Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt: The Woman Who Refused to Stop

In 1915 surgeons in Bordeaux amputated her right leg almost to the hip. She was seventy. She refused an artificial limb, refused crutches, refused a wheelchair, and had a Louis XV-style palanquin built so two men could carry her to the stage. Later that year, near Verdun, the actress Beatrix Dussanne watched her perform for soldiers and wrote: "The miracle again took place; Sarah, old, mutilated, once more illuminated a crowd."

A Childhood of Handoffs

Henriette-Rosine Bernard was born on 22 October 1844 at 5 rue de L'Ecole-de-Medecine in the Latin Quarter of Paris, daughter of Judith Bernard, a Dutch Jewish courtesan, and an attorney from Le Havre whose name went unrecorded for years. Her mother, largely absent, farmed her out first to a nurse in Brittany, then to Neuilly-sur-Seine, then at seven to a boarding school in Auteuil, where she played the Queen of the Fairies in *Clothilde*. At ten she entered Grandchamp, an exclusive Augustine convent school near Versailles, sponsored by Charles de Morny, half-brother to Napoleon III. She was baptised Catholic at her paternal family's insistence, took first communion in 1856, announced she would become a nun, and did not.

The Conservatoire and Two Dismissals

Morny steered her instead to the Paris Conservatory, where she studied from 1860 to 1862 under Joseph-Isidore Samson and Jean-Baptiste Provost, changed her name from Bernard to Bernhardt, and finished ranked fourteenth in tragedy and second in comedy. Her Comedie-Francaise debut on 31 August 1862 in Racine's *Iphigenie* was a failure; stage fright made her rush the verse. She recited Victor Hugo before Napoleon III and the emperor walked out. In 1863 she slapped the actress Madame Nathalie in a quarrel over her sister Regina, refused to apologise, and was dismissed. The Theatre de l'Odeon hired her in 1866 at 150 francs a month. Its director, Felix Duquesnel, saw what the Conservatoire had missed: "I had before me a creature who was marvelous gifted, intelligent to the point of genius, with enormous energy under an appearance frail and delicate."

The Golden Voice

The Odeon made her. *Kean* in 1868 doubled her salary. *Le Passant*, premiered that January, ran 150 performances plus a command performance for the emperor, who sent her a brooch monogrammed in diamonds. During the siege of Paris in 1870 she converted the Odeon into a hospital, installed thirty-two beds, assisted surgeons at amputations and nursed more than 150 wounded men, among them the future Marshal Foch. She returned to the Comedie-Francaise on 1 October 1872 at 12,000 francs a year, played the lead in Racine's *Phedre* in 1873 after learning the part in seventy-four hours, and made it the defining classical performance of the century. The critic Sarcey wrote that it was "nature itself served by marvelous intelligence, by a soul of fire, by the most melodious voice that ever enchanted human ears." After *Hernani* in 1877, Hugo sent her a tear-shaped pearl bracelet and a note: "Madame, you were great and charming; you moved me, me the old warrior... The tear which you caused me to shed is yours." He called it her golden voice. Edmond Rostand called her "the queen of the pose and the princess of the gesture."

The First Global Star

She resigned from the Comedie-Francaise in 1880 and went into business for herself with the impresario Edward Jarrett. Her first American tour ran from October 1880 to May 1881: 157 performances in 51 cities, *La Dame aux Camelias* sixty-five times, and a return home with a chest containing $194,000 in gold coin. Then Russia, where anti-Semitic crowds met her in Kiev and Odessa and Tsar Alexander III broke protocol by bowing to her. Then South America, Cuba and Mexico in 1886-87, earning over a million francs. Then a world tour in 1891-92 taking in Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Samoa, worth 3,500,000 francs. She played *La Dame aux Camelias* more than a thousand times before she died. She played men without apology: Hamlet in 1899, Lorenzaccio in 1898, the Duke of Reichstadt in *L'Aiglon* at fifty-six, Pelleas opposite Mrs Patrick Campbell in 1905. She played Joan of Arc at forty-five. She ran the Theatre de la Renaissance from 1893, then took a twenty-five-year lease on the 1,700-seat Theatre des Nations in 1899 and renamed it after herself, lighting its facade with 5,700 electric bulbs. She hired an unknown Czech named Alphonse Mucha to poster *Gismonda* in 1894, and Art Nouveau acquired its visual grammar.

Legend Management

She sculpted and painted, exhibiting in Piccadilly before the Prince of Wales and Gladstone. She kept a menagerie that included a cheetah, a wolfhound, an owl and two lions. She let it be known that she slept in a satin-lined coffin, which she in fact used for studying roles and posing for photographs. Asked who fathered her son Maurice, born in 1864 to the Belgian Prince de Ligne, she said she "could never make up my mind whether his father was Gambetta, Victor Hugo, or General Boulanger." Asked whether she was Christian, she answered: "No, I'm a Roman Catholic and a member of the great Jewish race. I'm waiting until Christians become better." She defended Alfred Dreyfus alongside Zola; her son took the other side and did not speak to her for a year. Thomas Edison recorded her reciting *Phedre* in 1880, and she filmed *Camille* in 1911 and *Les Amours de la reine Elisabeth* in 1912 for Adolph Zukor, carrying the nineteenth-century stage into the twentieth-century cinema almost single-handed.

Why Sarah Is Called a Genius

Her first director used the word directly in 1866, calling her "intelligent to the point of genius" before she had done anything to earn it, and the claim rests on a specific, unusual faculty: she could transmit emotional meaning across a language barrier. In London in 1879, playing *Phedre* in French to English audiences, Sir George Arthur recorded that "she set every nerve and fibre in their bodies throbbing and held them spellbound." Maurice Baring described "an aroma, an attraction, which was at once exotic and cerebral" and concluded that "she literally hypnotised her audience." This was craft and physical instrument rather than intellect: a voice of extraordinary tonal control, a command of pose and gesture so precise that Rostand made it her title, and a memory that could absorb Racine in seventy-four hours. There is a real counter-case. Much of her mystique was manufactured, the coffin and the menagerie included, and she was a shrewd manager of her own publicity long before the word existed. Her declamatory style struck later generations as excessive, and she chose sturdy melodramas by Sardou over the era's harder new writing. She was capable of petty violence, dismissed from the Comedie-Francaise for assaulting a colleague. What is not arguable is the reach: no performer before her had made an audience in Rio, Odessa and San Francisco feel the same thing.

Legacy

She was made a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur on 16 March 1913, having received the decoration earlier as a theatre director rather than as an actress. She acted until the end, collapsing at a rehearsal in 1922 and again on 21 March 1923, dying of uremia five days later. Thirty thousand people came to the funeral at Saint-Francois-de-Sales, and the crowd following her coffin to Pere Lachaise stopped in silence outside her theatre. The headstone carries one word: Bernhardt.