What is the truth about Sarah Bernhardt’s birth? Have I the right to tell it, even though I know the facts? Have I the right to divulge this secret of all secrets, for nearly four-score years locked in the breast of the greatest woman of five epochs? Who am I that I should venture into the cupboards of the dead Great for the purpose of rattling the skeletons I am certain to find there—yes, in the cupboards of all the dead great ones who later surrounded this celebrated woman, and not alone Bernhardt?

I have faced this problem squarely, fought it out with myself through long, sleepless nights, when publishers were bedevilling me for the truth, the whole truth and—scarcely anything but the truth. It is a problem that will raise a sharp conflict in the feelings of all my readers. It is a problem for Poe.

Have I the right—knowing what I do of the real circumstances surrounding not only the dead genius but her living relatives also—have I the right to tear the shroud from that dead face, and let the world gaze afresh on a long-familiar visage, only to find a new and wondrously changed entity beneath?

I will be frank. I had made up my mind not to do it: not for fear of giving offence to the dead, for ’twas from this very glorious clay that I had the truth with permission to publish it, but from respect to the living. Sarah Bernhardt not only left a son, Maurice Bernhardt; she left grandchildren and great-grandchildren, little ones whom I have watched joyously at play in the Parc Monceau, unknowing that at that very moment the great battle for life was being staged in the drab little house on the Boulevard Pereire. She had made up her mind that the sorrows which were hers should never blemish these innocent ones.

And yet—what a fallacy, what a heartrending fallacy it is to believe that such things can be concealed, or that, being concealed, they do not fester in their hiding-places!

Scarcely had the last, sad curtain been rung down on that greatest of real-life dramas than the scavengers of literature—those grisly people who lurk in the night of life, dealing in calumny and lies—began delving into the past of Sarah Bernhardt, just as the real chiffoniers, those horrible old women of the dawn, delve into the dustbins of Paris, seeking for Heaven knows what filth.

The mystery of her birth was Sarah’s great secret. Insatiable, the greedy public desired to rend this secret and to tear it into little bits. Literary ghouls fell upon the great woman’s reputation and fought over it. They disinterred legends that Sarah, while living, had successfully and scornfully proved untrue. They sent out lies by the bushel, secure in the knowledge that the Golden Voice, which alone could brand them, was stilled for ever.

Perhaps it was to be expected that the first of these legends came from Germany, a country that Sarah scorned and once refused to visit, although she had been offered a million marks to do so; a country, moreover, which had claimed Sarah as its own on more than one occasion. In 1902 the Berlin Lokal Anzeiger published a “revelation” of the birth of Sarah Bernhardt. She was born, said the inspired writer, at Frankfort. Her father was a German, her mother a Fleming. She had been taken to France when a tiny child and there abandoned by her parents.

“We are aware,” said the Lokal Anzeiger, “that Sarah herself claims to have been born in Paris. Our only retort to this is: let her produce her birth certificate!”

They knew, of course, that Sarah’s birth was never registered. Later I will tell you why.

Sarah Bernhardt was interviewed about these statements at the time they were published. As always, she refused to comment on the extraordinary story, and contented herself with referring inquiring journalists to her Memoirs, entitled “Ma Double Vie,” which had been published some years before.

In these Memoirs Sarah told an infinitesimal fraction of the truth. She said that she was born on October 22, 1844, at number 5, rue de l’Ecole de MÉdecine, in Paris. This was the only mention she made of the circumstances of her birth, and it was true.

Now comes George Bernhardt, a famous German, who ought to know better than to pander to the scandal-mongers, and who states positively that Sarah’s father was his great-grandfather, George Bernhardt, and that her mother was a Gypsy woman for whom he experienced a temporary passion while living in Algeria.

But here he hedges. “At least,” he says, “family records tell of the existence of the child, and of the allegation that George Bernhardt was the father; but they also say that the assertion was denied by him, which leads to the probability that Sarah Bernhardt had no claim whatever on the name she bore.”

Frankfort, and now Algiers! A Flemish mother and a Gypsy mother! A fine haul for the scavengers!

Sarah had to fight rumours of this kind on several occasions during her lifetime. In a scurrilous book which was written many years ago it was asserted that she “never knew who her father was.”

This, as might be expected, was untrue. Sarah not only knew who her father was, but knew him well. Though she never lived with him, he visited her frequently, especially when she was at school in the Convent at Grandchamps, and when he died he left her a portion of his fortune.

Sarah herself starts her Memoirs with this reference to him: “My father was travelling in China at the time—why, I do not know.”

Here, then, was the answer to the problem that had been bothering me: it was clearly better to tell the truth once and for all, and to set at rest all doubts concerning this much-debated question of Sarah Bernhardt’s birth, than to let every newspaper scavenger have his own way with it, prolong the agony, and incidentally contrive, by unscrupulous inference, to cast a shadow much blacker than the importance of the matter justified.

To aid me in coming to this decision I had the knowledge that Sarah herself, in telling the story to me many years ago, was aware that one day it would be made public, and wished things so. She knew that in time to come she would belong to history, and also how little of history is founded on actual fact. The last thing she wanted was for the facts of her life to be at the mercy of imaginative chroniclers, who would have nothing to base their story on except rumour.

Thus she told it to me, and thus I tell it to you. Let the world decide.