When Sarah was seven she was sent away to boarding school at Auteuil, where she says she spent two comparatively happy years. Her mysterious father then sent orders that she was to be transferred to a convent. “The idea that I was to be ordered about without any regard to my own wishes or inclinations put me into an indescribable rage. I rolled about on the ground, uttering the most heartrending cries. I yelled out all kinds of reproaches, blaming mamma, my aunts, and Mme. Fressard for not finding some way to keep me with her. The struggle lasted two hours, and while I was being dressed I escaped twice into the garden and attempted to climb the trees and throw myself into the pond, in which there was more mud than water. Finally, when I was completely exhausted and subdued, I was taken off sobbing in my aunt’s carriage.”[7] At the Augustinian convent at Grandchamp, Versailles, she was baptized and confirmed a Christian. She became extravagantly pious and conceived a passionate adoration of the Virgin. Nevertheless, she was fractious and was more than once expelled.[8] When she left the convent Sarah was a capricious, sensitive, religious girl, who must indeed have constituted a problem for her mother. Sarah, strangely enough, was herself strongly inclined to be a nun. But her mother, who was a woman of the world and of means, had other plans and provided as “finishing governess” for Sarah a Mlle. de Brabander. One day, when she was fifteen, her fate was decided for her. At a family council her own ambition to be a nun was voted down and the decision was: “Send her to the _Conservatoire_.” Sarah had never even heard of the famous school for actors of the government theatres. That same evening she was taken to the theatre for the first time--the _Théâtre Français_. _Brittanicus_ and _Amphitrion_ moved her profoundly, and she left the theatre weeping, as much for the sudden shattering of her cherished plan as from the effects of the plays. Thus she began her studies at the _Conservatoire_ (1860) with no love for the career chosen for her.[9] She was no beauty;--she was decidedly thin, had kinky hair, and a pale face. But she worked hard. Her extraordinary nervous energy and her intelligence had their effect and when she left the _Conservatoire_ she had won two second prizes.[10] The discernment of some of the judges[11] saw in her something of the artist she was to be, and she immediately had a call to the company of the _Comédie Française_. With the signing of her contract came her resolve, that if the stage were to be her working place, she would throw herself into her task with all her soul. “_Quand-même_,”--in spite of all,--was already her motto,--she would, in the face of any obstacle, win a place for herself.[12]