Note 21 — SARAH BERNHARDT

It was on the occasion of the first night of this play that she says she reverted to a trick of her childhood. Once when she had been fed something disagreeable, Sarah deliberately drank off a bottle of ink in the hope that she would die and vex her mother. Now when Perrin refused her a month’s needed holiday and forced her to play Zaïre in midsummer: “I was determined to faint, determined to vomit blood, determined to die, in order to enrage Perrin. Although the rôle was easy, it required two or three shrieks which might have provoked the vomiting of blood that frequently troubled me at that time. I uttered my shrieks with real rage and suffering, hoping to break something. But my surprise was great when the curtain fell at the end of the piece, and I got up quickly to answer to the call and salute the public without languor, without fainting, ready to recommence the piece. I had commenced the performance in such a state of weakness that it was easy to predict that I should not finish the first act without fainting. And I marked this performance with a little white stone—for that day I learned that my vital force was at the service of my intellect.” This is a significant passage. It helps to explain the wonder of Bernhardt’s unexampled vitality in the face of hard work and a frail physique.