Sarah Bernhardt by Catherine Reef

Author:Catherine Reef
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358330011
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2020-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

Bernhardt hired Marie Colombier, who had attended the Conservatoire with her and worked in her wartime hospital, to perform on the American tour.

The adventure began in mid-October 1880, when Bernhardt sailed for New York on an old steamship called the Amérique. The hardest part of leaving was saying goodbye to Maurice. He sometimes traveled with Bernhardt in the summer, but at other times he had to go to school. He was staying with her aunt Henriette and uncle Félix, and Bernhardt knew he would be safe. She felt happy knowing that Madame Guérard, her little lady, would be with her while she was away. Her current lover, an actor named Édouard Angelo, was also at her side. He would play the leading male roles in the dramas that she performed. And she brought one dog, a Brussels griffon named Hamlet. Her sister, Jeanne, was supposed to come as well. Sarah was trying to help Jeanne, who was addicted to morphine, although Sarah often had no idea whom Jeanne was seeing or what she was doing. When it was almost time to sail, an overdose landed Jeanne in a hospital. So Sarah invited Marie Colombier, her friend from the Conservatoire, to take her sister’s place. Colombier, who was in debt, welcomed this chance to put many miles between herself and her creditors. Jeanne would cross the Atlantic and catch up with the troupe when she had recovered.

The eleven-day voyage to New York was exciting—as Bernhardt described it in her memoirs. She claimed, for example, that she saved the life of Mary Todd Lincoln, who was on the same ship, sailing home from a European vacation. Bernhardt told readers that the widow of President Abraham Lincoln was strolling on deck one cold morning when a large swell crashed against the ship and sent her tumbling. Bernhardt, who was out walking too, grabbed a bench and steadied herself. With her free hand, she caught Mrs. Lincoln’s black skirt just as that lady was about to fall down a flight of stairs. “Very much hurt though she was, and a trifle confused, she thanked me in such a gentle dreamy voice that my heart began to beat with emotion,” Bernhardt wrote.

A few days later, the ship’s doctor led her to the steerage, the section where the poorest passengers rode. Many of these people were leaving Europe behind to take their chances in the New World. An emigrant woman was giving birth, and the doctor brought Bernhardt to help. “I went at once to the mother, and did all I could for the poor little creature who had just come into the world,” Bernhardt wrote. The doctor handed her the newborn and asked her to bathe him in a basin. Bernhardt remarked on the tiny boy’s strength and determination: “Oh, that first strident cry of the child affirming its will to live in the midst of all these sufferings, of all these hardships, and of all these hopes!” The proud mother and father asked Bernhardt to be baby Robert’s godmother.

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