As I said at the conclusion of the last chapter, I did not accompany Sarah Bernhardt on her first visit to the United States, and I can therefore give no first-hand impressions of the trip. What is more, she told me so much when she returned, and so mixed were her own impressions, that it is hard for me to say now whether she actually enjoyed her visit to the New World or not.

“What a detestable country!” she would say sometimes. “What a marvellous country!” she would exclaim at others. Similar mixed conclusions are often brought back from America by visitors even now.

She adored the scenery, the energy and the extravagance of the Americans, and she thought the American men perfect—all except the reporters. But she hated the American women—and she hated most of them until she died.

“Their voices!” she would exclaim, and shudderingly put both hands to her ears. “Quelle horreur!”

When she opened in New York, one of her most expensive costumes, she told me, was completely ruined by women visiting her in her dressing-room, who insisted on fondling it and exclaiming over its rich embroidery.

During her visit to London, in the June of the year when she first went to America, she met Henry Irving.

“They tell me, madame, that you are going to the United States?” said Irving. “Yes,” said Sarah. “I must make money, and the Americans seem to have it all!” Even at this period that was the generally accepted idea!

“Madame,” said Irving, “what you say saddens me extremely! America is a country of barbarians! They know nothing about the theatre, and yet they presume to dictate to us! If I were you I would not go to America, madame! What you will gain in dollars, you will lose in heart-throbs at their ignorance of your art!”

Irving himself, however, went to America a few years later.

Sarah brought back from the United States six hundred thousand francs, a variety of animals—including a lynx, which bit her chambermaid and had to be killed a week after its arrival in Paris—a profound respect for American enterprise, and the reputation she had long been hoping to make for La Dame aux CamÉlias.

When Alexandre Dumas was told of her intention to play La Dame in New York he cried disgustedly: “That’s it! Try my play on the barbarians!”

As a matter of fact, Booth’s Theatre, where Sarah opened in America, was filled on the first night with almost the entire French colony in New York, which was a considerable one. Practically the only Americans there were the critics, and a few wealthy society people who held regular boxes. The play chosen for the first night was Adrienne Lecouvreur.

The next day Abbey, the impresario, rushed into Sarah’s bedroom—Sarah usually received her business folk in the morning while still in bed—waving a bundle of papers. His face wore the look of one stricken by some grievous blow. Stopping short, he gave Sarah a look of indescribable anguish, and then sat abruptly down and mopped his face. He could not speak.

Sarah sat up in bed, fright on her countenance.

“What is it? What is it? The theatre has been burned down, and my costumes are destroyed?”

“No,” said Abbey, “but your reputation is!”

The American papers, without exception, said that Sarah Bernhardt was a magnificent actress, but that her rÉpertoire was filled with plays which should never be shown on the American stage. “They are doubtless considered all right in immoral Paris,” said the Globe, “but they will certainly only succeed in disgusting Americans.”

And they proceeded to tear poor Adrienne Lecouvreur to pieces! A highly improper play, they said, and one which should never be given in the presence of American women. One paper seriously advised the police to descend on the theatre, close the performances, “arrest this woman, and send her back to France.”

Sarah was bewildered. She had played Adrienne in Paris, in London, in Brussels and in Copenhagen, and everywhere it had been met with tremendous applause. This was her first experience of American methods.

The fact of the matter was that only one of the critics present at the opening night knew French, and they gathered quite wrong impressions from the few words they did understand. The play, given at full length in a word for word English translation, would doubtless have been insufferably vulgar. In French, it was whimsical, delightful in its irony, and entirely free from anything objectionable whatsoever. The American critics, however, could not understand the subtlety of the lines, and they gathered their opinions solely from the action.

The manager of the theatre followed Abbey into Sarah’s bedroom. He wore a strained, a hunted look.

“You have seen the newspapers?” he asked Abbey.

“Yes!” Consternation was in the eyes of all three.

“What shall we do?” inquired Abbey, at last.

“There is only one thing to do—we must choose another rÉpertoire! They will have us arrested soon, if this keeps up!”

“But that is ridiculous!” angrily said Sarah. “Never before in my life have I been so insulted! I will either play La Dame aux CamÉlias to-night, or I will pack up and return to France by the next boat!”

The two men cried out in protest.

“You can’t do that!” said Abbey. “There must be some way out of the difficulty!”

“I shall play La Dame aux CamÉlias to-night, as arranged!” said Sarah, as if this was the last word on the subject.

Abbey and the manager of Booth’s Theatre took their departure, after arguing with her for some time, but in vain.

“She will do it!” said Abbey, with conviction. “When Sarah Bernhardt makes up her mind, heaven and earth cannot change it.”

“But we must do something!” said the manager, in despair.

“I have it!” exclaimed Abbey. “We will play La Dame, but we will call it something else. They will never know the difference.”

When Sarah Bernhardt arrived at the theatre that night, she was astounded to see huge red placards outside, announcing that she would play Camille.

She rushed to Jarrett, the first man she met on the stage.

“What is it, this Camille?” she exclaimed furiously. “I know no Camille!”

“Oh yes, you do,” said Jarrett, smiling urbanely. “Camille is—La Dame!”

“Oh!” cried Sarah, and burst into uncontrollable laughter.

The theatre was packed to the roof, this time with a most representative crowd of Americans. The publicity of the morning had done its work. Sarah Bernhardt was playing immoral pieces? Well, New York didn’t know what to do about it, but New York decided to go and see for itself.

This sort of theatrical psychology is now a well-understood thing. Even in Paris, when a revue is not making expenses, they bribe the police to make a complaint about the immorality of one of the scenes—and then its success is assured. But it was the first time such a thing had been known in America.

New York liked Camille—it liked it enormously!

The critics were not fools, though. Every paper announced the next day that Camille was in reality La Dame aux CamÉlias, but with an American name!

They also said that the play had been forbidden in London by Queen Victoria, which was true; and were very severe on the “prudish Queen” for her “narrow-mindedness.” Completely forgetting their fulminations of only twenty-four hours before, they said that it was an unthinkable crime that such a beautiful play should ever have been banned anywhere. It was rather “Frenchy,” they admitted, but Sarah’s magnificent acting more than made up for that.

Sarah Bernhardt made more than a dozen tours in America, and Camille was invariably her greatest success there. It broke all records for receipts in New York City.

The reputation of the play crossed the Atlantic before Sarah did. Alexandre Dumas did not know whether to be delighted or dismayed. The “barbarians” had liked his play!

The success of La Dame in America encouraged Sarah to give it a fair trial in France, and elsewhere in Europe. Eventually it became, after PhÈdre and Le Passant, her greatest success. Even L’Aiglon—another play which received its original baptism of success in the United States—could not rival it in popularity.

All of which may go to show that American audiences have a better sense of the dramatic than have audiences in Europe—or it may not!

After witnessing a performance of Le Sphinx, which also obtained an enormous success in New York, Commodore Vanderbilt, who was then at the hey-day of his power in New York, but was not yet accepted in society because of his bluff and hearty—not to say indifferent—manners, was announced to Sarah in her dressing-room. She had heard of this remarkable man, and was anxious to meet him. Her account of the conversation, which took place through an interpreter, was amusing.

“His first words to me” (said Sarah) “were, ‘You are a Jewess, aren’t you, madame?’

“I was offended at his manner, and replied frigidly, ‘No, monsieur, I am a Catholic!’ “‘That’s peculiar,’ said Vanderbilt, ‘I heard you were a Jewess. However, it don’t matter. I came to present my respects. You’re the only woman who ever made me cry!’

“I laughed—nobody could resist him. ‘Yep, by gorry,’ went on the multi-millionaire, ‘you made me cry! An’ I’ve taken a box for every night you are billed to play!’”

He kept his word. Looking across the footlights, night after night, throughout twenty-three performances, Sarah never failed to see Vanderbilt in his box. Every time he saw her looking at him, he took out a gigantic handkerchief and solemnly wiped his eyes. When she left New York, he was among those who saw her off on the boat.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I’d like to give you a present. What would you like the most?”

Some women, hearing such an avowal from a multi-millionaire, would have thought of jewels. But Sarah was more original.

“Give me your handkerchief!” she replied promptly.

Vanderbilt was much taken aback, but took out his handkerchief and gave it to her.

Sarah thanked him. “I shall keep this always,” she told him, “in memory of the time I made Vanderbilt cry!”

When she got back to Paris, she had it framed and hung on the wall of her boudoir, but on one of the several occasions that her furniture was seized for debt, she lost it, and Vanderbilt had meanwhile died.

Theodore Roosevelt, then a very young man, was another of those who met Sarah Bernhardt during her first visit to New York. He was a firm friend of hers until he died, and invariably visited her when he was on one of his trips abroad. A letter from Roosevelt, extolling her genius, was one of the few she kept and had framed. It hung until the day of her death in the little ante-chamber outside her bedroom.

In this letter the former President said in one passage: “I have altered my plans so as to arrive in Paris after you return from Spain. I could not come to Paris and miss seeing my oldest and best friend there.”

During her tour of America in 1892, Sarah had dinner with Roosevelt, and she loved to recount the experience to her friends on her return to Paris.

“An unforgettable character!” she would say, and then would add: “Ah, but that man and I, we could rule the world!”

They came near to doing it, he on one side as President of the United States, and she, on the other, as the uncrowned Queen of Paris.

Booth, James Hubbard, James Wilcox and James K. Hackett were other Americans whom Sarah counted among her warmest friends. Hackett represented the American stage at her funeral.

It has often been commented upon that Sarah Bernhardt never had an American lover. I heard her speak of this one day with regret.

“I am sure the Americans must be great lovers,” she said; “they are so strong, so primitive, and so childish in their ardour. The English are wonderful men to love, because they possess the faculty of bending one to their likes, dislikes and moods without seeming to make it an imposition; but the Americans are greater, for they bend themselves to suit you.”

This absence of Americans in Sarah’s sentimental life is best explained by the short duration of each of her tours of America and the distances covered during them. Many towns in America saw Sarah only for twenty-four hours, and the whole period was a ceaseless whirl of arriving, rehearsing, playing and departing. She was a genius at organisation and insisted on attending to the larger details of her tours herself.

After three weeks in America, Sarah learned sufficient English to know the simpler expressions, and before 1895 she spoke it very well. On her tours in America she invariably travelled by special train, the “Sarah Bernhardt Special,” but this was not by her own arrangement, and she did not like it.

“They will not put one’s special coaches on the fast trains,” she explained, “and at night they back one’s car into a siding, where one is kept awake by the noise of the goods trains being made up, shunting, arriving and departing.”

On her last two visits to America she did not use either a special train or a special car, but travelled in drawing-room sleepers. She said she found it easier and “beaucoup plus pratique.”