“The impetuous feminine hand that wields scepter, thyrsus, dagger, fan, sword, bauble, banner, sculptor’s chisel and horsewhip--it is overwhelming.” Thus the poet Rostand epitomized “the divine Sarah.” Her career, he said, gives one the vertigo--it is one of the marvels of the nineteenth century. And he might have added, of the twentieth, for Bernhardt, who began her stage career at the time of our Civil War, was only recently, at an amazing age, to be seen on the stage of London and Paris. There are many who think, with William Winter,[3] that she has been merely “an accomplished executant, an experienced, expert imitator, within somewhat narrow limits, of the operations of human passion and human suffering.” The fact remains, the woman has been a genius of work and achievement, “the Lady of Energy,” who has fairly earned the title of great actress. It is difficult to think of any woman the light of whose fame has carried to the ends of the earth in quite the same way. To be sure it has not always been from the lamp of pure genius. There have been self-advertising, scandal, extravagant eccentricity, to swell the general effect, but back of all this has been the worker.[4] She was born in Paris, at 265 _Rue St. Honoré_, October 23, 1844.[5] Her blood is a mingling of French and Dutch-Jewish. Her real name is Rosine Bernard, and she was the eleventh of fourteen children. Of her father hardly anything can be learned. Sarah herself says that when she was still a mere baby he had gone to China, but why he went there she had no idea. Her mother was, by birth, a Dutch Jewess, by sympathy a Frenchwoman, by habit a cosmopolitan; “a wandering beauty of Israel,” forever traveling. As much because there was no home, therefore, as because the French have a custom of banishing infants from the household, Sarah spent her childhood in the care of a foster-mother, first in the Breton country, near Quimperlé (where she fell in the fireplace and was badly burned), then at Neuilly, near Paris. Her mother came seldom to see her, though there seems to have been affection, at least on the child’s side. It was a lonely childhood--made worse by the high-strung, sensitive nature that was Sarah’s from the beginning.[6]