My Double Life: The Memoirs of Sarah BernhardtBernhardt, Sarah
General
My Double Life: The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt
Bernhardt, Sarah
Actors -- France -- Biography; Bernhardt, Sarah, 1844-1923
The next morning there was terrible grief in store for me. There was no
window in the little room in which I slept, and I began to cry, and
escaped from the arms of my nurse, who was dressing me, so that I could
go into the adjoining room. I ran to the round window, which was an
immense “bull’s eye” above the doorway. I pressed my stubborn brow
against the glass, and began to scream with rage on seeing no trees, no
box-weed, no leaves falling, nothing, nothing but stone—cold, grey, ugly
stone—and panes of glass opposite me. “I want to go away! I don’t want
to stay here! It is all black, black! It is ugly! I want to see the
ceiling of the street!” and I burst into tears. My poor nurse took me up
in her arms, and, folding me in a rug, took me down into the courtyard.
“Lift up your head, Milk Blossom, and look! See—there is the ceiling of
the street!”
It comforted me somewhat to see that there was some sky in this ugly
place, but my little soul was very sad. I could not eat, and I grew pale
and became anæmic, and should certainly have died of consumption if it
had not been for a mere chance, a most unexpected incident. One day I
was playing in the courtyard with a little girl, called Titine, who
lived on the second floor, and whose face or real name I cannot recall,
when I saw my nurse’s husband walking across the courtyard with two
ladies, one of whom was most fashionably attired. I could only see their
backs, but the voice of the fashionably attired lady caused my heart to
stop beating. My poor little body trembled with nervous excitement.
“Do any of the windows look on to the courtyard?” she asked.
“Yes, Madame, those four,” he replied, pointing to four open ones on the
first floor.
The lady turned to look at them, and I uttered a cry of joy.
“Aunt Rosine! Aunt Rosine!” I exclaimed, clinging to the skirts of the
pretty visitor. I buried my face in her furs, stamping, sobbing,
laughing, and tearing her wide lace sleeves in my frenzy of delight. She
took me in her arms and tried to calm me, and questioning the concierge,
she stammered out to her friend: “I can’t understand what it all means!
This is little Sarah! My sister Youle’s child!”
[Illustration:
SARAH BERNHARDT AND HER MOTHER
]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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