La Divine, le roman de Sarah Bernhardt (French Edition)

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She made her fame on the stages of Europe in the s and was soon in demand all over Europe. Her first tour of the United States and Canada took place in performances in 31 cities. Another tour of America took place in The play was greeted with rave reviews despite its running time of four hours. It performed in New York's Globe Theatre for only one night in December before it was banned there, as well as in Boston and Philadelphia.

In New York's art scene of the story line of the play was nothing short of scandalous. Judas, after realizing that Mary Magdalene had given herself to Jesus, decided to betray his friend to the Romans. To top the provocation of New York's theater lovers, Judas was played by the voluptuous Sarah Bernhardt. After establishing herself on the stage, by age 25 Bernhardt, who designed her own clothes and was the first woman to wear a pantsuit , [23] began to study painting and sculpture under Mathieu Meusnier and Emilio Franceschi.

Her early work consisted mainly of bust portraiture, but later works were more ambitious in design.

Bernhardt also painted, and while on a theatrical tour to New York, hosted a private viewing of her paintings and sculpture for guests. Maurice did not become an actor but worked for most of his life as a manager and agent for various theaters and performers, frequently managing his mother's career in her later years, but rarely with great success. Maurice and his family were usually financially dependent, in full or in part, on his mother until her death.

Maurice married a Polish princess, Maria Jablonowska see Jablonowski , with whom he had two daughters, Simone who married Edgar Gross, son of a wealthy Philadelphia soap manufacturer and Lysiana who married the playwright Louis Verneuil. Alphonse Mucha based several of his iconic Art Nouveau works on her.

She later married Greek-born actor Aristides Damala known in France by the stage name Jacques Damala in London in , but the marriage, which legally endured until Damala's death in at age 34, quickly collapsed, largely due to Damala's dependence on morphine. During the later years of this marriage, Bernhardt was said to have been involved in an affair with the future King Edward VII while he was still the Prince of Wales. Bernhardt is said to have once stated, "Me pray? Bernhardt was one of the pioneer silent movie actresses, debuting as Hamlet in the two-minute long film Le Duel d'Hamlet in Technically, this was not a silent film, and in fact, it is cited as one of the first examples of a sound and moving image syncing system created with the new phono-cinema-theatre system.

The leg never healed properly. By , gangrene set in and her entire right leg was amputated ; she was required to use a wheelchair for several months. Barnum is usually cited as the one to have made the offer, he had been dead since She continued her career, sometimes without using a wooden prosthetic limb , which she did not like. She carried out a successful tour of America in , and on returning to France she played in her own productions almost continuously until her death. According to Arthur Croxton, the manager of London's Coliseum, the amputation was not apparent during her performances, which were done with the use of the artificial limb.

Sarah Bernhardt died from uremia following kidney failure in Newspaper reports stated she died "peacefully, without suffering, in the arms of her son".

Bernhardt's career spanned over six decades, during which she established herself as the Victorian era's most celebrated actress. In addition to being one of the greatest actors of all time, she was noted for her outsize legend, which made her the first international entertainment icon. Bernhardt's admirers included Sigmund Freud , who kept a photograph of her in his waiting room, Mark Twain , who remarked "There are five kinds of actresses: It is I who must bow to you," and he did so before his entire court.

Numerous theatres and works bear her name. Sarah Bernhardt Sarah Bernhardt. Sarah Bernhardt, in ; photographic portrait by Nadar. Sarah Bernhardt by Napoleon Sarony. Bernhardt as Hamlet , [39]. Bernhardt, in a portrait, s. Jules Bastien-Lepage , Portrait of Sarah. Chromolithographic portrait of Sarah Bernhardt in Vanity Fair magazine , Sarah Bernhardt by Giovanni Boldini.

After a month, he returned to Brussels and told his family that he wanted to marry the actress. The family of the Prince sent his uncle, General de Ligne, to break up the romance, threatening to disinherit him if he married Bernhardt. When asked who his father was, she sometimes answered, "I could never make up my mind whether his father was Gambetta , Victor Hugo, or General Boulanger. To support herself after the birth of Maurice, Bernhardt played minor roles and understudies at the Port-Saint-Martin, a popular melodrama theater.

Duquesnel described the reading years later, saying, "I had before me a creature who was marvelous gifted, intelligent to the point of genius, with enormous energy under an appearance frail and delicate, and a savage will. Her first performances with the theater were not successful. She was cast in highly stylized and frivolous 18th-century comedies, whereas her strong point on stage was her complete sincerity.

Dumas, her strongest supporter, commented after one performance, "she has the head of a virgin and the body of a broomstick. The influential critic Sarcey wrote " Her breakthrough performance was in the revival of Kean by Alexandre Dumas, in which she played the female lead part of Anna Danby. The play was interrupted in the beginning by disturbances in the audience by young spectators who called out, "Down with Dumas!

Bernhardt addressed the audience directly: Are you doing it by making Monsieur Dumas responsible for the banishment of Monsieur Hugo? At the final curtain, she received an enormous ovation, and Dumas hurried backstage to congratulate her. When she exited the theater, a crowd had gathered at the stage door and tossed flowers at her. Her salary was immediately raised to francs a month. Afterwards, the Emperor sent her a brooch with his initials written in diamonds. We all loved each other.

The theater was a like a continuation of school. All the young came there That little world was stiff, gossipy, jealous. I remember my few months at the Gymnase. There they talked only about dresses and hats, and chattered about a hundred things that had nothing to do with art.

We thought only of putting on plays. We rehearsed mornings, afternoons, all the time. She developed a close friendship with the writer George Sand , and performed in two plays that she authored. In , as she became more prosperous, she moved to a larger seven-room apartment at 16 rue Auber in the center of Paris. Her mother began to visit her for the first time in years, and her grandmother, a strict Orthodox Jew, moved into the apartment to take care of Maurice.

Bernhardt added a maid and a cook to her household, as well as the beginning of a collection of animals; she had one or two dogs with her at all times, and two turtles moved freely around the apartment. In , a fire completely destroyed her apartment, along with all of her belongings. She had neglected to purchase insurance. The brooch presented to her by the Emperor and her pearls melted, as did the tiara presented by one of her lovers, Khalid Bey.

She found the diamonds in the ashes, and the managers of the Odeon organized a benefit performance. The most famous soprano of the time, Adelina Patti , performed for free. In addition, the grandmother of her father donated , francs. Bernhardt was able to buy an even larger residence, with two salons and a large dining room, at 4 rue de Rome. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War abruptly interrupted her theatrical career.

Paris was cut off from news and from its food supply, and the theaters were closed. Besides organizing the hospital, she worked as a nurse, assisting the chief surgeon with amputations and operations. The patients had to be moved to the cellar, and before long, the hospital was forced to close. Bernhardt arranged for serious cases to be transferred to another military hospital, and she rented an apartment on rue de Provence to house the remaining 20 patients.

The French government signed an armistice on 19 January , and Bernhardt learned that her son and family had been moved to Hamburg. She went to the new chief executive of the French republic, Adolphe Thiers , and obtained a pass to go to Germany to return them. When she returned to Paris several weeks later, the city was under the rule of the Paris Commune.

She moved again, taking her family to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. She later returned to her apartment on the rue de Rome in May, after the Commune was defeated by the French Army. Bernhardt as the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas Bernhardt in her famous coffin, in which she sometimes slept or studied her roles c. Bernhardt as Dona Sol in Hernani Bernhardt replied that she was finished with the theater and was going to move to Brittany and start a farm. Chilly, who knew Bernhardt's moods well, told her that he understood and accepted her decision, and would give the role to Jane Essler, a rival actress.

According to Chilly, Bernhardt immediately jumped up from the sofa and asked when the rehearsals would begin. Jean-Marie , about a young Breton woman forced by her father to marry an old man she did not love, was another critical and popular success for Bernhardt. The critic Sarcey wrote, "She has the sovereign grace, the penetrating charm, the I don't know what.

She is a natural artist, an incomparable artist. Hugo himself attended all the rehearsals. At first, Bernhardt pretended to be indifferent to him, but he gradually won her over and she became a fervent admirer. The play premiered on 16 January The opening night was attended by the Prince of Wales and by Hugo himself; after the performance, Hugo approached Bernhardt, dropped to one knee, and kissed her hand. Ruy Blas played to packed houses. Chilly responded with a lawsuit, and she was forced to pay 6, francs of damages.

The leading French critic Sarcey wrote, "This is nature itself served by marvelous intelligence, by a soul of fire, by the most melodious voice that ever enchanted human ears. This woman plays with her heart, with her entrails. In , she had another success as Dona Sol in Hernani , a tragedy written 47 years earlier by Victor Hugo. Her lover in the play was her lover off-stage, as well, Mounet-Sully.

Hugo himself was in the audience. The next day, he sent her a note: The tear which you caused me to shed is yours. I place it at your feet. She maintained a highly theatrical lifestyle in her house on the rue de Rome. She kept a satin-lined coffin in her bedroom, and occasionally slept in it or lay in it to study her roles, though, contrary to the popular stories, she never took it with her on her travels.

She cared for her younger sister who was ill with tuberculosis, and allowed her to sleep in her own bed, while she slept in the coffin. She posed in it for photographs, adding to the legends she created about herself. However, she was frequently in conflict with Perrin, the director of the theater. In , during the Paris Universal Exposition , she took a flight over Paris with balloonist Pierre Giffard and painter George Clairin, in a balloon decorated with the name of her current character, Dona Sol. An unexpected storm carried the balloon far outside of Paris to a small town.

When she returned by train to the city, Perrin was furious; he fined Bernhardt a thousand francs, citing a theater rule which required actors to request permission before they left Paris. Perrin recognized that he could not afford to let her go. Perrin and the Minister of Fine Arts arranged a compromise; she withdrew her resignation, and in return was raised to a societaire , the highest rank of the theater.

Bernhardt was earning a substantial amount at the theater, but her expenses were even greater. By this time she had eight servants, and she built her first house, an imposing mansion on rue Fortuny, not far from Parc Monceau. She looked for additional ways to earn money. When Perrin protested, saying that Bernhardt was only 10th or 11th in seniority, the Gaiety manager threatened to cancel the performance; Perrin had to give in.

She wrote later that she also pitched her voice too high, and was unable to lower it. Though a majority of the audience could not understand Racine's classical French, she captivated them with her voice and gestures; one member of the audience, Sir George Arthur, wrote that "she set every nerve and fiber in their bodies throbbing and held them spellbound. While in London, she added to her personal menagerie of animals.

In London, she purchased three dogs, a parrot, and a monkey, and made a side trip to Liverpool, where she purchased a cheetah, a parrot, and a wolfhound and received a gift of six chameleons, which she kept in her rented house on Chester Square, and then took back to Paris. When she rehearsed the play without enthusiasm, and frequently forgot her lines, she was criticized by the playwright. She responded, "I know I'm bad, but not as bad as your lines.

She wrote immediately to Perrin, "You forced me to play when I was not ready Perrin sued her for breach of contract; the court ordered her to pay , francs, plus interest, and she lost her accrued pension of 43, francs. She could select her repertoire and the cast. She played the role more than a thousand times, and acted regularly and successfully in it until the end of her life. Audiences were often in tears during her famous death scene at the end. Instead, she took her new company and new plays on tour to Brussels and Copenhagen, and then on a tour of French provincial cities.

Few in the audience understood French, but it was not necessary; her gestures and voice captivated the audience, and she received a thunderous ovation. She thanked the audience with her distinctive curtain call; she did not bow, but stood perfectly still, with her hands clasped under her chin, or with her palms on her cheeks, and then suddenly stretched them out to the audience. After her first performance in New York, she made 27 curtain calls. Although she was welcomed by theater-goers, she was entirely ignored by New York high society, who considered her personal life scandalous.

Bernhardt's first American tour carried her to performances in 51 cities. She gave countless press interviews and in Boston posed for photos on the back of a dead whale. She was condemned as immoral by the Bishop of Montreal and by the Methodist press, which only increased ticket sales. On 3 May , she gave her final performance of Camelias in New York. Throughout her life, she always insisted on being paid in cash. I planted the French verb in the heart of a foreign literature, and it is that of which I am most proud.

No crowd greeted Bernhardt when she returned to Paris on 5 May , and theater managers offered no new roles; the Paris press ignored her tour, and much of the Paris theater world resented her leaving the most prestigious national theater to earn a fortune abroad. She recited the Marseillaise , dressed in a white robe with a tricolor banner, and at the end dramatically waved the French flag. The audience gave her a standing ovation, showered her with flowers, and demanded that she recite the song two more times.

She also announced that she would not be available to begin until In Kiev and Odessa , she encountered anti-Semitic crowds who threw stones at her; pogroms were being conducted, forcing the Jewish population to leave. The only European country where she refused to play was Germany, due to the German annexation of French territory after the —71 Franco-Prussian War.

It opened on 12 December , with her husband Damala as the male lead, and received good reviews. Critic Maurice Baring wrote, "a secret atmosphere emanated from her, an aroma, an attraction, which was at once exotic and cerebral She literally hypnotized her audience. The extreme love, the extreme agony, the extreme suffering.

She had leased and refurbished a theater, the Ambigu, specifically to give her husband leading roles, and made her year-old son Maurice, who had no business experience, the manager. She was forced to give up the Ambigu, and then, in February , to sell her jewelry, her carriages, and her horses at an auction. When Damala left, she took on a new leading man and lover, the poet and playwright Jean Richepin , who accompanied her on a quick tour of European cities to help pay off her debts.

The play and Richepin's acting were poor, and it quickly closed. The only person who praised the play was Oscar Wilde , who was then living in Paris. Bernhardt then performed a new play by Sardou, Theodora , a melodrama set in sixth-century Byzantium. Sardou wrote a nonhistoric but dramatic new death scene for Bernhardt; in his version, the empress was publicly strangled, whereas the historical empress died of cancer.

Bernhardt travelled to Ravenna , Italy, to study and sketch the costumes seen in Byzantine mosaic murals, and had them reproduced for her own costumes. The play opened on 26 December and ran for performances in Paris, and in London, and was a financial success. She was able to pay off most of her debts, and bought a lion cub, which she named Justinian, for her home menagerie. Theodora was followed by two failures.

In , in homage to Victor Hugo, who had died a few months earlier, she staged one of his older plays, Marion Delorme , written in , but the play was outdated and her role did not give her a chance to show her talents. The critics and audiences were not impressed, and the play was unsuccessful. Bernhardt was forced to sell her chalet in Saint-Addresse and her mansion on rue Fortuny, and part of her collection of animals. She was on tour for 15 months, from early until late On the eve of departure, she told a French reporter: I detest knowing in advance what they are going to serve at my dinner, and I detest a hundred thousand times more knowing what will happen to me, for better or worse.

I adore the unexpected. In every city she visited, she was feted and cheered by audiences. The actors Edouard Angelo and Philippe Garnier were her leading men. Emperor Pedro II of Brazil attended all of her performances in Rio de Janeiro , and presented her with a gold bracelet with diamonds, which was almost immediately stolen from her hotel. The two leading actors both fell ill with yellow fever , and her long-time manager, Edward Jarrett, died of a heart attack.

Bernhardt was undaunted, however, and went crocodile hunting at Guayaquil , and also bought more animals for her menagerie. Her performances in every city were sold out, and by the end of the tour, she had earned more than a million francs. From then on, whenever she ran short of money which generally happened every three or four years , she went on tour, performing both her classics and new plays. She returned to Paris in early with an enormous owl given to her by the Grand Duke Alexis Alexandrovich, the brother of the Czar. Her personal luggage consisted of 45 costume crates for her 15 different productions, and 75 crates for her off-stage clothing, including her pairs of shoes.

She carried a trunk for her perfumes, cosmetics and makeup, and another for her sheets and tablecloths and her five pillows. After the tour, she brought back a trunk filled with 3,, francs, but she also suffered a painful injury to her knee when she leaped off the parapet of the Castello Sant' Angelo in La Tosca. The mattress on which she was supposed to land was misplaced, and she landed on the boards. The theater management was willing to forget the conflict of her two previous periods there, and offered a payment of , francs a year.

The money appealed to her, and she began negotiations. Moreover, what roles could she have? I can only imagine that she could play mothers It was extremely popular, and critically acclaimed. Bernhardt played the role for 29 consecutive sold-out performances. The success of the play allowed Bernhardt to buy a new pet lion for her household menagerie. She named him Scarpia, after the villain of La Tosca. Following this success, she acted in several revivals and classics, and many French writers offered her new plays.

Zola had previously been attacked due to the book's confronting content. Asked why she chose this play, she declared to reporters, "My true country is the free air, and my vocation is art without constraints. A short drama she wrote herself, L'Aveu , disappointed both critics and the audience and lasted only 12 performances. She had considerably more success with Jeanne d'Arc by the poet Jules Barbier , in which the year-old actress played Joan of Arc , a year-old martyr.

Her next success was another melodrama by Sardou and Moreau , Cleopatra , which allowed her to wear elaborate costumes and finished with a memorable death scene. For this scene, she kept two live garter snakes, which played the role of the poisonous asp which bites Cleopatra. For realism, she painted the palms of her hands red, though they could hardly be seen from the audience. Bernhardt in Gismonda by Victorien Sardou Poster for Gismonda by Alphonse Mucha Bernhardt made a two-year world tour — to replenish her finances.

She managed every aspect of the theater, from the finances to the lighting, sets, and costumes, as well as appearing in eight performances a week. She abolished in her theater the common practice of hiring claqueurs in the audience to applaud stars.

He continued to make posters of her for six years. In five years, Bernhardt produced nine plays, three of which were financially successful. In , she had another success, in the play Lorenzaccio , playing the male lead role in a Renaissance revenge drama written in by Alfred de Musset , but never before actually staged.

As her biographer Cornelia Otis Skinner wrote, she did not try to be overly masculine when she performed male roles: Her co-star was Lucien Guitry , who also acted as her leading man until the end of her career. Besides Guitry, she shared the stage with Edouard de Max, her leading man in 20 productions, and Constant Coquelin , who frequently toured with her. In April , she played the lead role in a romantic and poetic fantasy, Princess Lointaine , by little-known year-old poet Edmond Rostand.

It was not a monetary success and lost , francs, but it began a long theatrical relationship between Bernhardt and Rostand. Rostand went on to write Cyrano de Bergerac and became one of the most popular French playwrights of the period. In , she performed the female lead in the controversial play La Ville Morte by the Italian poet and playwright Gabriele D'Annunzio ; the play was fiercely attacked by critics because of its theme of incest between brother and sister. The issue divided Parisian society; a conservative newspaper ran the headline, "Sarah Bernhardt has joined the Jews against the Army", and Bernhardt's own son Maurice condemned Dreyfus; he refused to speak to her for a year.

Despite her successes, her debts continued to mount, reaching two million gold francs by the end of The theater had 1, seats, twice the size of the Renaissance, enabling her to pay off the cost of performances more quickly; it had an enormous stage and backstage, allowing her to present several different plays a week; and since it was originally designed as a concert hall, it had excellent acoustics.

On 1 January , she signed a year lease with the City of Paris, though she was already 55 years old. The facade was lit by 5, electric bulbs, 17 arc lights, and 11 projectors. Her dressing room was a five-room suite, which, after the success of her Napoleonic play L'Aiglon , was decorated in Empire Style , featuring a marble fireplace with a fire Bernhardt kept burning year round, a huge bathtub that was filled with the flowers she received after each performance, and a dining room fitting 12 people, where she entertained guests after the final curtain.

Bernhardt opened the theater on 21 January with a revival of Sardou's La Tosca , which she had first performed in The British critic Max Beerbohm wrote, "the only compliment one can conscientiously pay her is that her Hamlet was, from first to last, a truly grand dame. In , Bernhardt presented L'Aiglon , a new play by Rostand. She played the Duc de Reichstadt , the son of Napoleon Bonaparte , imprisoned by his unloving mother and family until his melancholy death in the Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna.

L'Aiglon was a verse drama, six acts long.

Sarah Bernhardt - Wikipedia

The year-old actress studied the walk and posture of young cavalry officers and had her hair cut short to impersonate the young Duke. The play ended with a memorable death scene; according to one critic, she died "as dying angels would die if they were allowed to.

The play inspired the creation of Bernhardt souvenirs, including statuettes, medallions, fans, perfumes, postcards of her in the role, uniforms and cardboard swords for children, and pastries and cakes; the famed chef Escoffier added Peach Aiglon with Chantilly Cream to his repertoire of desserts.

Bernhardt continued to employ Mucha to design her posters, and expanded his work to include theatrical sets, programs, costumes, and jewelry props. His posters became icons of the Art Nouveau style. To earn more money, Bernhardt set aside a certain number of printed posters of each play to sell to collectors. On this tour, she traveled with Constant Coquelin, then the most popular leading man in France. Bernhardt played the secondary role of Roxanne to his Cyrano de Bergerac , a role which he had premiered, and he co-starred with her as Flambeau in L'Aiglon and as the first grave-digger in Hamlet.

She also changed, for the first time, her resolution not to perform in Germany or the "occupied territories" of Alsace and Lorraine. In , at the invitation of the French ministry of culture, she took part in the first cultural exchange between Germany and France since the war. During her German tour, she began to suffer agonizing pain in her right knee, probably connected with a fall she had suffered on stage during her tour in South America. She was forced to reduce her movements in L'Aiglon. A German doctor recommended that she halt the tour immediately and have surgery, followed by six months of complete immobilization of her leg.

Bernhardt promised to see a doctor when she returned to Paris, but continued the tour. In , she had another unsuccessful role playing another masculine character in the opera Werther , a gloomy adaptation of the story by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

She played a Moorish sorceress in love with a Christian Spaniard, leading to her persecution by the church. This story of tolerance, coming soon after the Dreyfus affair, was financially successful, with Bernhardt often giving both a matinee and evening performance. Instead, she took aspiring actresses and actors into her company, trained them, and used them as unpaid extras and bit players.

Bernhardt made her first American Farewell Tour in —, the first of four farewell tours she made to the US, Canada, and Latin America, with her new managers, the Shubert brothers. She attracted controversy and press attention when, during her visit to Montreal, the Roman Catholic bishop encouraged his followers to throw eggs at Bernhardt, because she portrayed prostitutes as sympathetic characters. The US portion of the tour was complicated due to the Shuberts' competition with the powerful syndicate of theater owners which controlled nearly all the major theaters and opera houses in the United States.

The syndicate did not allow outside producers to use their stages. As a result, in Texas and Kansas City, Bernhardt and her company performed under an enormous circus tent, seating 4, spectators, and in skating rinks in Atlanta, Savannah, Tampa, and other cities. She could not play in San Francisco because of the recent San Francisco earthquake , but she performed across the bay in the Hearst Greek Theatre at the University of California at Berkeley, and gave a recital, titled A Christmas Night during the Terror , for inmates at San Quentin penitentiary.

Her tour continued into South America, where it was marred by a more serious event: This time, however, the mattress on which she was supposed to land had been positioned incorrectly. She landed on her right knee, which had already been damaged in earlier tours. She fainted and was taken from the theater on a stretcher, but refused to be treated in a local hospital.

She later sailed the few hours by ship from Rio to New York. When she arrived, her leg had swollen, and she was immobilized in her hotel for 15 days before returning to France. In —, the French government finally awarded Bernhardt the Legion of Honor, but only in her role as a theater director, not as an actress. However, the award at that time required a review of the recipients' moral standards, and Bernhardt's behavior was still considered scandalous.

Bernhardt ignored the snub and continued to play both inoffensive and controversial characters. French newspapers encouraged schoolchildren to view her personification of French patriotism. Despite the injury to her leg, she continued to go on tour every summer, when her own theater in Paris was closed. In June , she made a day tour of Britain and Ireland, performing in 16 different cities. Her second American farewell tour her eighth tour in America began in late She took along a new leading man, the Dutch-born Lou Tellegen , a very handsome actor who had served as a model for the sculpture Eternal Springtime by Auguste Rodin , and who became her co-star for the next two years, as well as her escort to all events, functions, and parties.

He was not a particularly good actor, and had a strong Dutch accent, but he was successful in roles such as Hippolyte in Phedre , where he could take off his shirt and show off his physique. It was performed in New York's Globe Theater for only one night in December before it was banned by local authorities. It was also banned in Boston and Philadelphia. It was lavish and expensive, but was a monetary failure, lasting only 12 performances. Fortunately for Bernhardt, she was able to pay off her debt with the money she received from the American producer Adolph Zukor for a film version of the play.

She departed on her third and last farewell tour of the United States in —, when she was Her leg had not yet fully healed, and she was unable to perform an entire play, only selected acts. She also separated from her co-star and lover of the time, Lou Tellegen. When the tour ended, he remained in the United States, where he briefly became a silent movie star, while she returned to France in May On 16 March, she was made a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur.

Despite her successes, she was still short of money. She had made her son Maurice the director of her new theater, and permitted him to use the receipts of the theater to pay his gambling debts, eventually forcing her to pawn some of her jewels to pay her bills. There, she received the news of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the beginning of the First World War. She hurried back to Paris, which was threatened by an approaching German army. In September, Bernhardt was asked by the Minister of War to move to a safer place.

She departed for a villa on the Bay of Arcachon, where her physician discovered that gangrene had developed on her injured leg.

Sarah Bernhardt

She was transported to Bordeaux, where on 22 February , a surgeon amputated her leg almost to the hip. She refused the idea of an artificial leg, crutches, or a wheelchair, and instead was usually carried in a palanquin she designed, supported by two long shafts and carried by two men. She had the chair decorated in the Louis XV style , with white sides and gilded trim. She returned to Paris on 15 October, and, despite the loss of her leg, continued to go on stage at her theater; scenes were arranged so she could be seated, or supported by a prop with her leg hidden.

The German eagle has fallen into the Rhine! Bernhardt joined a troupe of famous French actors and traveled to the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Argonne , where she performed for soldiers who were just returned or about to go into battle. Propped on pillows in an armchair, she recited her patriotic speech at Strasbourg Cathedral. Another actress present at the event, Beatrix Dussanne, described her performance: This fragile creature, ill, wounded and a immobile, could still, through the magic of the spoken word, re-instill heroism in those soldiers weary from battle.

She returned to Paris in and made two short films on patriotic themes, one based on the story of Joan of Arc, the other called Mothers of France. Then she embarked on her final American farewell tour. Despite the threat of German submarines, she crossed the Atlantic and toured the United States, performing in major cities including New York and San Francisco.

Bernhardt was diagnosed with uremia , and had to have an emergency kidney operation.

Early life

She recuperated in Long Beach, California, for several months, writing short stories and novellas for publication in French magazines. In , she returned to New York and boarded a ship to France, landing in Bordeaux on 11 November , the day that the armistice was signed ending the First World War. In , she resumed acting in her theater, usually performing single acts of classics such as Racine's Athelee , which did not require much movement. For her curtain calls, she stood, balancing on one leg and gesturing with one arm.

She also starred in a new play, Daniel , written by her grandson-in-law, playwright Louis Verneuil. She played the male lead role, but appeared in just two acts. She took the play and other famous scenes from her repertory on a European tour and then for her last tour of England, where she gave a special command performance for Queen Mary, followed by a tour of the British provinces. In , Bernhardt made her last tour of the French provinces, lecturing about theater and reciting the poetry of Rostand. She continued to entertain guests at her home.

One such guest, French author Colette , described being served coffee by Bernhardt:

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