“Yes,” she answered, with a sigh of regret, “but it was not God’s will. Are you not Madame Hessler?” she continued, looking earnestly at me. “No, madame,” I answered, “my name is Sarah Bernhardt.” She stepped back and drawing herself up, her face very pale and her brows knitted, she said in a mournful voice, a voice that was scarcely audible: “I am the widow of President Lincoln.” I, too, stepped back, and a thrill of anguish ran through me, for I had just done this unhappy woman the only service that I ought not to have done her—I had saved her from death. Her husband had been assassinated by an actor, Booth, and it was an actress who had now prevented her from joining her beloved husband. I went back again to my cabin and stayed there two days, for I had not the courage to meet that woman for whom I felt such sympathy, and to whom I should never dare to speak again. On the 22d we were surprised by an abominable snowstorm. I was called up hurriedly by Captain Jonclas. I threw on a long ermine cloak and went on to the bridge. It was perfectly stupefying and at the same time fairylike. The heavy flakes met each other with a hiss in their mad waltzing provoked by the wind. The sky was suddenly veiled from us by all this whiteness which fell round us in avalanches, completely hiding the horizon. I was facing the sea and, as Captain Jonclas pointed out to me, we could not see a hundred yards in front of us. I then turned round and saw that the boat was as white as a seagull; the ropes, the cordage, the nettings, the portholes, the shrouds, the whalers, the deck, the sails, the ladders, the funnels, the airholes—everything was white. The sea was black and the sky was black. The boat alone was white, floating along in this immensity. There was a contest between the high funnel, sputtering forth with difficulty its smoke through the wind which was rushing wildly into its great mouth, and the prolonged shrieks of the siren. The contrast was so extraordinary between the virgin whiteness of this boat and the infernal uproar it made that it seemed to me as if I had before me an angel in a fit of hysterics.