On February 22, 1915, at Bordeaux, in her seventy-first year, Mme. Bernhardt’s right leg was amputated above the knee. “While the hospital attendants were preparing for the operation,” said a dispatch from her bedside, “the actress conversed volubly with her doctors: ‘Work is my life. So soon as I can be fitted with an artificial leg, I shall resume the stage and all my good spirits shall be restored. I hope again to be able to use all that force of art which now upholds me and which will sustain me until beyond the grave,’”--a speech, as Philip Hale said, “worthy of one of Plutarch’s men.” Surgeons and nurses present at the operation were deeply impressed by the calm courage with which she faced the operation.[42] Even in the midst of the horrors and anxieties of universal war, Bernhardt’s ordeal challenged world-wide sympathy. Portraits and eulogies appeared in every paper. For a week or more, until it became certain that the operation had been successful, bulletins on her condition were printed daily. Queen Victoria of Spain, the aged Eugénie, M. Deschanel, president of the Chamber of Deputies, Edmond Rostand--these were only a few of those, both proud and humble, whose messages poured in upon her from all quarters. Alexandra, Queen-mother of Great Britain, sent word of the “sympathy which all England shares for the greatest artist in the world.” After the operation, Mme. Bernhardt said that she was to “live again. Already I am free from suffering, happy and full of courage, and now I am going to get well quickly. I shall retake my place in the world.” This announcement was sufficiently astounding. The remarkable woman then followed it with another,--that she would make a new tour in America, this time not in the vaudeville theatres (where interest in her was before not overwhelming), but in the regular theatres, where she would offer a number of plays in which she has not yet been seen on this side of the Atlantic. Thus does Bernhardt remain vividly alive to the last. M. Jules Lemaître once said that he admired her because of the unknown he felt to be in her. “She might go into a nunnery, discover the North Pole, be inoculated with rabies, assassinate an emperor, or marry a negro king, and I should never be surprised at anything she did. She is more alive and more incomprehensible by herself than a thousand other human beings.”