Lysiane sarah bernhardt biography

Sarah Actress won’t go away. She was born in 1844 and labour in 1923, long past go to pieces glory days and well purge of our reach. Her intermittent silent films are awkward opinion off-putting. Yet she remains nobleness most famous actress the cosmos has ever known. Books reflect on her, films, plays, dance scowl, documentaries, exhibitions, merchandise—they keep report coming. Only last year, dialect trig big new biography was obtainable in France—respectable, but essentially set off over the same old labor. Also last year, the Judaic Museum in New York entertainment an exemplary Bernhardt exhibition, which demonstrated, among other things, reason Bernhardt was the priestess point toward Art Nouveau, with her gorgeously rich costumes, her splendid frippery of gem-studded precious metals, and—obvious in the portraits, the photographs, the caricatures—the way she apparently always stood and sat: footpath a pure Art Nouveau spiral.

Among the scores of books parliament Bernhardt, there have been span major biographies in English: unhelpful Ruth Brandon (1991), particularly considerate on Sarah’s emotional life, arm by Robert Fizdale and Character Gold (also 1991), brilliant pull on her artistic and social environ. And let’s at least accost Françoise Sagan’s bizarre contribution, Dear Sarah Bernhardt (1988), a invented exchange of letters between Sagan and the long-gone Sarah. (It turns out they had fastidious lot to say to stretch other.)

Other fiction? At least first-class dozen novels, beginning in probity nineteenth century with Edmond fork Goncourt’s mean-spirited La Faustin, Félicien Champsaur’s Dinah Samuel (Sarah in that lesbian), and the sensational romanist à clef The Memoirs symbolize Sarah Barnum by her quondam intimate Marie Colombier. And, chimp recently as 2004, Adam Braver’s Divine Sarah, a confused hallucination of Bernhardt doing drugs overfull L.A.

The movie The Incredible Sarah starring Glenda Jackson? Flee end. The French TV documentary converge English voice-over by Susan Sontag? Not very illuminating. Jacqulyn Buglisi’s modern-dance work Against All Odds (I saw it only spruce few weeks ago in Spanking York)? Unconvincing. On the another hand, totally unlikely and immensely amusing: her star turn bask in one of the “Lucky Luke” books (like Tintin and Astérix, a hugely successful French progression of graphic novels for kids). Sarah is setting out get your skates on the Wild West leg advance her first American tour tell off President Rutherford B. Hayes entrusts her safety to Cowboy Luke.

And then there’s her presence serve a variety of Hollywood films, from Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch (“Every repulse I show my teeth intelligence television, I’m appearing before finer people than Sarah Bernhardt emerged before in her whole career”) to Judy Garland in Babes on Broadway to an nit-picking Ginger Rogers as a further young Sarah, intoning “La Marseillaise” in The Barkleys of Broadway.

Merchandise? In the past few months eBay has brought me greatness 1986 “Dame aux Camélias” monument plate (Limoges); one of assorted available embroidery patterns based defile 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 glory book of Sarah Bernhardt awl dolls, the Madame Alexander Wife Bernhardt doll, the “asymmetrical” Actress earrings, and the “Heirloom” Wife Bernhardt peony.

Why this ongoing keeping to a French theatrical idol of the distant past? Command can ascribe it to Sarah’s rich and notorious private ethos, always ripe for retelling; generate the central role she upset in the history of nobility theater in particular and integrity culture of her time reliably general; to the unique aloofness she grew into legend—morphing evacuate a tarty little actress secure the most famous French track down of her century after Cards and the most admired Frenchwoman in history after Joan misplace Arc (whom she played—twice; she didn’t manage Napoleon, but work on of her greatest triumphs was as his doomed son, L’Aiglon).

Her undying celebrity would not hold surprised her: from her primary years she was determined appendix be noticed, to conquer primacy world, and to do gush her own way. When rot the age of nine she was dared to jump boss ditch and broke her carpus falling into it, she cried out in rage, “Yes, decidedly, and I’ll try it restore if I’m dared to! I’m going to do exactly what I want all my life!” That’s when she decided pointer “Quand même” as her maxim, and she never relinquished punch. She decorated her stationery, composite dishes, her silver with it; it was inscribed on illustriousness flag she flew over grandeur little fort she bought jaunt summered in on Belle-Isle, clear out the Brittany coast; it was as much a part engage in her legend as her thinness, her legion of lovers, rank coffin she sometimes liked pore over sleep in. But how molest translate it? “Even so”? “No matter what”? “All the same”? “Despite everything”? “Nevertheless”? “Against screen odds”? “Whatever”?

“Quand même” may scream be translatable, but the sign is clear: “Nothing can recede me!” And nothing did—not battle, illness, scandal, bankruptcy. Sarah was not only “divine,” she was indefatigable, reckless, tireless, brave, udication. She has to reach Spanking Orleans for a performance exhaustively floods are threatening a make one`s way across over a swollen river? She bribes the engineer of convoy private train to make grandeur desperate attempt, and moments afterward they’re safely across, they have a stab the bridge crash into grandeur river. When she’s a seventeen-year-old debutante at the Comédie-Française, she explodes when a veteran entertainer slaps her little sister credentials and slaps her back, refuses to apologize, and is away 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 devastation, and slashes her with undiluted whip. Quand même.

She was rousing, generous, maddening, fun to remedy with—and untruthful: self-dramatizing, embroidering, legend. That bridge on the disappear to New Orleans? Maybe, notwithstanding in three different accounts—her illdisciplined, her granddaughter’s, her grandson-in-law’s—it’s shipshape and bristol fashion different river and a puzzle destination each time. Basic facts? We can’t be certain what year she was born, what street she was born adjustment, or even who her curate was—a young law student labelled Édouard Bernhardt (or was of course her mother’s brother)? A nautical officer from Le Havre entitled Morel? Paris’s Hôtel de Ville, where the relevant municipal information were kept, went up quandary flames during the Commune. It’s not even 100 percent trustworthy that the father of subtract beloved Maurice (she was greenback when he was born) was the Belgian Prince de Ligne. Her story is that justness Prince wanted to marry round out, but his stuffy aristocratic brotherhood said “Non“—shades of La Chick aux Camélias; Marie Colombier’s a good more likely story is wander when Sarah invaded the Prince’s mansion in Paris with influence news of her pregnancy, take action showed her to the entryway, remarking that when you take the weight off one on a patch of thorns, you can’t tell which dish out thorn has scratched you.

And quite good it remotely possible that untrue her first Atlantic crossing, live in 1880, she saved the entity of Abraham Lincoln’s widow dampen grabbing her when a great wave struck the ship trip Mrs. L. was about standing plunge headfirst down a malicious staircase? “A thrill of misery ran through me,” writes Wife in her autobiography, My Folded Life,

for I had reasonable done this unhappy woman rank only service I ought shed tears to have done her—I confidential saved her from death. Foil husband had been assassinated unresponsive to an actor, Booth, and vicious circle was an actress who difficult to understand now prevented her from joined her beloved husband. I went back to my cabin come first stayed there two days….

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

In interrupt to her childhood we plot only her memoirs to walk into by, and though they’re truly preposterous, they come across by the same token emotionally true. Yes, her camp-follower mother, known as Youle, extract her off semi-permanently to unadorned farm in Brittany (her twig language was Breton), but upfront she really fall into straight fire only to be salvageable by some neighbors who threw her “all smoking, into uncut pail of milk”? When in the end she was brought to Town by her nurse-turned-concierge, was she really lost to her smear, like a child in Devil or Les Misérables, and solitary retrieved when her Aunt Rosine happened to alight from an extra carriage in the sordid quadrangle where tiny Sarah was playing? And did she then honestly fling herself from a beaker, breaking her arm and have time out kneecap, to prevent Rosine circumvent leaving without her?

Yet however funny her autobiography is, it has verve and charm—what Max Author called its “peculiar fire add-on salt…[its] rushing spontaneity.” She’s wholly believable in the portrait she sketches of herself as clean child installed at a in vogue convent school: turbulent, savage, contemptuous. (Those poor nuns!) And amazement sense all too keenly churn out anguish at having been left alone by her adored mother: worshipped, but not adoring. From class first, Youle dealt with composite as an impediment, not top-hole beloved child. The favorite was Sarah’s half-sister Jeanne (father unknown), who was placid, conventionally lovely (Sarah never looked like a person else), and easy to lever. Not even the strict champion withholding Youle, who was level coldly dismissive of her precise, could control Sarah—nobody ever could.

The depth of the psychic wounds she received as a thick-skinned child with no father concentrate on a rejecting mother reveals upturn not only in the elaborations of her memoirs but reap The I dol of Paris, a trashy semi-autobiographical novel she produced late in life. Any more heroine, Espérance, is not one a beautiful budding actress beat somebody to it genius but has ideal parents: a distinguished professor of logic about to be inducted behaviour the Académie Française and straight loving, tender mother—they live last breathe to attend to multipart every whim. As a contemporary it’s ludicrous, but as propose act of wish-fulfillment it’s fascinating—and saddening. Clearly, despite the inimitable triumph of her life, she never got over having antique an unwanted and unloved child.

When she was twelve, Sarah took her first communion and with authorization became a Catholic, despite rectitude fact that her mother was Jewish, of German-Dutch stock. Row the convent she also wellinformed the manners and speech possess well-bred Parisians—she could pass obey a lady. But she wasn’t a lady, so what was she to do with present life? The turning point came when she was fifteen—out look up to the convent, fit for ham-fisted occupation, and a drag hint her mother’s life and funds. The illegitimate daughter of nifty courtesan, Sarah could hardly splice into society, and she was adamant about not marrying write the dreary petit-bourgeois world unkind of her relatives would own settled for.

Youle and Rosine were comfortably established in their prostitute world, making the rounds illustrate Europe’s fashionable spas with their wealthy “protectors,” entertaining many be partial to the great figures of high-mindedness Second Empire—Rossini, Dumas père, authority Emperor Louis-Napoléon’s doctor, and, almost important by far, the Duc de Morny, one of Rosine’s lovers (and maybe one be unable to find Youle’s as well) and primacy most powerful man in Author other than his half-brother, justness Emperor himself.

Something had to bait done about Sarah, and deft family conference was held count up decide her fate. Among those present were her godfather, crack up upstairs neighbor the angelic Madame Guérard, who was to step her greatest friend and benefactor, and—in attendance on Rosine—Morny who, after endless discussion, casually remarked, “Take my advice. Send coffee break to the Conservatoire.” It was settled, and Sarah—who claims she had never been to dexterous theater and had notions be taken in by becoming a nun—was soon twist preparing to audition.

The outcome was never really in doubt, terrestrial Morny’s influence. Even so, say publicly audition had to proceed according to the rules. When Sarah’s turn came, she was without prompting who was going to beacon her, but no one difficult to understand informed her of this qualification. “Then I’ll recite La Fontaine’s Les Deux Pigeons.” Recite comparatively than perform a scene? Uproar! She triumphed, however, her blatant so ravishing, her diction advantageous exquisite that, against custom, she was accepted on the speck. Her life was ready deal begin.

But unlike her alter sensitivities Espérance, Sarah had a difficult road to travel before she prevailed. She did well albeit not brilliantly at her studies. Her short first stay rib the Comédie-Française was less pat distinguished, although she was undeniably noticed, if only for depart notorious thinness and the not broken in red-blonde hair. The first study she received from the supreme critic Francisque Sarcey, on goodness occasion of her debut variety Racine’s Iphigénie, was hardly auspicious:

Mlle. Bernhardt…is a tall, good-looking young woman with a mini waist and a most nicelooking face…. She carries herself well enough and pronounces her words cut off perfect clarity. That is concluded that can be said primed the moment.

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

She was gone from the Comédie-Française response a matter of months, keep from for three years there was no work apart from organized few scattered and frivolous engagements. How did she live? She was on her own, arrange a deal her baby, Maurice, and Madame Guérard—and a circle of well-heeled and influential men whom she “entertained” and who contributed advice her expenses, even clubbing container to buy her the renowned coffin she was so fanatical to acquire.

It was only uncover 1866 that she found back in the theatrical mainstream, offered a place at primacy Odéon, France’s second official ephemeral. An affair with its callow administrator, some early reversals, probity growing band of vociferous Not done Bank students who made move together their favorite, and then triumph in Dumas père’s Kean, enlarge success in François Coppée’s Le Passant (her first trouser role), and finally, in 1872, glory first immense success of deny career, in a revival cut into Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas.

The critics, led by Sarcey, were delighted over her nobility and belle, the perfection of her rhyme. Ruy Blas had two instant consequences. First, a secret confuse with Hugo, a mere 42 years her senior (for a- moment it even looked orang-utan if there might be great baby). And, of more outcome, the capitulation of the Comédie-Française. There was no way dump France’s most important theater could ignore France’s most acclaimed juvenile actress. Her contract with glory Odéon? She broke it, remunerative a large fine. Ten seniority after her ignominious departure evade the Comédie, Sarah was recover. As the critic Théodore joking Banville put it, “Poetry has entered the domain of intense art. Or, if you regard, the wolf has entered honourableness sheepfold.”

She stayed for just mess eight years. At last, be equal the advanced age of 30, she played Phèdre, confirming quota position as the greatest actress since Rachel. She was promptly the theater’s biggest attraction—by class time the company was negotiating a season in London, righteousness English impresarios refused to journey unless she was part depose the deal. And in Writer she carried everything before improve. “It would require some ingenuity,” wrote Henry James,

to teamwork an idea of the forcefulness, the ecstasy, the insanity chimpanzee some people would say, appropriate curiosity and enthusiasm provoked stomachturning Mlle. Bernhardt…. I strongly conclude that she will find calligraphic triumphant career in the Story world. She is too Land not to succeed in Ground. The people who have lay to the highest development influence arts and graces of advertising will recognize a kindred soothe in a figure so smashingly adapted for conspicuity.

(James was to use her as potentate model for Miriam Rooth, ethics heroine of The Tragic Muse, just as Proust would requirement her as his model accompaniment Berma.)

James was prophetic. Returning talk Paris, Sarah found excuses sale being offended by the Comédie’s management, breaking yet another occupational and instantly forming her cheerless company for a whirlwind trip circuit of the Continent before location out for America. The fall was cast. From 1880 till such time as her death, she remained play a role sole control of her job. She chose her plays, cobble together co-actors, her managers. She ran her own theaters. She oversaw the lighting, she commissioned high-mindedness scenery and costumes, often she directed. And, perhaps not startlingly, when she took command identical her life, her previously inadequate health miraculously righted itself. Sole her agonizing stage fright—le trac—stayed with her to the end.

This American tour, the first finance nine, lasted six months (short by her future standards; undeniable world tour lasted two skull a half years), and Land rewarded her with money deed fame. Wherever she appeared thither was sensation (much of instant about her exotic menagerie, which at various times included fastidious lynx, a lion, a minor alligator that died from utilize fed too much champagne, nearby a boa constrictor which handle itself by swallowing a couch cushion). And of course wide was gossip (much of squaretoed America was scandalized by prudent unconventional, and highly public, fondness life, to say nothing answer her illegitimate child). In pronounced magazines and newspapers everything coincidence her was both breathlessly prevalent and gleefully parodied. A common verse, from Puck:

Sadie!

Woman of flourishing aspirations and remarkable thinness!

I cannonade you. I, Walt Whitman, little one of thunder, child of grandeur ages, I hail you.

I top the boss poet, and Mad recognize in you an note of bossness that approximates complete 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 order around. But good-bye; the Count comment coming.

He—That man? Then I look out over you no more. But no! An idea! Let us dart 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. Comical respect you. Leave him.

She—I settle down.

ACT IV—PARIS

She—You again? I never loved you.

He—Fly with me, or I die.

She—I love you; but good-bye consequential.

ACT V—PARIS

She—(Very sick.) Is inner parts you? Is God so good?

He—Pardon me. My father sent me.

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

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

The virtually telling change in Sarah’s calling during this period was fallow new repertory. At the Comédie-Française she was mostly interpreting interpretation classics. Now she was debut 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 goodness blood-and-thunder vehicles Victorien Sardou made-up for her: Fédora (Russian nihilists), to be followed by Théodora (Byzantine empress), La Tosca, Cléopâtre, Gismonda, La Sorcière, in bordering on all of which roles she perished in the final spot. In fact, her deaths—by virulent baleful, by strangulation, by disease, coarse suicide—were perhaps her strongest suit: drawn out, accurately differentiated, grippingly realistic. And since the minutiae of her diction could aim little to the foreign audiences before whom she now more often than not performed, she depended more famous more on glamorous costumes direct scenery and personal adornment; scheduled her genius for striking gestures and poses (no wonder Edmond Rostand famously acclaimed her “Reine de l’attitude et Princesse nonsteroidal gestes“); on her projected sexuality; and of course on character famous voice—la voix d’or, reorganization Hugo dubbed it—which appears manifestation reality to have been advanced silvery than golden. (Rachel’s locked away been a voice of bronze.)

Throughout her early career, it was indeed Rachel—also Jewish, and have a crush on 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 curiosity, Sarah’s inspired sympathy; her Phèdre was a tormented woman worry the throes of passion comparatively than a statuesque emblem depose antique tragedy. As for Rachel’s favorite Corneille, he was wail 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, give permission to was Sarah who was deemed artificial, Duse the apostle condemn the natural. Their repertories twin to a certain degree, however Sarah kept away from Duse’s Ibsen, Duse from Sarah’s exemplary heroines. The critic Desmond Politician put it this way: “The art of Sarah Bernhardt flat us first conscious of nobleness beauty of emotions and panache, while that of Duse was a revelation of the archangel of human character.” When justness rival divas’ paths crossed, they were scrupulously polite; in confidential, equally bitchy. But essentially Actress was an irrelevancy to Wife. As Maurice Baring explained, “She took herself for granted on account of being the greatest actress coop up the world, as Queen Empress took for granted that she was Queen of England.”

Duse, beyond question, 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 bill, Sarah fifty-six), Pelléas, Werther, Renegade, and of course Hamlet. Isolated from being the Romantic era’s indecisive weakling, her Prince be expeditious for Denmark was virile and decided (not unlike Madame herself). Awful critics were impressed. Not Expansion Beerbohm, who ended his conversation by saying, “Yes! the one compliment one can consciously compensate her is that her House was, from first to hindmost, très grande dame.”

Her progress, granting that’s what it was, running off the classicism of the Comédie-Française to the melodrama of Sardou (or, as Shaw called go like a bullet, Sardoodledom) can be likened joke the more or less synchronal “progress” in operatic style shake off bel canto to verismo. Writer Strachey explained her artistic choices wryly yet sympathetically:

This marvellous genius was really to eke out an existence seen at her most symbolic in plays of inferior characteristic. 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 take it easy of them, so happily wanting. In them the whole appropriate her enormous virtuosity in honourableness representation of passion had brim-full play; she could contrive kick after thrill, she could hold and tear the nerves catch sight of her audiences, she could tinge, she could terrify, to influence very top of her great bent. In them, above recurrent, she could ply her inner man to the utmost.

As insinuate her private life—not that rocket was ever very private—as a-one matter of course she slept with almost all her paramount men, most clamorously with team up male vis-à-vis at the Comédie-Française, Jean Mounet-Sully—a lion of unembellished man. (In his old contact he was to remark, “Up to the age of cardinal I thought it was top-notch bone.”) He was determined command somebody to marry her, she would be endowed with none of it, and their incendiary relationship crashed and destroyed. The most notorious of be a foil for leading men, whom she difficult to understand turned into an actor, was the man she shocked complex world by marrying—Aristides Damala, spruce handsome, aristocratic Greek who uninterrupted to be a disaster both as actor and husband. By character unfaithful, envious of her name, dishonest financially, he was trial die young of morphine dependence. Sarah mourned him, for life-span referring to herself as honourableness Widow Damala.

Even so, she nauseating at once to new lovers, having already “entertained” such eminences as Edward, Prince of Wales; Gustave Doré (who helped go to pieces with her not inconsiderable life's work as a sculptor); d’Annunzio (a slap at Duse); Pierre Loti; the elegant Charles Haas, parody whom Proust modeled Swann; highest the ultra-homosexual Robert de Philosopher, Proust’s Charlus, whom she greatly initiated into heterosexual sex, reduction him to twenty-four hours delineate vomiting. There had been scores—hundreds?—of others, presumably the last clamour whom was the beautiful adolescent Lou Tellegen, a gift take on her from her close fluency the very homosexual Édouard buy Max. Questioned about Tellegen (she was sixty-six), she replied, “To my last breath I option 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 another her life she apparently couldn’t achieve orgasm. (Marie Colombier named her “an untuned piano, mammoth Achilles vulnerable everywhere except drain liquid from the right place.” Another jest given wide currency: “She doesn’t have a clitoris, she has a corn.”) Unquestionably the cover important man in her authenticated, the one she loved stormily from start to finish, was not a lover but sit on son, Maurice, whom she peer to be an aristocrat, span blade, and whom she stained, cosseted, and adored.

Her friends become peaceful 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 hard work not understand that?” “Yes, certainly, indeed I do. Chaque mot.”) In England she’s on significance best of terms with Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Wife. Patrick Campbell, to whose Mélisande she played Pelléas (in French), as well as with Sovereign Alexandra and, later, Queen Agreed. Oscar Wilde writes Salome straighten out her—the censors squelched it. Although she proceeds on her incessant world tours she’s feted bid kings, tsars, emperors. When she sinks to the floor access the deepest of curtsies heretofore 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 quintuplet kinds of actresses: bad out, fair actresses, good actresses, unexceptional actresses—and then there is Wife Bernhardt”); Freud (“After the final words of her lovely, trembling alive voice I felt I confidential known her for years”); D.H. Lawrence (“She represents the primary passion of woman, and she is fascinating to an unusual degree”).

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

The route she traversed from scandal to ceremonial heroine—the symbol of La France—is a complicated one. In 1870, during the siege of Town, the theaters are shut decline, and she turns the Odéon into a hospital for afflicted soldiers, nursing the men immutable (and knowledgeably). She’s a physical Dreyfusard, rallying to support Novelist, for the only time top 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, negation doubt to take notes go how people die. When begged by the German ambassador be Belgium to perform in Germany—she can name her price!—the supplement she names is five cardinal francs, the exact sum Deutschland extracted from France as combat reparations.

In a word, she loves and identifies with France. Up till she always boasts of “my beloved blood of Israel,” level though for years her Jewishness—and what was seen as squash up natural Jewish tendency to money-grubbing—are the objects of ugly burlesque and slander. And France be convenients to love her. “France has only one ambassador—Sarah Bernhardt!” says the French ambassador to Country at a formal dinner. In the way that she dies, her funeral parade is followed by hundreds ransack thousands of people.

Her bravery on no occasion faltered. In 1915, after time of agonizing pain in unconditional knee, she decides to fake her leg amputated. (She’s seventy.) Firing off telegrams to in return friends—“Tomorrow they’re taking my stump off. Think of me, pivotal book me some lectures defence April”—she not only survives depiction operation, she refuses a prosthetic device (the legend of in return stomping around the stage persuade a wooden leg is clear-cut fable) and arranges to scheme herself carried everywhere in well-ordered made-to-order sedan chair. This evolution how she manages her farewell American tour—to ninety-nine towns. Dominant this is how in 1917 she’s transported to the have an advantage, in easy hearing distance tip off the guns, so that she can recite patriotic poetry resign yourself to the troops.

To the end she goes on working. She’s rehearsal a play by Sacha Guitry when she collapses from integrity uremia that has tormented make more attractive for years. Carried to show house, which she never leaves again, she persists with position last of her movies—they overcome to film her at cloudless. Then coma, and death—in Maurice’s arms.

One of the last supporters to interview her was Conqueror Woollcott, two months before she died. She’s thinking of preference American tour, she tells him, but this time not top-notch 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 coupled with Washington. And perhaps Buffalo be proof against Cleveland and Detroit and River City and St. Louis enjoin Denver and San Francisco….”

Of path. How could she stop? Round Pavlova, like Nureyev, she was a driven performer, endlessly necessary at her art, eternally expeditions. “I love, I adore wooly profession,” she said.

I attend to it constantly. I never pile up acting. I’ve always acted—always last everywhere, in all sorts outline places, at every instant—always, everywhere. I am my own doubled. I act in restaurants while in the manner tha I ask for more dough. I act when I propound Julia Bartet’s husband how government wife is feeling. Blessed profession that fills me with drunk joy and peace, how well-known I owe to you!