For all my intimacy with Sarah Bernhardt (said Madame Berton), I find it difficult to believe that she loved me. I think that, on the contrary, she distrusted me, and I even believe that at times she hated me, because it was I, and not she, who had married Pierre Berton.

Yet she confided in me. She was at times hard-pressed for somebody to whom she could tell her secrets. She knew that I would keep my promise never to relate them during her lifetime, and I know she told them to me because she realised that one day even the most intimate details of her life would belong by right to posterity.

This great actress with Jewish, German, French and Flemish (and probably also Gypsy) blood in her veins, was born into that condition of life which even to-day spells ruin, hate, despair and poverty for the great majority. In those days illegitimacy was almost an insuperable obstacle to recognition and success.

To the fact that the union of her mother and father was never blessed by holy matrimony may with justice be ascribed the impunity with which she was assailed during the first forty or fifty years of her life by all manner of critics, high and low. No less than three books or pamphlets were written attacking her before she had attained her fortieth year. Articles in the Parisian press were sometimes so virulent as to be inconceivable, when it is remembered that the object of their venom was the world’s greatest actress, the “Divine Sarah.” Every blackmailing penny-a-liner in Paris essayed to make Sarah pay him tribute at some time or another. I do not think that she ever paid, but I do know that the fits of rage and despair into which she was thrown after reading these attacks often made her so ill that for days her understudy was obliged to play her part.

Her long fight to keep the truth of her birth from being published is known. In telling me one day of the sordid circumstances to which she owed her appearance in the world she pledged me to secrecy during her lifetime. I have kept that pledge, and it is only because she gave me express permission to write this book after her death, and because it is time that the world knew the true story of this extraordinary genius, that I tell it now.

The “Divine” Sarah was divine only in her inspiration; the “immortal” Sarah was immortal solely in her art. The real Sarah, the Sarah whom her intimates knew and adored, was not so much a divinity as an idol; a woman full of vanity and frailty, dominated since birth by ambitious egoism and a determination to become famous.

She was the supreme woman of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but it was not her supremacy or her position at the pinnacle of theatrical success that made her lovable. She was loved, not because she was a saint but because she was not a saint; for to err is human and to be human is to be loved. Even on the stage her art was natural—she did not pose, she lived. In the history of the Christian world only one other woman was born under a greater handicap than was Sarah Bernhardt, and few women ever rose to a similar fame. Yet Sarah, even at the height of her career, did things which were justly condemned by strict-living people and would not have been tolerated in anyone else’s case.

Consider this woman. She was born to an unwed Jewish mother whose birth-place was Berlin. Her father was a French provincial lawyer, a profligate, who afterwards became a world-traveller.

She was born a Jewess, baptized a Catholic. By birth she was French, and by marriage she was Greek.

Throughout her life she was, first, an actress; secondly, a mother; thirdly, a great, a tempestuous lover.

She was a sculptress of extraordinary merit; she was a painter whose pictures were exhibited in the Paris Salons before she became famous as an actress; she was a writer with many books to her credit.

A temperamental morbidity was, I think, supreme in her character, although many who knew her placed ambition first. After these came mother-love, vanity, affection and malice. She made more enemies than friends; more people feared her than loved her; yet her life was replete with great sentimental episodes with some of the most famous men of her time.

The happiest period of her life was during the infancy of her son Maurice; her greatest joy was in his abiding affection. The bitterest period of her life was her old age, when she was surrounded by jackals whose affection for her was chiefly purchased by the money she mistakenly lavished on them; and who reduced her to such a penniless condition that, practically on her death-bed, she was forced to pose for an American film company, so that her debts and funeral expenses might in part be covered.

Fifty years of constant association taught me the truth about Sarah Bernhardt. Others might have known her longer, but none knew her better. None certainly could speak with greater authority of her intimate life. I had the details of her birth, her life, and her loves that are here set forth from her own lips, and from the lips of others who figured in her career.

The first time I met Sarah Bernhardt will live in my memory for ever. A child of eight, I was taken to visit the actress—then beginning to taste the first fruits of success—in her loge at the OdÉon Theatre.

I remember my fright as we crossed the vast, cavernous stage, on our way to the stairs which led to the dressing-rooms. Enormous pieces of scenery looked as though they might topple on one at any moment. Cardboard statues, which to my childish imagination seemed forbidding demons, leered at me from the shadows. Rough, uncouth scene-shifters, acolytes of this painted Hades, jostled me as we passed. The great height of the stage, ending in a gloomy mystery of ropes, pulleys and platforms which hinted at occult rites, awed me and made me feel smaller than I really was (and I was very small!).

From time to time voices, bawling from the gloom but whence exactly I neither knew nor could discover, echoed and re-echoed through the shadows. The curtain was up, and beyond the darkened proscenium I could faintly discern the four-storied auditorium, awesome in its resounding emptiness. Whom could we be going to visit here, I wondered, and clung tighter to my mother’s protecting skirts, while she inquired her way of a black-coated gentleman, who appeared with disconcerting suddenness as we reached the foot of the stairs. But I dared not voice the question, and now we mounted a bewildering number of steps, each bringing a more mysterious vista than the last.

Finally we reached the top of the stairs and my mother led me down a long passageway, lined with doors which had once been painted white but which were now a dirty cream colour. Some of these doors had simply numbers; others bore a name inscribed on a piece of pasteboard, inserted in a metal holder.

Almost at the end of the corridor my mother stopped before a door precisely similar to the others, except that instead of a number or a pasteboard it bore the name in golden letters:

SARAH BERNHARDT

Even then the young actress had evinced her preference for gold. She said that it matched her hair.

Receiving a summons to enter, my mother opened the door and went in, dragging me resolutely after her. Inside this door was another, inscribed in like fashion, and when this in turn was opened, we found ourselves in a large room illuminated by two windows and shaded lights, for it was winter and the windows opened on a courtyard.

This room contained a settee, an armchair, two other chairs and a table, which had three movable mirrors above it. The table was littered with pots and vases of every description and a wild confusion of gold-backed brushes and toilet accessories. A great vase full of carnations stood on it, and another filled with the same flowers was on the floor near one of the windows. The room was carpeted, but the carpet was so littered with envelopes, pieces of paper and various articles of wearing apparel that its design could not be discerned.

Seated before the table-de-toilette was an angel.

Let the reader remember that he is dealing with a child’s memory. My imagination had so been wrought upon by the fearful caverns below that I had fully expected to see, enthroned here, in the upper chambers, His Majesty Satan in all his glory. The sight then of this radiant creature, her head literally crowned with a tumbling glory of gold, came as a tremendous shock—until I recalled that, although that awful place down below must have been Hell, we had mounted upwards since then and must therefore by now have reached Heaven!

As my mother shook hands, I ran behind her and, terror-stricken at I know not what, hid my face in her ample skirts. Then, as though from far away, I heard the divinity speak.

“So this is little ThÉrÈse!” she said. “Come here, ma petite, and let Sarah Bernhardt kiss you!”

But I would not go, and only buried my face all the deeper in my mother’s dress.

“Mais, ma mignonne,” remonstrated the angel, “I cannot see you if you hide like that! Come!”

My mother, excusably vexed, dragged me from my hiding-place.

“Come! come!” she said sharply; “speak to Mademoiselle! Go and kiss her!”

Thus commanded in a tone I knew too well, I advanced a step and stood there shyly, not daring to lift my head. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by two arms and a mass of golden hair, which literally covered my head and shoulders as Sarah Bernhardt caught me to her.

“La pauvre petite ... la pauvre mignonne!” she kept repeating, punctuating the words with hearty hugs and an embrace on both cheeks. Then, holding me at arm’s length:

“So, you want to be an actress?”

Now this, to my knowledge, was the first occasion on which I had ever heard that I was to be an actress. Certainly I had never mentioned the idea to anyone, least of all to my mother, who was not a person to whom one made confidences. I stood there dumb.

“Ma foi,” ejaculated the angel, in her glorious voice, “she is pretty enough!”

There followed a rapid exchange of remarks between my mother and Sarah Bernhardt—the connection between whom I have never been able to fathom—and during these I was ordered to sit on the chair (my legs did not touch the ground) and told not to open my mouth. As if I would have dared to! But I had become bold enough to feast my eyes on the divinity, and to study her at leisure.

How easily that first childish impression of Sarah comes to me now, fifty years later!

Those amazingly blue eyes, widely-spaced; that arched nose, a pulse beating in the sensitive nostril as she talked; that glorious mouth, full and red, the upper lip slightly projecting over the under one; that firm chin, with the dimple that Edmond Rostand afterwards raved about; those high cheek-bones, the line of them extending to where the hair covered the ears; above all, that extraordinary mass of unruly golden-red hair, tossed about in riotous confusion and every direction.

Many another face I might see and forget, this one, never!

When Sarah stood up to say good-bye, I saw that she was taller than my mother, and unbelievably slender.

As we went downstairs, I was in such an ecstatic state of bliss that I had not the slightest fear of the gnomes lurking in the shadows of the nether regions as we passed them again on our way out, nor do I remember my mother talking to me.

My heart was dedicated to a goddess. Sarah Bernhardt, from that day onwards, was my idol.