To the body of Bernhardtian legend has now been added the legend of the leg. This time it is an authentic legend, and one that adds greatly to Sarah’s merited fame for courage and will. In February, 1915, she wrote to Mme. Jane Catulle Mendès: “_My Dear_: As you perhaps have learned, they are going to cut off my leg Monday. They should have done so last Sunday, but it seems I was not sufficiently prepared for that first performance. The principal artist, my right leg, had not learned its rôle. It has now learned it, and it will be charming.” There is a long story of patiently endured suffering back of that lightly phrased note. In 1912 she made a visit to America, playing--as before and since in London--in the vaudeville theatres short scenes from her former successes. There were circumstances in her acting that puzzled the beholders. She would take a fixed position and maintain it for long periods. When she moved across the stage, it was usually with another’s support. Such hamperings to her acting were commonly put down to her advanced age, or sometimes to rheumatism. As a matter of fact, Sarah had for ten years suffered from osteoarthritis--chronic inflammation of the articulation of her right knee. The trouble manifested itself first at Montevideo, and was there temporarily and inadequately treated. From that time, at first intermittently and then continuously, the knee brought her pain that she endured with fortitude and without curtailment of her work. As time went on, she gradually modified the business of her parts, and even had plays written to suit her limitations,--as in _Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc_, in which she stood in court all during one act and in another remained seated at the side of her bed. In the Spring of 1914, while she was playing in Liège, she gave the afflicted knee a slight sprain. Upon this, the trouble became acute. She remained, first at her house on Belle Isle, and later at Andernos, now Arcachon, with the knee in a fixed plaster cast. The pain was reduced; Mme. Sarah could paint and could work on her memoirs, and her general health was excellent; but here she was with her career cut off! When the surgeons, hoping to replace the cast with some apparatus that would permit her to walk, found that instead the knee would have to be kept unmoved for an indefinite time, Sarah took matters into her own hands, and ordered the offending member removed. It was better, she said, in a letter to Maurice Barres, “to be mutilated than to remain impotent.”