Hospitality is a quality made up of primitive taste and antique grandeur. The English are, in my opinion, the most hospitable people on earth, and they are hospitable simply and munificently. When an Englishman has opened his door to you he never closes it again. He excuses your faults and accepts your peculiarities. It is thanks to this broadness of ideas that I have been for twenty-five years the beloved and pampered artiste.

I was delighted with my first soirée in London, and I returned home very gay and very much “anglomaniaised.” I found some of my friends there—Parisians who had just arrived—and they were furious. My enthusiasm exasperated them, and we sat up arguing until two in the morning.

The next day I went to Rotten Row. It was glorious weather, and all Hyde Park seemed to be strewn with enormous bouquets. There were the flower-beds wonderfully arranged by the gardeners; then there were the clusters of sunshades, blue, pink, red, white, or yellow, which sheltered the light hats covered with flowers under which shone the pretty faces of children and women. Along the riding path there was an exciting gallop of graceful thoroughbreds bearing along some hundreds of horsewomen, slender, supple, and courageous; then there were men and children, the latter mounted on big Irish ponies. There were other children, too, galloping along on Scotch ponies with long, shaggy manes, the children’s hair and the manes of the horses streaming in the wind of their own speed.

The carriage road between the riding-track and the foot passengers was filled with dog-carts, open carriages of various kinds, mail-coaches, and very smart cabs. There were powdered footmen, horses decorated with flowers, sportsmen driving, ladies, too, driving admirable horses. All this elegance, this essence of luxury, and this joy of life brought back to my memory the vision of our Bois de Boulogne, so elegant and so animated a few years before, when Napoleon III. used to drive through on his daumont, nonchalant and smiling. Ah, how beautiful it was in those days—our Bois de Boulogne, with the officers caracoling in the Avenue des Acacias, admired by our beautiful society women!

The joy of life was everywhere—the love of love enveloping life with an infinite charm. I closed my eyes, and I felt a pang at my heart as the awful recollections of 1870 crowded to my brain. He was dead, our gentle Emperor, with his shrewd smile. Dead, vanquished by the sword, betrayed by fortune, crushed with grief.

The thread of life in Paris had been taken up again in all its intenseness, but the life of elegance, of charm, and of luxury was still shrouded in crape. Scarcely eight years had passed since the war had struck down our soldiers, ruined our hopes, and tarnished our glory. Three Presidents had already succeeded each other. That wretched little Thiers, with his perverse bourgeois soul, had worn his teeth out with nibbling at every kind of Government—royalty under Louis Philippe, Empire under Napoleon III., and the executive power of the French Republic. He had never even thought of lifting our beloved Paris up again, bowed down as she was under the weight of so many ruins. He had been succeeded by MacMahon, a good, brave man, but a cipher. Grévy had succeeded the Marshal, but he was miserly, and considered all outlay unnecessary for himself, for other people, and for the country. And so Paris remained sad, nursing the leprosy that the Commune had communicated to her by the kiss of its fires. And our delightful Bois de Boulogne still bore the traces of the injuries that the national defence had inflicted on her. The Avenue des Acacias was deserted.

I opened my eyes again. They were filled with tears, and through their mist I caught a glimpse once more of the triumphant vitality which surrounded me.

I wanted to return home at once, for I was acting that night for the first time, and I felt rather wretched and despairing. There were several persons awaiting me at my house in Chester Square, but I did not want to see any one. I took a cup of tea and went to the Gaiety Theatre, where we were to face the English public for the first time. I knew already that I had been elected the favourite, and the idea of this chilled me with terror, for I am what is known as a traqueuse. I am subject to the trac or stage fright, and I have it terribly. When I first appeared on the stage I was timid, but I never had this trac. I used to turn as red as a poppy when I happened to meet the eye of some spectator. I was ashamed of talking so loud before so many silent people. That was the effect of my cloistered life, but I had no feeling of fear. The first time I ever had the real sensation of trac or stage fright was in the month of January 1869, at the seventh or perhaps the eighth performance of Le Passant. The success of this little masterpiece had been enormous, and my interpretation of the part of Zanetto had delighted the public, and particularly the students. When I went on the stage that day I was suddenly applauded by the whole house. I turned towards the Imperial box, thinking that the Emperor had just entered. But no; the box was empty, and I realised then that all the bravos were for me. I was seized with a fit of nervous trembling, and my eyes smarted with tears that I had to keep back. Agar and I had five curtain calls, and on leaving the theatre the students ranged on each side gave me three cheers. On reaching home I flung myself into the arms of my blind grandmother, who was then living with me.

“What’s the matter with you, my dear?” she asked.

“It’s all over with me, grandmother,” I said. “They want to make a ‘star’ of me, and I haven’t talent enough for that. You’ll see they’ll drag me down and finish me off with all their bravos.”

My grandmother took my head in her hands, and I met the vacant look in her large light eyes fixed on me.

“You told me, my child, that you wanted to be the first in your profession, and when the opportunity comes to you, why, you are frightened. It seems to me that you are a very bad soldier.”

I drove back my tears, and declared that I would bear up courageously against this success which had come to interfere with my tranquillity, my heedlessness, and my “don’t care-ism.” But from that time forth fear took possession of me, and stage fright martyrised me.

It was under these conditions that I prepared for the second act of Phèdre, in which I was to appear for the first time before the English public. Three times over I put rouge on my cheeks, blackened my eyes, and three times over I took it all off again with a sponge. I thought I looked ugly, and it seemed to me I was thinner than ever and not so tall. I closed my eyes to listen to my voice. My special pitch is “le bal,” which I pronounce low down with the open a, “le bâââl,” or take high by dwelling on the l—“le balll.” Ah, but there was no doubt about it; my “le bal” neither sounded high nor low, my voice was hoarse in the low notes and not clear in the soprano. I cried with rage, and just then I was informed that the second act of Phèdre was about to commence. This drove me wild. I had not my veil on, nor my rings, and my cameo belt was not fastened.

I began to murmur:

That word “j’oublie” struck me with a new idea. What if I did forget the words I had to say? Why, yes. What was it I had to say? I did not know—I could not remember. What was I to say after “en le voyant”?

No one answered me. Every one was alarmed at my nervous state. I heard Got mumble, “She’s going mad!”

Mlle. Thénard, who was playing Œnone, my old nurse, said to me, “Calm yourself. All the English have gone to Paris; there’s no one in the house but Belgians.”

This foolishly comic speech turned my thoughts in another direction.

“How stupid you are!” I said. “You know how frightened I was at Brussels!”

“Oh, all for nothing,” she answered calmly. “There were only English people in the theatre that day.”

I had to go on the stage at once, and I could not even answer her, but she had changed the current of my ideas. I still had stage fright, but not the fright that paralyses, only the kind that drives one wild. This is bad enough, but it is preferable to the other sort. It makes one do too much, but at any rate one does something.

The whole house had applauded my arrival on the stage for a few seconds, and as I bent my head in acknowledgment I said within myself, “Yes—yes—you shall see. I’m going to give you my very blood—my life itself—my soul.”

When I began my part, as I had lost my self-possession, I started on rather too high a note, and when once in full swing I could not get lower again—I simply could not stop. I suffered, I wept, I implored, I cried out; and it was all real. My suffering was horrible; my tears were flowing, scorching and bitter. I implored Hippolyte for the love which was killing me, and my arms stretched out to Mounet-Sully were the arms of Phèdre writhing in the cruel longing for his embrace. The inspiration had come.

When the curtain fell Mounet-Sully lifted me up inanimate and carried me to my dressing-room.

The public, unaware of what was happening, wanted me to appear again and bow. I too wanted to return and thank the public for its attention, its kindliness, and its emotion. I returned.

The following is what John Murray said in the Gaulois of June 5, 1879:

“When, recalled with loud cries, Mlle. Bernhardt appeared, exhausted by her efforts and supported by Mounet-Sully, she received an ovation which I think is unique in the annals of the theatre in England.”

The following morning the Daily Telegraph terminated its admirable criticism with these lines:

“Clearly Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt exerted every nerve and fibre, and her passion grew with the excitement of the spectators, for when, after a recall that could not be resisted, the curtain drew up, M. Mounet-Sully was seen supporting the exhausted figure of the actress, who had won her triumph only after tremendous physical exertion—and triumph it was, however short and sudden.”

The Standard finished its article with these words:

“The subdued passion, repressed for a time, until at length it burst its bonds, and the despairing, heart-broken woman is revealed to Hippolyte, was shown with so vivid a reality that a scene of enthusiasm such as is rarely witnessed in a theatre followed the fall of the curtain. Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt in the few minutes she was upon the stage (and coming on, it must be remembered, to plunge into the middle of a stirring tragedy) yet contrived to make an impression which will not soon be effaced from those who were present.”

The Morning Post said:

“Very brief are the words spoken before Phèdre rushes into the room to commence tremblingly and nervously, with struggles which rend and tear and convulse the system, the secret of her shameful love. As her passion mastered what remained of modesty or reserve in her nature, the woman sprang forward and recoiled again, with the movements of a panther, striving, as it seemed, to tear from her bosom the heart which stifled her with its unholy longings, until in the end, when, terrified at the horror her breathings have provoked in Hippolyte, she strove to pull his sword from its sheath and plunge it in her own breast, she fell back in complete and absolute collapse. This exhibition, marvellous in beauty of pose, in febrile force, in intensity, and in purity of delivery, is the more remarkable as the passion had to be reached, so to speak, at a bound, no performance of the first act having roused the actress to the requisite heat. It proved Mlle. Sarah Bernhardt worthy of her reputation, and shows what may be expected from her by the public which has eagerly expected her coming.”

This London first night was decisive for my future.