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I went to another gate, but it was only at the postern gate of Poissonniers that I could get my passport signed. We were taken into a little shed which had been transformed into an office. A Prussian general was seated there. He looked me up and down, and then said: "Are you Sarah Bernhardt?" "Yes," I answered. "And this young lady is with you?" "Yes."
It was all over. He had survived! Boston would never know. The next day I received a note from Sarah Bernhardt, asking me if I would allow her to make a bust of la charmante petite fille. I answered that I should be delighted. Then came another note telling me at what time l'enfant should come for the first sitting.
Quite a short while after my arrival April 12, 1870 I saw for the first time Sarah Bernhardt, who had just begun to make a name at the Odeon. She was playing in George Sand's beautiful and mutinous drama L'autre, from which the great-grandmother in Bjoernson's Leonarda is derived.
"Oh, want it badly enough then, Zoe; want it badly enough!" "The greatest singer in the world! That's what I want to be, and stand on a stage with all the music there is around me as if I was in the middle of an ocean of it. Lilly, will you take me to another matinee to see Bernhardt? She makes me feel what I want to be. Just just her being what she is makes me want to be what I am."
Ursula was older, but she would always be in a sense ageless, as such women are one would thrill to Sara Bernhardt were she seventeen or seventy. Jimmie seemed to have dropped the years from him. He was very confident of the success of his play. "It can't fail," he said, "with Ursula to make it sure " I wondered whether it was Ursula or Elise who had made it sure.
It was like a thick shell with no crevice in it through which the tenderness of Shakespeare's Hamlet could show, except for the one moment at Ophelia's grave, where he reproaches Laertes with those pathetic words "What is the reason that you use me thus? I loved you ever; but it is no matter." Here Mme. Bernhardt betrayed a real grief, but as a woman would, and not a man.
Its haute ecole was its pride, and it demanded for its premiere equestrienne the homage due to the great artists of the world. Bernhardt of the Comedie Francaise I think she was still there in those far-off days, Patti of the Opera and Mlle Renee Saint-Maur of the Cirque Rocambeau were three stars of equal magnitude. The circus toured through France from year's end to year's end.
On one of the pillars of this edifice was a brilliant, gilded poster. It represented Sarah Bernhardt in the costume of Tosca, I believe. She wore a stiff rich robe and held a palm in her hand. And I called to mind the things I had been told of this famous woman: her caprices that were immediately obeyed, her extravagances, her coffin, her pride.
Bernhardt is as noted and notable as Millet, Irving as distinguished as Millais; while in our own country not more than two men in painting and sculpture deserve places beside Booth and Forrest as high priests of Art. That your audience applauds you is nothing. The same audience would applaud Paderewski or a great prestidigitator.
"Art is impossible to little people, to those who starve the big side of their nature, for fear of Mrs. Grundy. Look at the real people Rachel, Wagner, Turner, Bernhardt, and a thousand others. Were they bound by the marriage laws? What will these crowds of tiny men and petty women do who come from the country parlors and corn-shocks of the West?
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