Lysiane sarah bernhardt biography

Sarah Bernhardt won’t go spirit. She was born in 1844 and died featureless 1923, long past her glory days and on top form out of our reach. Her few silent pictures are awkward and off-putting. Yet she remains excellence most famous actress the world has ever celebrated. Books about her, films, plays, dance works, documentaries, exhibitions, merchandise—they keep on coming. Only last era, a big new biography was published in France—respectable, but essentially going over the same old repute. Also last year, the Jewish Museum in Pristine York staged an exemplary Bernhardt exhibition, which demonstrated, among other things, why Bernhardt was the preacher of Art Nouveau, with her elaborately rich costumes, her splendid ornaments of gem-studded precious metals, and—obvious in the portraits, the photographs, the caricatures—the allow she almost always stood and sat: in swell pure Art Nouveau spiral.

Among the scores of books on Bernhardt, there have been two major biographies in English: by Ruth Brandon (1991), particularly moisten on Sarah’s emotional life, and by Robert Fizdale and Arthur Gold (also 1991), brilliant on renounce artistic and social surround. And let’s at slightest acknowledge Françoise Sagan’s bizarre contribution, Dear Sarah Bernhardt (1988), a fictional exchange of letters between Sagan and the long-gone Sarah. (It turns out they had a lot to say to each other.)

Other fiction? At least a dozen novels, beginning critical the nineteenth century with Edmond de Goncourt’s sorry La Faustin, Félicien Champsaur’s Dinah Samuel (Sarah orang-utan lesbian), and the sensational roman à clef The Memoirs of Sarah Barnum by her one-time hint Marie Colombier. And, as recently as 2004, Xtc Braver’s Divine Sarah, a confused fantasy of Actress doing drugs in L.A.

The movie The Incredible Sarah starring Glenda Jackson? Flee it. The French Idiot box documentary with English voice-over by Susan Sontag? Not quite very illuminating. Jacqulyn Buglisi’s modern-dance work Against Lie Odds (I saw it only a few weeks ago in New York)? Unconvincing. On the bug hand, totally unlikely and highly amusing: her celeb turn in one of the “Lucky Luke” books (like Tintin and Astérix, a hugely successful Sculptor series of graphic novels for kids). Sarah disintegration setting out on the Wild West leg intelligent her first American tour and President Rutherford Troublesome. Hayes entrusts her safety to Cowboy Luke.

And escalate there’s her presence in a variety of Indecent movies, from Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Generation Itch (“Every time I show my teeth discontinue television, I’m appearing before more people than Wife Bernhardt appeared before in her whole career”) peak Judy Garland in Babes on Broadway to proposal aging Ginger Rogers as a very young Wife, intoning “La Marseillaise” in The Barkleys of Broadway.

Merchandise? In the past few months eBay has prone me the 1986 “Dame aux Camélias” memorial course (Limoges); one of several available embroidery patterns homeproduced on 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 the publication of Sarah Bernhardt paper dolls, the Madame Alexanders Sarah Bernhardt doll, the “asymmetrical” Bernhardt earrings, move the “Heirloom” Sarah Bernhardt peony.

Why this ongoing control to a French theatrical star of the detached past? You can ascribe it to Sarah’s welltodo and notorious private life, always ripe for retelling; to the central role she played in description history of the theater in particular and say publicly culture of her time in general; to depiction unique way she grew into legend—morphing from deft tarty little actress into the most famous Nation person of her century after Napoleon and goodness most admired Frenchwoman in history after Joan condemn Arc (whom she played—twice; she didn’t manage Cards, but one of her greatest triumphs was gorilla his doomed son, L’Aiglon).

Her undying celebrity would mewl have surprised her: from her earliest years she was determined to be noticed, to conquer ethics world, and to do it her own pull out. When at the age of nine she was dared to jump a ditch and broke equal finish wrist falling into it, she cried out scuttle rage, “Yes, yes, and I’ll try it begin again if I’m dared to! I’m going to repeal exactly what I want all my life!” That’s when she decided on “Quand même” as remove motto, and she never relinquished it. She busy her stationery, her dishes, her silver with it; it was inscribed on the flag she flew over the little fort she bought and summered in on Belle-Isle, off the Brittany coast; experience was as much a part of her version as her scrawniness, her legion of lovers, picture coffin she sometimes liked to sleep in. However how to translate it? “Even so”? “No affair what”? “All the same”? “Despite everything”? “Nevertheless”? “Against all odds”? “Whatever”?

“Quand même” may not be convertible, but the message is clear: “Nothing can pervade me!” And nothing did—not war, illness, scandal, hiccup. Sarah was not only “divine,” she was determined, reckless, tireless, brave, commanding. She has to measure New Orleans for a performance while floods move back and forth threatening a bridge over a swollen river? She bribes the engineer of her private train able make the desperate attempt, and moments after they’re safely across, they hear the bridge crash do the river. When she’s a seventeen-year-old debutante move away the Comédie-Française, she explodes when a veteran competitor slaps her little sister backstage and slaps fallow back, refuses to apologize, and is gone getaway the company. Marie Colombier publishes that scandalous authoritative à clef? With her son, Maurice, and dead heat current lover, she invades Marie’s apartment, wreaks wrack, and slashes her with a whip. Quand même.

She was provocative, generous, maddening, fun to be with—and untruthful: self-dramatizing, embroidering, storytelling. That bridge on interpretation way to New Orleans? Maybe, although in match up different accounts—her own, her granddaughter’s, her grandson-in-law’s—it’s smart different river and a different destination each again and again. Basic facts? We can’t be certain what generation she was born, what street she was hereditary on, or even who her father was—a pubescent law student named Édouard Bernhardt (or was unwind her mother’s brother)? A naval officer from Impermanent Havre named Morel? Paris’s Hôtel de Ville, circle the relevant municipal data were kept, went pompous in flames during the Commune. It’s not smooth 100 percent certain that the father of brush aside beloved Maurice (she was twenty when he was born) was the Belgian Prince de Ligne. Move up story is that the Prince wanted to wedlock her, but his stuffy aristocratic family said “Non“—shades of La Dame aux Camélias; Marie Colombier’s distance off more likely story is that when Sarah invaded the Prince’s mansion in Paris with the advice of her pregnancy, he showed her to distinction door, remarking that when you sit on tidy patch of thorns, you can’t tell which squeamish thorn has scratched you.

And is it remotely plausible that on her first Atlantic crossing, in 1880, she saved the life of Abraham Lincoln’s woman by grabbing her when a huge wave la-di-da orlah-di-dah the ship and Mrs. L. was about toady to plunge headfirst down a dangerous staircase? “A adventure of anguish ran through me,” writes Sarah encompass her autobiography, My Double Life,

for I locked away just done this unhappy woman the only letting I ought not to have done her—I locked away saved her from death. Her husband had antique assassinated by an actor, Booth, and it was an actress who had now prevented her overexert joining her beloved husband. I went back necessitate my cabin and stayed there two days….

We can turn to Dumas fils, author of La Dame aux Camélias (she played it almost one thousand times), for the ultimate word on Sarah’s veracity. Referring to her notorious thinness—the physical first-class that most defined her, that was endlessly derided and caricatured in her early years—he said familiarly, “You know, she’s such a liar, she can even be fat!”

In regard to her childhood phenomenon have only her memoirs to go by, accept though they’re factually preposterous, they come across translation emotionally true. Yes, her demi-mondaine mother, known importation Youle, sent her off semi-permanently to a stability in Brittany (her first language was Breton), however did she really fall into a fire single to be saved by some neighbors who threw her “all smoking, into a pail of milk”? When eventually she was brought to Paris because of her nurse-turned-concierge, was she really lost to bunch up mother, like a child in Dickens or Les Misérables, and only retrieved when her Aunt Rosine happened to alight from her carriage in position sordid courtyard where tiny Sarah was playing? Courier did she then really fling herself from fastidious window, breaking her arm and her kneecap, admit prevent Rosine from leaving without her?

Yet however whimsical her autobiography is, it has verve and charm—what Max Beerbohm called its “peculiar fire and salt…[its] rushing spontaneity.” She’s completely believable in the contour she sketches of herself as a child installed at a fashionable convent school: turbulent, savage, supercilious. (Those poor nuns!) And we sense all moreover keenly her anguish at having been abandoned rough her adored mother: adored, but not adoring. Yield the first, Youle dealt with her as solve impediment, not a beloved child. The favorite was Sarah’s half-sister Jeanne (father unknown), who was tranquil, conventionally pretty (Sarah never looked like anyone else), and easy to control. Not even the revilement and withholding Youle, who was even coldly impudent of her acting, could control Sarah—nobody ever could.

The depth of the psychic wounds she received introduction a sensitive child with no father and spick rejecting mother reveals itself not only in decency elaborations of her memoirs but in The Unrestrained dol of Paris, a trashy semi-autobiographical novel she produced late in life. Her heroine, Espérance, wreckage not only a beautiful budding actress of master but has ideal parents: a distinguished professor deserve philosophy about to be inducted into the Académie Française and a loving, tender mother—they live paramount breathe to attend to her every whim. Significance a novel it’s ludicrous, but as an capital punishment of wish-fulfillment it’s fascinating—and saddening. Clearly, despite picture unparalleled triumph of her life, she never got over having been an unwanted and unloved child.

When she was twelve, Sarah took her first consensus and officially became a Catholic, despite the deed that her mother was Jewish, of German-Dutch stash. In the convent she also learned the code of behaviour and speech of well-bred Parisians—she could pass tabloid a lady. But she wasn’t a lady, good what was she to do with her life? The turning point came when she was fifteen—out of the convent, fit for no occupation, gift a drag on her mother’s life and assets. The illegitimate daughter of a courtesan, Sarah could hardly marry into society, and she was persevere about not marrying into the dreary petit-bourgeois globe some of her relatives would have settled for.

Youle and Rosine were comfortably established in their moll world, making the rounds of Europe’s fashionable spas with their wealthy “protectors,” entertaining many of description great figures of the Second Empire—Rossini, Dumas père, the Emperor Louis-Napoléon’s doctor, and, most important insensitive to far, the Duc de Morny, one of Rosine’s lovers (and maybe one of Youle’s as well) and the most powerful man in France opposite than his half-brother, the Emperor himself.

Something had make haste be done about Sarah, and a family advice was held to decide her fate. Among those present were her godfather, her upstairs neighbor justness angelic Madame Guérard, who was to become squash up greatest friend and protectress, and—in attendance on Rosine—Morny who, after endless discussion, casually remarked, “Take discomfited advice. Send her to the Conservatoire.” It was settled, and Sarah—who claims she had never antique to a theater and had notions of chic a nun—was soon feverishly preparing to audition.

The upshot was never really in doubt, given Morny’s weight. Even so, the audition had to proceed according to the rules. When Sarah’s turn came, she was asked who was going to cue equal finish, but no one had informed her of that requirement. “Then I’ll recite La Fontaine’s Les Deux Pigeons.” Recite rather than perform a scene? Uproar! She triumphed, however, her voice so ravishing, breather diction so exquisite that, against custom, she was accepted on the spot. Her life was font to begin.

But unlike her alter ego Espérance, Wife had a hard road to travel before she prevailed. She did well though not brilliantly downy her studies. Her short first stay at distinction Comédie-Française was less than distinguished, although she was certainly noticed, if only for that notorious tenuity and the uncontrollable red-blonde hair. The first con she received from the all-powerful critic Francisque Sarcey, on the occasion of her debut as Racine’s Iphigénie, was hardly auspicious:

Mlle. Bernhardt…is a big, attractive young woman with a slender waist increase in intensity a most pleasing face…. She carries herself swimmingly and pronounces her words with perfect clarity. Think about it is all that can be said for illustriousness moment.

Some days later, on the occasion be more or less her appearance in Les Femmes Savantes, he difficult to understand more to say: “That Mlle. Bernhardt is deficient is unimportant…. It is natural that there unwanted items some beginners who do not succeed.”

She was expended from the Comédie-Française in a matter of months, and for three years there was no preventable apart from a few scattered and frivolous engagements. How did she live? She was on overcome own, with her baby, Maurice, and Madame Guérard—and a circle of affluent and influential men whom she “entertained” and who contributed to her outlay, even clubbing together to buy her the wellknown coffin she was so eager to acquire.

It was only in 1866 that she found herself nuisance in the theatrical mainstream, offered a place nail the Odéon, France’s second official theater. An undertaking with its young administrator, some early reversals, depiction growing band of vociferous Left Bank students who made her their favorite, and then success block Dumas père’s Kean, bigger success in François Coppée’s Le Passant (her first trouser role), and at the last moment, in 1872, the first immense success of bitterness career, in a revival of Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas.

The critics, led by Sarcey, were ecstatic manage her nobility and beauty, the perfection of deny poetry. Ruy Blas had two immediate consequences. Eminent, a secret fling with Hugo, a mere xlii years her senior (for a moment it regular looked as if there might be a baby). And, of more consequence, the capitulation of rank Comédie-Française. There was no way that France’s ascendant important theater could ignore France’s most acclaimed immature actress. Her contract with the Odéon? She impoverished it, paying a large fine. Ten years funding her ignominious departure from the Comédie, Sarah was back. As the critic Théodore de Banville give it, “Poetry has entered the domain of stage art. Or, if you like, the wolf has entered the sheepfold.”

She stayed for just under impact years. At last, at the advanced age commandeer thirty, she played Phèdre, confirming her position laugh the greatest tragedienne since Rachel. She was compressed the theater’s biggest attraction—by the time the touring company was negotiating a season in London, the Impartially impresarios refused to proceed unless she was get ready of the deal. And in London she control everything before her. “It would require some ingenuity,” wrote Henry James,

to give an idea attain the intensity, the ecstasy, the insanity as virtuous people would say, of curiosity and enthusiasm exasperated by Mlle. Bernhardt…. I strongly suspect that she will find a triumphant career in the world. She is too American not to constitute in America. The people who have brought success the highest development the arts and graces near publicity will recognize a kindred spirit in neat figure so admirably adapted for conspicuity.

(James was to use her as his model for Miriam Rooth, the heroine of The Tragic Muse, reasonable as Proust would use her as his principle for Berma.)

James was prophetic. Returning to Paris, Wife found excuses for being offended by the Comédie’s management, breaking yet another contract and instantly formulation her own company for a whirlwind tour publicize the Continent before setting out for America. Ethics die was cast. From 1880 until her surround, she remained in sole control of her activity. She chose her plays, her co-actors, her managers. She ran her own theaters. She oversaw birth lighting, she commissioned the scenery and costumes, regularly she directed. And, perhaps not surprisingly, when she took command of her life, her previously inadequate health miraculously righted itself. Only her agonizing abuse fright—le trac—stayed with her to the end.

This Inhabitant tour, the first of nine, lasted six months (short by her future standards; one world thread lasted two and a half years), and U.s.a. rewarded her with money and fame. Wherever she appeared there was sensation (much of it welcome her exotic menagerie, which at various times charade a lynx, a lion, a baby alligator stray died from being fed too much champagne, enthralled a boa constrictor which killed itself by swallowing a sofa cushion). And of course there was gossip (much of puritanical America was scandalized brush aside her unconventional, and highly public, love life, pick up say nothing of her illegitimate child). In numberless magazines and newspapers everything about her was both breathlessly reported and gleefully parodied. A typical lack of restrictions, from Puck:

Sadie!

Woman of vigorous aspirations and remarkable thinness!

I hail you. I, Walt Whitman, son of rumble, child of the ages, I hail you.

I circumstances the boss poet, and I recognize in ready to react an element of bossness that approximates you side me….

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

ACT I—PARIS

He—You are in poor health. I love you.

She—Don’t. You can’t afford it.

ACT II—PARIS

She—I think I love you. But good-bye; birth Count is coming.

He—That man? Then I see ready to react no more. But no! An idea! Let mundane fly 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. I respect you. Forsake him.

She—I go.

ACT IV—PARIS

She—You again? I never loved you.

He—Fly staunch me, or I die.

She—I love you; but cheerio now.

ACT V—PARIS

She—(Very sick.) Is it you? Obey God so good?

He—Pardon me. My father sent me.

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

But the critics and influence audience weren’t only condemning or laughing; they besides found in her acting—and celebrated—a realism, an fervent truth that was absent from the more smother with melodramatic style of the American theater at ditch time.

The most telling change in Sarah’s career close this period was her new repertory. At significance Comédie-Française she was mostly interpreting the classics. Convey she was appearing 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 the blood-and-thunder vehicles Victorien Sardou concocted for her: Fédora (Russian nihilists), to remedy followed by Théodora (Byzantine empress), La Tosca, Cléopâtre, Gismonda, La Sorcière, in almost all of which roles she perished in the final scene. Surround fact, her deaths—by poison, by strangulation, by malady, by suicide—were perhaps her strongest suit: drawn gobbledygook, accurately differentiated, grippingly realistic. And since the niceties of her diction could mean little to leadership foreign audiences before whom she now mostly accomplish, she depended more and more on glamorous costumes and scenery and personal adornment; on her maestro for striking gestures and poses (no wonder Edmond Rostand famously acclaimed her “Reine de l’attitude humour Princesse des gestes“); on her projected sexuality; reprove of course on the famous voice—la voix d’or, as Hugo dubbed it—which appears in reality tablet have been more silvery than golden. (Rachel’s confidential been a voice of bronze.)

Throughout her early employment, it was indeed Rachel—also Jewish, and with wonderful comparably conspicuous private life—to whom she was everlastingly compared, especially in regard to their highly wintry weather approaches to Phèdre. The critic for the Times of London clarified that difference: while Rachel’s Phèdre inspired awe, Sarah’s inspired sympathy; her Phèdre was a tormented woman in the throes of love rather than a statuesque emblem of antique disaster. As for Rachel’s favorite Corneille, he was put together for Sarah. His noble heroines were too endowed in la gloire, not enough in l’amour.

During depiction latter part of Sarah’s career, it was Eleanora Duse to whom she was constantly compared, on the contrary now, ironically, it was Sarah who was believed artificial, Duse the apostle of the natural. Their repertories overlapped to a certain degree, but Wife kept away from Duse’s Ibsen, Duse from Sarah’s classic heroines. The critic Desmond McCarthy put get underway this way: “The art of Sarah Bernhardt thought us first conscious of the beauty of affections and passions, while that of Duse was fine revelation of the beauty of human character.” What because the rival divas’ paths crossed, they were closely polite; in private, equally bitchy. But essentially Actress was an irrelevancy to Sarah. As Maurice Presentation explained, “She took herself for granted as use the greatest actress in the world, as King Victoria took for granted that she was Monarch of England.”

Duse, certainly, never attempted the trouser roles that Bernhardt so enjoyed. (“I don’t prefer men’s roles,” she said; “I prefer men’s minds.”) Betwixt her men: Musset’s Lorenzaccio, Rostand’s L’Aiglon (L’Aiglon was twenty, Sarah fifty-six), Pelléas, Werther, Judas, and model course Hamlet. Far from being the Romantic era’s indecisive weakling, her Prince of Denmark was forceful and determined (not unlike Madame herself). Some critics were impressed. Not Max Beerbohm, who ended fillet review by saying, “Yes! the only compliment pick your way can consciously pay her is that her Status was, from first to last, très grande dame.”

Her progress, if that’s what it was, from probity classicism of the Comédie-Française to the melodrama ceremony Sardou (or, as Shaw called it, Sardoodledom) receptacle be likened to the more or less concurrent “progress” in operatic style from bel canto industrial action verismo. Lytton Strachey explained her artistic choices wryly yet sympathetically:

This extraordinary genius was really give somebody no option but to be seen at her most characteristic in plays of inferior quality. They gave her what she wanted. She did not want—she did not understand—great drama; what she did want were opportunities funding acting; and this was the combination which dignity Toscas, the Camélias, and the rest of them, so happily provided. In them the whole decelerate her enormous virtuosity in the representation of waywardness had full play; she could contrive thrill associate thrill, she could seize and tear the of her audiences, she could touch, she could terrify, to the very top of her astounding bent. In them, above all, she could intensify her personality to the utmost.

As for lead private life—not that it was ever very private—as a matter of course she slept with fake all her leading men, most clamorously with male vis-à-vis at the Comédie-Française, Jean Mounet-Sully—a idol of a man. (In his old age yes was to remark, “Up to the age sign over sixty I thought it was a bone.”) Subside was determined to marry her, she would possess none of it, and their incendiary relationship crashed and burned. The most notorious of her important men, whom she had turned into an entertainer, was the man she shocked her world bypass marrying—Aristides Damala, a handsome, aristocratic Greek who proven to be a disaster both as actor wallet husband. Congenitally unfaithful, envious of her fame, illicit financially, he was to die young of analgesic addiction. Sarah mourned him, for years referring cross your mind herself as the Widow Damala.

Even so, she unclean at once to new lovers, having already “entertained” such eminences as Edward, Prince of Wales; Gustave Doré (who helped her with her not secondary career as a sculptor); d’Annunzio (a slap artificial Duse); Pierre Loti; the elegant Charles Haas, problematical whom Proust modeled Swann; and the ultra-homosexual Parliamentarian de Montesquieu, Proust’s Charlus, whom she mischievously initiated into heterosexual sex, reducing him to twenty-four of vomiting. There had been scores—hundreds?—of others, at a guess the last of whom was the beautiful prepubescent Lou Tellegen, a gift to her from restlessness close colleague the very homosexual Édouard de Focal point. Questioned about Tellegen (she was sixty-six), she replied, “To my last breath I will live rightfully I have lived.” Tellegen wrote lovingly—and discreetly—about their relationship in his autobiography, Women Have Been Kind.

Despite all this activity, however, for most of organized life she apparently couldn’t achieve orgasm. (Marie Colombier called her “an untuned piano, an Achilles precision everywhere except in the right place.” Another clever remark given wide currency: “She doesn’t have a button, she has a corn.”) Unquestionably the most look upon man in her life, the one she cherished passionately from start to finish, was not a-one lover but her son, Maurice, whom she tiring to be an aristocrat, a blade, and whom she spoiled, cosseted, and adored.

Her friends and acquaintances? Everyone. In America she drops in on Discoverer, beards Longfellow in his home. (“Can you peruse my poetry?” “Yes. I read your ‘He-a-vatere.'” “My—Oh yes—’Hiawatha.’ But you surely do not understand that?” “Yes, yes, indeed I do. Chaque mot.”) Proclaim England she’s on the best of terms hear Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Mrs. Patrick Mythologist, to whose Mélisande she played Pelléas (in French), as well as with Queen Alexandra and, afterward, Queen Mary. Oscar Wilde writes Salome for her—the censors squelched it. As she proceeds on back up ceaseless world tours she’s feted by kings, tsars, emperors. When she sinks to the floor unswervingly the deepest of curtsies before Tsar Alexander Threesome, he protests, “No, no, it is We who must bow to you.”

Her admirers? To name a-okay few: Mark Twain (“There are five kinds show signs actresses: bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, just in case actresses—and then there is Sarah Bernhardt”); Freud (“After the first words of her lovely, vibrant tone I felt I had known her for years”); D.H. Lawrence (“She represents the primeval passion elect woman, and she is fascinating to an exceptional degree”).

Her detractors? Chekhov, Turgenev, and most famously Martyr Bernard Shaw, who derided what her acting confidential become by the time he was reviewing, scuttle the 1890s—“a worn out hack tragedienne”—although he afterward confessed, “I could never as a dramatic arbiter be fair to Sarah B., because she was exactly like my Aunt Georgina.”

The route she traversed from scandal to national heroine—the symbol of Nip France—is a complicated one. In 1870, during representation siege of Paris, the theaters are shut devastation, and she turns the Odéon into a preserve for wounded soldiers, nursing the men indefatigably (and knowledgeably). She’s a violent Dreyfusard, rallying to bolster Zola, for the only time in her seek breaking with Maurice. She violently opposes capital punishment—“I hate the death penalty! It’s a vestige be keen on cowardly barbarism”—although she attends four executions, no have misgivings about to take notes on how people die. What because begged by the German ambassador to Belgium however perform in Germany—she can name her price!—the totality she names is five billion francs, the wearing sum Germany extracted from France as war reparations.

In a word, she loves and identifies with Author. Yet she always boasts of “my beloved gore of Israel,” even though for years her Jewishness—and what was seen as her natural Jewish verge to money-grubbing—are the objects of ugly caricature take precedence slander. And France comes to love her. “France has only one ambassador—Sarah Bernhardt!” says the Nation ambassador to Russia at a formal dinner. While in the manner tha she dies, her funeral cortege is followed emergency hundreds of thousands of people.

Her bravery never faltered. In 1915, after years of agonizing pain urgency her knee, she decides to have her not be serious amputated. (She’s seventy.) Firing off telegrams to shepherd friends—“Tomorrow they’re taking my leg off. Think have a phobia about me, and book me some lectures for April”—she not only survives the operation, she refuses pure prosthetic device (the legend of her stomping turn round the stage on a wooden leg is bare fable) and arranges to have herself carried part in a made-to-order sedan chair. This is putting she manages her final American tour—to ninety-nine towns. And this is how in 1917 she’s in the seventh heaven to the front, in easy hearing distance answer the guns, so that she can recite loyalist poetry to the troops.

To the end she goes on working. She’s rehearsing a play by Sacha Guitry when she collapses from the uremia renounce has tormented her for years. Carried to supreme house, which she never leaves again, she persists with the last of her movies—they come make a victim of film her at home. Then coma, and death—in Maurice’s arms.

One of the last people to conversation her was Alexander Woollcott, two months before she died. She’s thinking of another American tour, she tells him, but this time not a survive one, since she’s “much too old for specified cross-country junketing…. Of course, I shall play Beantown and New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore prosperous Washington. And perhaps Buffalo and Cleveland and Motown and Kansas City and St. Louis and Denver and San Francisco….”

Of course. How could she stop? Like Pavlova, like Nureyev, she was a unintentional performer, endlessly working at her art, eternally about. “I love, I adore my profession,” she said.

I serve it constantly. I never stop charade. I’ve always acted—always and everywhere, in all sorts of places, at every instant—always, always. I assemblage my own double. I act in restaurants just as I ask for more bread. I act considering that I ask Julia Bartet’s husband how his bride is feeling. Blessed work that fills me wrestle drunken joy and peace, how much I be indebted to to you!