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ONE

What Can Be Done with Sarah?

Meek,
Chic,
Very
Merry!
You are just the huckleberry
Of our dreams . . .

—Anonymous, “An Ode to Sara”

Sarah Bernhardt claimed that when she was three years old, she fell out of her highchair and into a burning hearth. Acting fast, her nurse snatched her from the fire and plunged her into a pail of fresh milk. Dieu merci! The nurse, an old farm woman, treated Sarah’s burns in the only way she knew, by spreading butter on them. She also sent for the little girl’s mother.
      Soon, there she was: golden-haired, showy, and looking like a saint to Sarah’s eyes. Once she was sure that her daughter would be fine, Sarah’s mother left the farm in northern France where the aging couple—the nurse and her husband—looked after the child for a fee.
      Sarah’s beautiful mother! Her name was Judith, but she went by Youle, or sometimes Julie. She used the last name Van Hard, but the family name was closer to Bernard or Bernardt. Sarah would spell it Bernhardt. Sarah’s mother had been born into a Jewish family in the Netherlands. She and her sister Rosine left home as young teenagers. They made their way to Switzerland, London, and finally Le Havre, on France’s northern coast. Little is known about Youle’s early life, but records show that in Le Havre she gave birth to twin girls, who soon died.
      Sarah Bernhardt’s first home was a Brittany farmhouse with a kitchen hearth much like this one.
      The sisters moved on to Paris, where Youle found work as a seamstress. At sixteen she had another baby, a girl who lived. Sarah Bernhardt said that she was born on October 22, 1844, and maybe she was. A fire destroyed her birth certificate, so she can only be taken at her word.
      In Paris, Youle and Rosine slipped into the demimonde.This was a level of society that thrived apart from “respectable” city life. Devoted to creativity and erotic pleasure, the demimonde had no physical boundaries; it was defined by its live-and-let-live approach to life. Proper ladies never ventured into the demimonde, although their husbands might seek its delights. Artists, writers, and performers frequented its dance halls. Gay men and lesbians found acceptance there. The demimonde was the world of the courtesans. These women earned a good living by offering companionship and sex to men who paid them handsomely. This was the life that Youle and Rosine found. Another sister, Henriette, also lived in France, but she had married a businessman and lived a conventional life.
      Men commonly visited sex workers in the cities of nineteenth-century France. Often, a young man went to a house of prostitution for the first time with his father. This practice was considered part of a youth’s education, a way of teaching him about sex and female bodies. It was thought important for boys to acquire this knowledge, whereas girls—whose virginity had to be protected—were kept ignorant.
      Just as a rigid class system divided society, there were levels of prestige among sex workers. At the bottom were streetwalkers. These poor, desperate women solicited customers from sidewalks and doorways. Above them were women employed in houses of prostitution. They lived and worked under the supervision of a madam, a woman with years of experience in the sex trade and an aptitude for business. Courtesans were at the peak of their profession. They catered to men who were wealthy, connected to royalty, or powerful in the sphere of politics, finance, or the arts. A visit to an ordinary prostitute was kept discreet, but a courtesan was to be shown off and showered with money and costly gifts. She was a status symbol, proof that a man belonged to the privileged class.
      A courtesan offered more than sex. Customers paid lavishly to bask in her charm, escort her to the theater, and have her as a traveling companion. Some evenings, they gathered in her salon to engage in clever conversation and tell risqué stories. The money she earned allowed a courtesan to live independently in gracious surroundings and wear expensive clothes. “Honest work would never have brought me the luxury I craved,” said one courtesan. “I wanted to know the refinements and pleasures of artistic taste, the joy of living in elegant and cultivated society.” Her life was not very different from that of her clients’ aristocratic wives, but she would never have been accepted as their equal.
      Courtesans were known for their beauty, intelligence, and nonconformist ways. They spurned marriage or respectable work in favor of a life that offered money and freedom. Many courtesans, among them Youle Van Hard, changed their names. Turning their backs on the past, they reinvented themselves. Some courtesans even became celebrities. These were women like Cora Pearl, whose real name was Emma Crouch. Pearl loved horses and owned as many as sixty. She maintained two homes, a sumptuous Paris apartment and a grand chateau in the Loire valley. Another famous courtesan, Liane de Pougy (born Anne Marie Chassaigne), bragged to the press about the value of her jewels. She owned a diamond-and-ruby serpent worth nine hundred thousand francs, she said, a pearl collar worth one hundred thirty thousand francs, and another pearl necklace valued at seventy-five thousand francs. Most courtesans, including Van Hard, never achieved this level of wealth and fame, but they did live quite comfortably.
      By the time Sarah was five, she and her nurse were dwelling in a small, nearly windowless apartment in Paris. The nurse’s husband had died, and she had married again. Her new spouse was the building’s concierge, or superintendent. For Sarah, life felt “black, black!” In years to come, she would grow to love the beauty and cheery bustle of Paris, but not yet. She was homesick for the landscape she knew, the green hills and rocky coast of Brittany, in northern France. Mostly she missed her mother, whom she rarely saw. Youle Van Hard still paid the nurse to take care of Sarah. She, too, lived in Paris, but Sarah never saw her.
      Finally, one day something wondrous happened. A carriage pulled into the building’s courtyard, and a stylish lady stepped out. She was someone Sarah knew: Aunt Rosine! The little girl ran to her aunt and wrapped her thin arms around her. Rosine gave money to the nurse. Then, with her errand completed, she tried to pry Sarah’s hands from her lacy sleeves, but the child could not be budged. Rosine promised to return for her the next day, and Sarah relaxed her grip. Seconds later, though, as she watched her aunt climb into the carriage, she worried. What if Rosine was lying? What if she was telling the truth but forgot to come back?
      Desperate to stop her aunt from leaving, Sarah threw herself to the pavement in front of the carriage. She fell hard, blacking out and possibly breaking her arm. At least, that’s the tale she told when she wrote her memoirs as an adult. Another time she said that she jumped from a window onto the paving stones. Either way, it was a dramatic story, but when Sarah Bernhardt spoke about the past, it was hard to know whether all she said was true. She once told a journalist that her mother had fourteen children, including two sets of twins, and that she was child number eleven. Why stick to plain facts when imagined scenes could be more fantastic, touching, or tragic? Bernhardt always left her audience entertained.
      However it happened, Sarah was hurt badly enough to be removed from the nurse’s care and taken to live in her mother’s Paris flat. The next thing she remembered was waking up “in a beautiful, wide bed which smelt very nice,” with a worried Youle Van Hard at her side. Sarah’s mother loved her . . . didn’t she?
      Two years passed; for Sarah, they were years of boredom, when she played alone with her dolls under a servant’s watchful eye. Her mother promised to spend time with her, but she was always too busy. Eventually it dawned on Van Hard that Sarah, age seven, could not read, write, or do simple arithmetic. She had yet to start practicing the refined skills that all young ladies mastered, such as drawing and embroidery. Maybe it was time for her to go away to school. Besides, Van Hard was pregnant again. Two youngsters were more than she wanted to handle—especially when one had such a wild, dramatic streak. She enrolled Sarah in a fashionable girls’ boarding school in the suburb of Anteuil.
      Throughout Europe and America in the nineteenth century, very few paths in life were open to women. Education prepared girls to be upstanding wives—modest, refined mates who adorned a man’s home and hearth—and charming hostesses. Most girls aspired to marry well; that is, they hoped to wed a kind, morally upright man with an ample income and a secure place in society. It was common knowledge, though, that a suitor wanted more than a woman who could sing pretty airs and sew a fine seam. She had to come from a good family, which meant that the daughter of an unmarried courtesan would never be welcomed into the upper or middle class. At best she might find happiness with a solid, steady laborer. If unmarried, a girl like Sarah could find a job in a shop or earn her living with a sewing needle.
      Luckily for Sarah, she liked school. She made friends, and the schoolmistress treated her kindly. The pupils sang rounds and raised flowers in the school’s garden. Once a week, they enjoyed a visit from actors with the Comédie-Française, the famed national theater of France, who recited poetry for them. Each time, Sarah was enthralled. In the evening, she would sit on her dormitory bed and read loudly from great French tragedies. The other girls laughed, as they were bound to do, drawing embarrassed anger from Sarah. “I would then rush about to the right and the left, giving them kicks and blows,” Bernhardt recalled.
      When the girls staged a play of their own, Sarah was cast as the fairy queen. She practiced her part until she knew it backward and forward, and when the curtain went up, the show began well. The girls remembered their lines and moved about the stage just as they had done in rehearsals. Then the second scene started, and Sarah noticed three latecomers joining the audience. She recognized her mother, Aunt Rosine, and the duc de Morny, one of the women’s male friends. In that moment, she panicked, and everything she had practiced went right out of her head. All she could think of were the many eyes watching her, and the keen ears listening for her to make a mistake. Gripped by stage fright and nearly blinded by tears, Sarah ran from the stage and threw herself on her bed.
      Youle Van Hard followed her daughter to the dormitory and stood above her, scolding. “And to think that this is a child of mine!” Sarah’s heart was breaking. After her mother left, she cried so much that she made herself ill and spent four days in the infirmary. She wrestled with a question that she would still be asking in years to come: “Why had my mother been so cruel, so cold to her daughter?”
      Occasionally someone else visited Sarah at school: her father. At one time, he and Van Hard were romantically involved. They no longer had any kind of relationship, and he didn’t play much of a role in his child’s upbringing. Still, he helped support Sarah, and he was known to her, although today his name is a mystery. It has been said that he was a naval officer, the son of a wealthy family in Le Havre. Or maybe he was a lawyer who had been studying at the University of Paris when Sarah was conceived. Whoever he was, Sarah’s father was paying for her schooling. And when she was nine, he decided that she needed instruction in religion—in his religion, the Roman Catholic faith. He arranged for her to enter Notre-Dame du Grandchamp, a convent school in another suburb, Versailles.
      No one told Sarah, though. She learned that she was to leave her much-loved school on the day Aunt Rosine showed up to take her away. Sarah reacted by throwing the biggest temper tantrum of her life. For two hours, her blue eyes flashed with fury. She yelled, rolled on the floor, and cursed the adults in her life. She rushed outside and threatened to jump into a muddy pond. “The idea that I was to be ordered about, without any regard to my own wishes or inclinations, put me into an indescribable rage,” Bernhardt wrote. Rosine at last brought Sarah away, not to the convent but to her own Paris apartment. There she called in a doctor to examine the exhausted child. He prescribed several weeks of rest, so Sarah went to stay with proper Aunt Henriette and her husband, Félix Faure.
      Her uncle was kind, but Sarah hated her strict, unsmiling aunt. Aunt Henriette chided Sarah for her wildness, yet she conveniently failed to see that her own perfect children egged their cousin on. If they bet Sarah that she could not jump across a ditch, Sarah had to accept the challenge—even though she knew Aunt Henriette would punish her for soiling her dress.
      None too soon, the day came for ten-year-old Sarah to enter the convent school. Wearing a new uniform, she set off in a carriage with her mother and father together, as they almost never were. Soon she stood before the heavy double doors of the convent. It was a solid, silent brick building that looked to Sarah like a prison. She had heard adults say that she was impossible to manage. Aunt Henriette foresaw that she would come to a bad end. Now she trembled, fearing that she was about to be locked up forever.
      The doors opened, Sarah and her parents stepped inside, and Sarah discovered that her new school was not the prison she had feared. Waiting beyond the doorway was “the sweetest and merriest face imaginable,” Bernhardt recalled. It belonged to Mother Sainte Sophie, the nun who oversaw Notre-Dame du Grandchamp. Sarah, a little girl desperate to be loved, flung herself into the mother superior’s embrace. The kindly nun showed the newcomers around the convent school. Sarah saw the dining hall where she would eat her meals and the dormitory where she would sleep. Outdoors, Mother Sainte Sophie pointed out the plot of ground where each girl raised her own garden. Already Sarah thought about the seeds she wanted to plant.
      Here was a place where she could thrive! This did not mean, though, that she was a perfect student. She earned good grades in geography and did well in art classes, but in other subjects she turned in just enough work to get by. Her misbehavior led to frequent scoldings and gained her a reputation. “I became a personality,” Bernhardt stated, “and that sufficed for my childish pride.” Sarah was the girl who played tricks on the nuns during lessons, who mimicked the bishop for laughs. She was the one who collected small pets: lizards, crickets, and spiders. When one of her lizards died, she held a funeral for it. Some twenty girls marched in a procession, chanting a Latin prayer.
      News came that the archbishop of Paris was to visit the school. To honor him, the nuns helped the girls put on a play. It told the story of Tobias, a man living in Old Testament times. With help from the Angel Raphael, Tobias restores sight to his blind father. Sarah hoped more than anything that she would be given a role. She told herself that stage fright was a thing of the past, that she had outgrown her childish fear. Then she watched as all the parts went to other students, to girls like her pretty, popular friend, Sophie Croizette. Sarah was crushed, but she was also resourceful. On the day of the performance, when the girl playing the Angel Raphael was too terror-stricken to go on, Sarah came forward. She knew all the lines, stepped into the role, and played the part without feeling afraid. She considered this her first success as an actor.
      Religion was basic to convent-school life. Sarah, who had had no religious upbringing and whose mother had been raised Jewish, learned Catholic teachings. She found peace in the solemn ritual of the Catholic Mass and felt that she had found a new home in the church. She watched the nuns go about their quiet, orderly lives, praying, eating their meals, and performing humble duties at certain hours each day. Sarah imagined herself taking religious vows and spending her life behind the convent’s walls, serving God with the sisters she had grown to love.
      She received the church’s sacraments, beginning with baptism. As the sisters explained, a priest would wash sin from her soul with a small amount of water and welcome her into the Catholic faith. Children born into Catholic homes are almost always baptized as infants, but people can be baptized at any age. Sarah’s baptism took place on May 21, 1856, when she was eleven. Joining her were two strangers who did not study at the convent: her half sister Jeanne, the child born while Sarah was away at her first school, and another, younger half sister, Régine. Youle Van Hard had arranged for all three of her children to be baptized together.
      Also present were Sarah’s aunts, uncle, and three men who had agreed to be the girls’ godfathers. Sarah’s was named Régis Lavolie. He possibly was a friend of her father’s, as she was told. Or he may have been one of the male companions who paid for Youle’s favors. He was a gruff man whom Sarah disliked. Not there was her father, though Sarah had long imagined his pride as he watched her join his church. Days before the baptism, Van Hard had come to the school and given Sarah the terrible news that her father had died. Sarah cried as never before for the father she had barely known. As always, her fragile health was no match for her violent emotions. A week later, after receiving the sacrament of confirmation, she fell ill again. This time she came down with pneumonia.
      Hoping that pure mountain air would heal Sarah’s lungs, Van Hard took her daughters for a long holiday in the Pyrenees, the mountain range separating France and Spain. The vacation gave Sarah time to get to know her half sisters. Four-year-old Jeanne, quiet and well-behaved, was their mother’s pet. Van Hard often cuddled her and kissed her feet. Régine, at two, was a spunky, rebellious child, much like Sarah. Sarah understood this little girl whom their mother pushed away and formed a close, protective bond with her.
      Day by day, Sarah felt her health returning. She took solitary hikes past peasants’ farms, through low woods, and on the slippery turf of steep meadows. Neighboring hills looked like clusters of blue or violet clouds; beyond them rose taller, snow-covered peaks. Sarah befriended the alpine goats that grazed in this rocky terrain and told her mother that she wanted to be a goatherd one day. Anything was better than becoming a nun, Van Hard replied. When it came time to leave the mountains and say goodbye to the goats, Sarah wept and pleaded. She wanted to take them with her to Grandchamp and saw no reason not to. In the end, weary of arguing, her mother purchased two nanny goats to graze on the convent grounds and give the girls milk.
      Youle Van Hard was not alone in thinking that Sarah was unsuited to convent life. Mother Sainte Sophie agreed. Religious belief was not enough. A nun needed to practice obedience and bend her will to the service of others. Could Sarah keep her impulses under control? The answer became clear one afternoon when the students were having recess outdoors. Some soldiers stationed at nearby barracks were on the other side of the convent wall, horsing around. Suddenly a shako—a tall, rigid military hat—sailed over the wall and landed at Sarah’s feet. A moment later, a soldier leaped onto the convent grounds and asked to have it back. But where had it gone? The giggling girls pretended not to know.
      As if from nowhere, the hat appeared on Sarah’s head. In a second, she had climbed a rope to the top beam of a tall piece of playground equipment, where no one could reach her, and pulled the rope up after her. She stood there in victory, with the shako falling over her eyes. What a commotion she caused! Officers from the barracks arrived, and together with Mother Sainte Sophie they pleaded with Sarah to return the soldier’s hat. At last, shouting, “There it is, your shako!” Sarah tossed it so that it glided over a wall and into a cemetery. Then she refused to come down until everyone had gone away.
      The soldiers left, and after a while the girls went indoors. The time came for Mother Sainte Sophie to resume her convent duties. Hours passed, dusk fell, and the air turned cold. Sarah grew hungry for her dinner, but still she remained on her perch. The gardener’s big dog was prowling the grounds, and he frightened her. She felt relieved when she saw Mother Sainte Sophie returning. The caring nun convinced the headstrong girl that she would be safe.
      No one knows whether the cause was exposure to cold or the lingering effects of pneumonia, but Sarah again got sick. This time she developed pleurisy, a painful inflammation of tissue surrounding the lungs. Youle Van Hard was traveling in Britain with a man and Aunt Rosine was in Germany, so Mother Sainte Sophie nursed Sarah. For more than three weeks, the devoted mother superior never left the girl’s bedside. When Van Hard was back in France and Sarah had recovered enough, her mother took her home to Paris, having decided that Sarah’s days at school were over.
      Van Hard ordered her to forget that silly notion of becoming a nun, but Sarah argued back that she would never change her mind. To prove it, she hung pictures of saints in her bedroom and knelt beneath them in prayer for hours at a time. She wore her white confirmation dress day after day, with a string of rosary beads around her neck. The dress grew so filthy that it had to be thrown away. Youle produced tears at any mention of her daughter joining the sisters and made sure Sarah heard her noisy sobs.
      Yet despite the discord, daily life went on. Because Sarah and her sisters still needed schooling and refinement, Van Hard hired a governess to come during the day and instruct her girls at home. Mademoiselle de Brabender was highly qualified, having once taught the children of Russian royalty. With graying hair and the shadow of a mustache, she was old enough to be Sarah’s grandmother. Mademoiselle was a pious churchgoer, gentle and kind. As Sarah did whenever someone showed her affection, she gave Mademoiselle her loyalty and love. Van Hard also enrolled Sarah in art classes to perfect her ladylike accomplishments. Sarah had liked art lessons at the convent, and she continued to show talent. She won a prize for a painting she did of winter in Paris.
      Living upstairs from Youle and her daughters was another person who gained Sarah’s lasting friendship. Slim, dark-haired Madame Guérard was a young widow with children. She, too, was devoted and sweet-natured. Sarah called her by an affectionate nickname, “my little lady.”
      One day in September 1859, as Sarah’s fifteenth birthday neared, Youle Van Hard invited guests for lunch. Sarah’s aunt Rosine came, and so did her godfather, Régis Lavolie, and Youle’s close friend the duc de Morny. After the meal, Van Hard instructed Sarah to join the adults for coffee in the drawing room. It was a sunny space, decorated in green and yellow. There was not a speck of dirt on the carpet or dust on the potted plants, because Van Hard insisted on a spotless home. Others soon joined the company: Mademoiselle de Brabender, Sarah’s uncle Félix Faure, and her little lady from upstairs, Madame Guérard. Once everyone had gathered and coffee was poured, Monsieur Lavolie rose. “As we have come here on account of this child,” he said, “we must begin and discuss what is to be done with her.”
      Sarah understood all at once that her mother had called this meeting to decide her future. With panic in her eyes, she looked around at the adults in the room. What did they have in mind for her? It was “as though I was to be thrown into the sea,” Bernhardt recalled, “when I could not swim.”