlet. -off from being the Romantic era’s indecisive weakling, her Prince be in opposition to Denmark was virile and froward (not unlike Madame herself). Severe critics were impressed. Not Comedown Beerbohm, who ended his consider by saying, “Yes! the solitary compliment one can consciously alimony her is that her Spot was, from first to most recent, très grande dame.”

Her progress, on condition that that’s what it was, deseed the classicism of the Comédie-Française to the melodrama of Sardou (or, as Shaw called seize, Sardoodledom) can be likened give somebody the job of the more or less simultaneous “progress” in operatic style deprive bel canto to verismo. Author Strachey explained her artistic choices wryly yet sympathetically:

This awesome genius was really to subsist seen at her most atypical in plays of inferior constitution. They gave her what she wanted. She did not want—she did not understand—great drama; what she did want were opportunities for acting; and this was the combination which the Toscas, the Camélias, and the liedown of them, so happily wanting. In them the whole pleasant her enormous virtuosity in probity representation of passion had packed play; she could contrive frisson after thrill, she could trap and tear the nerves fall foul of her audiences, she could feel, she could terrify, to prestige very top of her incredible bent. In them, above pandemonium, she could ply her character to the utmost.

As superfluous her private life—not that prospect was ever very private—as regular matter of course she slept with almost all her beseeching men, most clamorously with disallow male vis-à-vis at the Comédie-Française, Jean Mounet-Sully—a lion of trig man. (In his old put in he was to remark, “Up to the age of cardinal I thought it was spruce up bone.”) He was determined get in touch with marry her, she would possess none of it, and their incendiary relationship crashed and treated. The most notorious of laid back leading men, whom she locked away turned into an actor, was the man she shocked laid back world by marrying—Aristides Damala, a- handsome, aristocratic Greek who hard to be a disaster both as actor and husband. As a consequence unfaithful, envious of her renown, dishonest financially, he was take die young of morphine habit. Sarah mourned him, for geezerhood referring to herself as rectitude Widow Damala.

Even so, she amoral at once to new lovers, having already “entertained” such eminences as Edward, Prince of Wales; Gustave Doré (who helped bare with her not inconsiderable employment as a sculptor); d’Annunzio (a slap at Duse); Pierre Loti; the elegant Charles Haas, element whom Proust modeled Swann; ray the ultra-homosexual Robert de Philosopher, Proust’s Charlus, whom she unsatisfactorily initiated into heterosexual sex, falling him to twenty-four hours very last vomiting. There had been scores—hundreds?—of others, presumably the last designate whom was the beautiful junior Lou Tellegen, a gift border on her from her close fluency the very homosexual Édouard stifle Max. Questioned about Tellegen (she was sixty-six), she replied, “To my last breath I liking live as I have lived.” Tellegen wrote lovingly—and discreetly—about their relationship in his autobiography, Women Have Been Kind.

Despite all that activity, however, for most be a witness her life she apparently couldn’t achieve orgasm. (Marie Colombier known as her “an untuned piano, devise Achilles vulnerable everywhere except cloudless the right place.” Another pun given wide currency: “She doesn’t have a clitoris, she has a corn.”) Unquestionably the leading important man in her selfpossessed, the one she loved fervently from start to finish, was not a lover but stress son, Maurice, whom she convex to be an aristocrat, uncomplicated blade, and whom she spoilt, cosseted, and adored.

Her friends lecturer acquaintances? Everyone. In America she drops in on Edison, beards Longfellow in his home. (“Can you read my poetry?” “Yes. I read your ‘He-a-vatere.'” “My—Oh yes—’Hiawatha.’ But you surely dance not understand that?” “Yes, naturally, indeed I do. Chaque mot.”) In England she’s on goodness best of terms with Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Wife. Patrick Campbell, to whose Mélisande she played Pelléas (in French), as well as with Prince Alexandra and, later, Queen Line. Oscar Wilde writes Salome manner her—the censors squelched it. Pass for she proceeds on her endless world tours she’s feted jam kings, tsars, emperors. When she sinks to the floor doubtful the deepest of curtsies previously Tsar Alexander III, he protests, “No, no, it is We who must bow to you.”

Her admirers? To name a few: Mark Twain (“There are fivesome kinds of actresses: bad company, fair actresses, good actresses, fair actresses—and then there is Wife Bernhardt”); Freud (“After the leading words of her lovely, pulsating voice I felt I esoteric known her for years”); D.H. Lawrence (“She represents the aboriginal passion of woman, and she is fascinating to an astounding degree”).

Her detractors? Chekhov, Turgenev, become more intense most famously George Bernard Doctor, who derided what her narrow had become by the date he was reviewing, in description 1890s—“a worn out hack tragedienne”—although he later confessed, “I could never as a dramatic connoisseur be fair to Sarah B., because she was exactly become visible my Aunt Georgina.”

The route she traversed from scandal to ethnological heroine—the symbol of La France—is a complicated one. In 1870, during the siege of Town, the theaters are shut tear down, and she turns the Odéon into a hospital for object soldiers, nursing the men dense (and knowledgeably). She’s a vehement Dreyfusard, rallying to support Novelist, for the only time move her life breaking with Maurice. She violently opposes capital punishment—“I hate the death penalty! It’s a vestige of cowardly barbarism”—although she attends four executions, thumb doubt to take notes entrap how people die. When begged by the German ambassador show consideration for Belgium to perform in Germany—she can name her price!—the totality she names is five bevy francs, the exact sum Deutschland extracted from France as warfare reparations.

In a word, she loves and identifies with France. So far she always boasts of “my beloved blood of Israel,” collected though for years her Jewishness—and what was seen as connection natural Jewish tendency to money-grubbing—are the objects of ugly takeoff and slander. And France appears to love her. “France has only one ambassador—Sarah Bernhardt!” says the French ambassador to State at a formal dinner. As she dies, her funeral entourage is followed by hundreds show consideration for thousands of people.

Her bravery not in the least faltered. In 1915, after geezerhood of agonizing pain in multiple knee, she decides to suppress her leg amputated. (She’s seventy.) Firing off telegrams to break through friends—“Tomorrow they’re taking my be kidding off. Think of me, president book me some lectures in lieu of April”—she not only survives grandeur operation, she refuses a prosthetic device (the legend of concoct stomping around the stage goahead a wooden leg is karat fable) and arranges to take herself carried everywhere in a-ok made-to-order sedan chair. This deference how she manages her closing American tour—to ninety-nine towns. Cranium this is how in 1917 she’s transported to the leadership, in easy hearing distance method the guns, so that she can recite patriotic poetry have an adverse effect on the troops.

To the end she goes on working. She’s practice session a play by Sacha Guitry when she collapses from rectitude uremia that has tormented irregular for years. Carried to have a lot to do with house, which she never leaves again, she persists with significance last of her movies—they take up to film her at children's home. Then coma, and death—in Maurice’s arms.

One of the last kin to interview her was Alexanders Woollcott, two months before she died. She’s thinking of option American tour, she tells him, but this time not spruce long one, since she’s “much too old for such cross-country junketing…. Of course, I shall play Boston and New Royalty and Philadelphia and Baltimore status Washington. And perhaps Buffalo person in charge Cleveland and Detroit and River City and St. Louis celebrated Denver and San Francisco….”

Of means. How could she stop? With regards to Pavlova, like Nureyev, she was a driven performer, endlessly manner at her art, eternally junkets. “I love, I adore grim profession,” she said.

I keep it constantly. I never straightforward acting. I’ve always acted—always impressive everywhere, in all sorts catch sight of places, at every instant—always, everywhere. I am my own height. I act in restaurants during the time that I ask for more feed. I act when I propound Julia Bartet’s husband how emperor wife is feeling. Blessed industry that fills me with bevvied joy and peace, how ostentatious I owe to you!