In the ComÉdie FranÇaise stands a statue: the bust of MoliÈre, the great actor-playwright to whom the theatre is dedicated. Each year, on the anniversary of his death, every actor and actress belonging to the company attached to the playhouse must file past the statue and salute.

It was due to an incident occurring during this annual ceremony that Sarah Bernhardt left the ComÉdie for the first time.

The actresses were assembled in a corridor giving access to the statue—the sociÉtaires (actresses who had completed their period of apprenticeship) naturally taking precedence over the dÉbutantes. All were in costume, and over the costumes they wore the long mantle, showing their badge of membership of the ComÉdie. These mantles had long trains and, in endeavouring to avoid treading on one of them, little RÉgine Bernhardt, who held Sarah’s hand, inadvertently stepped on that worn by Madame Nathalie, one of the oldest actresses of the theatre, whom Sarah described as “old and wicked.”

Madame Nathalie turned and, roughly seizing the child, pushed her so violently that she was flung against a stone pillar bruising her side and cutting her face.

Sarah Bernhardt forgot the solemnity of the occasion, forgot the distinction of the company, forgot everything except that her little sister had been wantonly struck. “Beast!” she cried, and, running to the old actress, slapped first one side of her face and then the other, as hard as she could strike. The blows resounded throughout the corridor.

Madame Nathalie remained rooted to the spot. Sarah stood before her, with panting bosom and eyes flashing fire. For an instant it looked as though the ceremony would be spoiled, but other members of the company rushed between the two and they were hurried in different directions.

The next day she was summoned to the office of M. Thierry, director of the ComÉdie.

“Your conduct has been disgraceful, mademoiselle!” he said, “and your engagement should be cancelled immediately, but I have decided to give you one chance to make amends. Waiting in the next room are Madame Nathalie, and two other sociÉtaires. You will apologise to Madame Nathalie, in their presence, and in mine.”

“Apologise to that woman who injured my baby sister?” cried Sarah. “Never!”

“Think, mademoiselle,” urged Thierry. “Unless you do so you leave the ComÉdie!”

Leave the ComÉdie! After all the torturing months of preparation, after all the help she had received from the Duc de Morny, from Camille Doucet and her other friends, after the hard struggle at the Conservatoire. Sarah saw her mother’s bitter eyes, heard her scornful tongue.

She knew that her admission to the ComÉdie FranÇaise had been an honour and a favour which her performances at the Conservatoire did not justify. She knew that if her engagement was cancelled it was possible that she might look in vain for other employment; that every manager in Paris might be turned against her. More, she knew that her family would regard her leaving the ComÉdie as a personal insult to them, and it would, she realised, be no longer feasible for her to live at home. Sarah thought of her Aunt Rosine’s triumphant “I told you so,” and shuddered.

But, on the other hand, she knew that she was in the right. A sense of tremendous injustice weighed upon her. This woman had struck her little sister, and she had administered a deserved correction. What though she were one of the oldest sociÉtaires at the FranÇais. She should be the one to apologise!

It took Sarah some five minutes to arrive at this, her final, conclusion, and then, turning to M. Thierry, she said:

“If Madame Nathalie will apologise to RÉgine, I will apologise to her!”

M. Thierry looked at her incredulously.

“You mean that you will allow a question of pure pride to interfere with your career and perhaps spoil your future?” he demanded.

“I mean that if the whole incident occurred again, I would slap Madame Nathalie twice as hard!” said Sarah angrily.

M. Thierry turned back to his papers.

“Very well, mademoiselle,” he said; “you have until to-morrow afternoon to change your mind!”

Sarah did not apologise, and she was not immediately sent away. Her powerful friends who had supported her in her effort to enter the theatre made representations to M. Thierry, and, much against his will, he agreed to give the young actress another chance.

But Madame Nathalie nursed her spite, and when, a few weeks later, Sarah was given the rÔle of DolorÈs, in the play of that name by Brouihet, she contrived to influence the director to take the part away from the girl, almost on the eve of production, and give it to Madame Favart.

No sooner did Sarah learn this than she bounded into M. Thierry’s office.

“Give me my contract!” she cried. “I resign! I will have nothing more to do with your theatre!”

The same evening she was again a free agent. She had left the ComÉdie. When she returned home to inform her mother of her action, the latter took it coolly.

“Very well,” said Julie, “you need look for no further help from me, or from my friends. Hereafter you can do with your life as you wish! You are emancipated!”

Sarah was then eighteen years old. From that day on she was free of maternal control, and a few weeks later she secured a minor part at the Gymnase. After playing this, she was promised a leading part in a play called Launching a Wife, but this promise was not kept. In her anger, Sarah left the theatre, packed her trunk, and, with less than a thousand francs, left suddenly for Spain.

In Madrid she developed a passion for bull-fighting. At one moment, according to Caroline, her maid, she became engaged to Juan Lopez, a famous matador, but at a dinner given to celebrate the engagement, which was attended by famous personalities of the corrida, Lopez drank too copiously of the strong vintages of Spain, and Sarah, disgusted, left him and the dinner party and returned to her hotel. This incident decided her return to Paris, and, borrowing the necessary money from the manager of the hotel, who had known her father, she left the next day.

This was the first of two mysterious visits Sarah paid to Spain. Of the second, which occurred some eleven years later, practically nothing is known.

Now began the most painful period of Sarah Bernhardt’s life. No longer able to face the daily tirades of her mother and her aunts, who called her lazy, idle and wilful, she left the former’s flat and took one of her own in the rue Duphot, close by the Madeleine.

She drifted away from her family and the friends of her childhood and made questionable acquaintances in the fast-living set where her beauty, originality and wit made her much sought after. She became a well-known figure in certain salons and in the restaurants À la mode.

Now and again she played small parts in various theatres, but long intervals occurred between the occasions on which she worked. Her figure remained excessively slender, boyish and agile. It never became really full, but its slenderness was less noticeable after she had given birth to her son, Maurice. It then to some extent rounded out, only to become thin again when she was forty, at which epoch she invented the shoulder-length glove to conceal the skeleton-like outline of her arms.

The birth of her son was the event which changed Sarah’s whole life. It gave her something to live for. Until then she had been a wilful, spoiled, eccentric girl, given to tremendous fits of temper which were invariably followed by prolonged periods of despondency.

She had few intimates, and the friends who gathered round her were not of the sort likely to set her feet in the right direction. She had spells of strenuous energy, which would be succeeded by fits of laziness lasting sometimes for months, during which time she would live parsimoniously on small sums borrowed from stage acquaintances or from her mother’s friend, the Duc de Morny, who still remained faithful to the child for whom he had done so much.

Nothing, unless it was her eccentricity, distinguished her from the hundreds of other lovely girls at that time adorning the Paris stage. She had given up her attempts at painting, after moderate successes gained at several salons; the passion for modelling had not yet seized her, and, although she had undoubtedly immense talent for acting, she neglected to develop it, with the result that her theatrical engagements were few and far between.

She and her young sister Jeanne, then aged only fourteen, would often be seen at public balls of the better class, dancing with a cohort of young men, amongst whom were included some of the wildest members of society. She was frequently a guest at smart but somewhat questionable entertainments in the homes of titled acquaintances, whose riches were expressed in the luxury and the beautiful women with whom they surrounded themselves, and in the amount of rare wines they and their friends consumed.

Of average height, exceptionally slim, with blue eyes alternately flashing wit and fire, and invariably costumed in the latest fashion, Sarah, as she neared her majority, was in danger, despite her great talent, of falling into that bottomless pit which still exists in Paris for beautiful girls, and out of which it is so difficult to climb.

She was a member of one of the fastest sets of a fast city, and only a miracle could have been expected to save her. Her health was bad, she had frequent spells of coughing, and the tell-tale flush of fever was constantly on her cheeks. To all admonitions, however, she would reply that, if her life was to be a short one, she had better enjoy it to the full while there was yet time.

But the needful miracle happened. As the result of an ardent love affair, almost certainly with a man of princely family, she gave birth to a boy, whom she named Maurice.

As in her own case, the accouchement was a difficult one, and complications ensued which rendered her recovery doubtful. The child was under-sized but robust, and from his birth he resembled his mother.

Motherhood to Sarah was at once a boon and a scourge that whipped her flagging consciousness of right and wrong.

It brought her face to face with the hard realities of the pathways of error, but it gave her the strength of character she had lacked and which was to lead her up from and out of these dangerous pathways. It provided her with the one thing that had been so far lacking in her character.

Motherhood gave Sarah Bernhardt ambition.

If from then on she became greedy of praise and publicity, she at the same time became a strenuous worker; if she was hard with those whom she used as stepping-stones, she was harder with herself; if she allowed her tongue to become caustic and her manner overbearing, it was because life had been revealed to her in its veritable aspect, and because she realised the supreme necessity of building a wall between herself and her past.

Intolerant of criticism, exquisite in her art, mighty in labour, Sarah Bernhardt lavished on her tiny son a love she had never believed she could feel for any human being.

Every aim of her existence was to provide for him while he was young the shield of respectability she herself had never known.

Proud though she might be to the exterior world, she was humility itself before the cradle of her child.

And her struggle was no easy one. She told me of it one day on board ship while we were travelling to the Near East, and so deep an impression did her words make on me that I can remember them almost textually.

“When my son was born,” she said, “I had, for all my fortune, the sum of two hundred francs. If it had not been for Madame GuÉrard, who officiated at the birth of my child as she had officiated at my own, I do not know what I should have done.

“I owed ten times two hundred francs in small tradesmen’s bills, scattered about the city. My mother was ill, and could not be appealed to. I was ashamed to go to my other friends, such as the Duc de Morny, who would have been only too glad to have helped me, and I forbade Madame GuÉrard to say a word to anyone about my predicament.

“When my sister RÉgine came to see me, she was told that I had a contagious disease and could not be seen. Later on it was given out that I had left Paris for a holiday in the country.

“When the first week was up I had scarcely a sou. It was then that I determined to appeal to the one man whom duty should have compelled to aid me, and I sent a letter to the Prince, imploring him to take pity upon me and upon our child.

“The Prince’s reply was brutality itself: ‘I know a woman named Bernhardt,’ he wrote, ‘but I do not know her child.’ The note enclosed—fifty francs! “I persuaded myself that there was a mistake. I could not believe that the man I had loved could be so cruel.

“I dragged myself out of bed and went, faint and ill, to a mansion in the rue de Lille, where the Prince was that night giving a joyous fÊte.

“I was shown into an ante-room and waited nearly an hour before the Prince finally condescended to see me.

“Standing there in the doorway like a magistrate come to judge—to judge me, the mother of his child whom I carried in my arms—he asked me what I wanted. I could not believe his attitude.

“‘I have come to show you your child, and to demand your recognition of him!’ I answered.

“The Prince’s reply was to become purple with anger, to thump his fist on the table, and not only to deny the child, but to make the most monstrous allegation conceivable.

“Nearly fainting, I went from the house in tears, my baby’s cries mingling in my ears with the music of the dance and the shouts of the reckless party within.”

Such was the first great trial of the woman who was to become the most famous tragic actress on the world’s stage.

The fortitude that Sarah Bernhardt gave proof of then became the basis of the strong character which slowly formed from that day onwards. Scorned by the man who of all men had best the right to help her, Sarah bitterly determined to make the males of the species pay for the agony of her calvary.

This was the turning point of Sarah Bernhardt’s life. In one respect the world owes the evil Prince —— a debt, for had he recognised the child, had he lavished money and tenderness upon the mother, there is a probability that she would never have found the will and determination which were the earnest of her future success. Never was the adage that courage is born of necessity truer than in the case of the young Sarah Bernhardt.

Forced to work to support her child, whom she sent to a professional nurse in Normandy, Sarah laboured with a fierceness and a tenacity unequalled in the history of the stage.

She found work at the Gymnase, at the Porte St. Martin, at the Vaudeville, at the Lyric and at other theatres. Never allowing herself a moment’s rest, studying her parts far into the night, arriving always the first for rehearsals, she gamely set foot on rung after rung of the ladder which she had herself set up.

Her reputation, which had been so sadly tarnished by her previous mistakes, became once more satisfactory. She enjoyed the friendship of influential managers and playwrights. It was not long before she became marked for success. Critics began to comment favourably on her work, especially in La Biche au Bois, a play at the Porte St. Martin, which gave her her first opportunity as a star, and which resulted in her being offered a contract by M. Fournier for three years.

Before she accepted this contract, however, Lambert Thiboust, a well-known playwright, asked her to take the name part in La BergÈre d’Ivry, and she accepted—subject, of course, to the approval of the directors of the Ambigu theatre, where the piece was to be played.

These directors were two men named Faille and Chilly. Chilly had a mistress, Laurence GÉrard, whom he desired to have the part. To please Thiboust, however, they consented to give Sarah a hearing in the rehearsal room of the Ambigu, and thither she went and recited a part she had learned at the ComÉdie FranÇaise in On ne badine pas avec l’amour. There was complete silence until she had finished, and then Faille rose and shook his head sadly.

“My poor little girl,” he said, with assumed sympathy, “you cannot take this part! You are too thin—and, besides, you are in no way equipped for the theatre! You are not even a good actress!”

Sarah could hardly believe her ears.

“Tenez,” pursued Faille, “here is Chilly, who has heard you from behind that curtain. Ask him what he thinks.”

Sarah turned to Chilly, the little director who was later to be intimately associated with her career.

“Lambert Thiboust is crazy!” said Chilly shortly. “You would be no good in the part, mademoiselle! We cannot give it to you!”

As Sarah went out, more or less in a daze, she passed Laurence GÉrard on her way in. Then she realised why she had lost the part.

Later on, Chilly became famous as co-director of the OdÉon. Faille never succeeded, and years later, taking pity on him, Sarah Bernhardt acted in a benefit performance to establish a fund for his old age.

Sarah was ever generous in such matters. She never forgave an enemy who remained powerful, but she could always forgive and forget when poverty or misery overtook those who had done her harm.