Robert Gottlieb - Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt

One summer day, some months before her death, my grandmother, who was then seventy-eight years old, summoned me to her room in the Manor House of Penhot and said: Lysiane, you are a writer and some day you must write a book about me. So I am going to entrust you with certain objects and certain documents.

But, I replied, you have already written your memoirs yourself.

Yes, but they stop in 1881 and we are now in 1922. Besides, she added with a smile, perhaps I did not tell everything.

Lysiane Bernhardt

S ARAH B ERNHARDT was born in July or September or October of 1844. Or was it 1843? Or even 1841?

She was born in Paris at 5, rue de lcole de Mdecine (thats where the plaque is). Or was it 32 (or 265), rue St. Honor? Or 22, rue de la Michandire?

Well never know, because the official records were destroyed when the Htel de Ville, where they were stored, went up in flames during the Commune uprising of 1871. With someone else that would hardly matter, because wed have no reason to doubt whatever he or she told us. But dull accuracy wasnt Bernhardts strong point: She was a complete realist when dealing with her life but a relentless fabulist when recounting it. Why settle for anything less than the best story? For the ultimate word on Sarahs veracity we can turn to Alexandre Dumas fils, who, referring to her famous thinness, remarked affectionately, You know, shes such a liar, she may even be fat!

We do know who her mother was, but her father remains an enigma. We think we know who the father of her son was, but can we be sure? Everything about her early years is elusiveno letters, no reminiscences of family or friends, and what few documents that exist, highly obscure. Her singularly unreliable memoirs, My Double Life, carry her through her first thirty-five or so years, and theyre the only direct testimony we have of her life until shes in her mid-teens. Yet despite her obfuscations, avoidances, lapses of memory, disingenuous revelations, and just plain lies, we can track her path, and (more important) begin to grasp her essential nature.

There are three basic components to her experience of childhood, two of them enough to derail an ordinary mortal: Her mother didnt love her, and she had no father. What she did have was her extraordinary will: to survive, to achieve, andmost of allto have her own way. She would like us to believe that it was at the age of nine that she adopted her lifelong motto, Quand mme. You can translate quand mme in a number of (unsatisfactory) ways: Even so. All the same. Despite everything. Nevertheless. Against all odds. No matter what. They all fit both the child she was and the woman she was to become.

The motherJudith, Julie, Youle Van Hardhad her own reserves of strength and willpower, but unlike Sarahs, they were hidden under layers of lazy charm and an almost phlegmatic disposition. She was a pretty blonde, she played and sang appealingly, she was a congenial hostess, and she welcomed the expensive attentions of a variety of men-about-town. As a result, she had managed to fashion for herself a comfortable niche in the higher reaches of the demimonde of the Paris of the 1840s. Never one of the great courtesansles grandes horizontalesshe nevertheless always had one or two well-to-do protectors to squire her around the elegant spas of Europe.

Youle conducted a relaxed salon to which a group of distinguished men gravitated, among them her lover Baron Larrey, who was the Emperor Louis-Napolons doctor (his father had been chief medical officer of the first Napolons armies); the composer Rossini; the novelist and playwright Dumas pre; and the duc de Morny, known as the most powerful man in France, who was Louis-Napolons illegitimate half-brother. Morny was a highflying and successful financier as well as the president of the Corps Legislatif, exerting immense political influence without entering the field of politics himself. It was Rosine, Youles younger, prettier, livelier sister, who was Mornys mistressexcept when Youle herself was; in these circles, it hardly mattered. The important thing, since it would prove crucial to Sarahs life, was that Morny was a regular fixture in the intimate life of the family.

Youle and Rosine had come a long way. Their mother, Julie (or Jeanette) Van Harda Jewish girl either German or Dutch in originhad married Maurice Bernard, a Jewish oculist in Amsterdam. There were five or six daughters (Sarah doesnt make it easy to keep track of her aunts) and at least one son, douard Bernard, who, like Sarah, eventually morphed into Bernhardt. When their mother died and their father remarried, Youle and Rosine struck out on their own, first to Basel, then on to London and Le Havre, where in 1843 Youleperhaps fifteen years oldgave birth to illegitimate twin girls, both of whom died within days. Documents about their birth provide the first verifiable data we have about her. Although the twins father isnt named, the supposition is that he was a young naval officer named Morel, from a prominent Havrais family.

Undeterred, the ambitious Youle quickly set out for Paris, her daytime occupation seamstress, her nighttime career a quick ascent into the demimonde. Soon, two of her sisters followed her to Paris: the younger Rosine, who would surpass her in the ranks of courtesans, and the older Henriette, who made a solid marriage to a well-off businessman, Felix Faure. (The Faures would be the only respectable bourgeoisie of Sarahs youth.) Quicklyor already?Youle was pregnant again, with Sarah, whose name appears in various documents as Rosine Benardt (her application for the Conservatoire) and Sarah Marie Henriette Bernard (her certificate of baptism).