Patrick Bade
Sarah Bernhardt: Diva of Divas

Patrick Bade - Sarah Bernhardt: Diva of Divas

- [Instructor] Thank you. Thank you very much, Lauren. First of all, apologies for the lack of my face. I’m sure you can do without it. And apparently, the sound quality is better without it, as I’ve got a rather poor connection in London. But now, the image you can see on the screen is of Sarah Bernhardt’s funeral on March the 29th, 1923. And it was an enormous affair. The service itself had taken place in the fashionable Church of the Madeleine, which you see in the background. And the cortege was followed by hundreds of thousands of people, all the way to the cemetery of Pere Lachaise, where she was eventually buried. This is perhaps the most famous portrait of her. It’s normally on show in the Petit Palais, and it’s by an artist called Clairin, who was really a kind of court artist to her. He was an occasional lover and made many images of her. She was, by the time this portrait was painted, around 1880, not just the most famous actress in the world, she was the most famous woman in the world. And in fact, she was more famous than any woman had been in history. And she travelled more. She was known to more people. She travelled across the world several times. So certainly, no woman had ever travelled as far and wide as she did up to the late 19th century. This was quite an achievement for a girl who was the illegitimate child of a Dutch Jewish prostitute. There’s quite a lot of speculation about who her father was. She was born in 1844, and had a rather neglected childhood. Her mother farmed her out to a convent ‘cause she was too busy doing other things. There’s a lot of speculation that her father was the Duc de Morny, who you see on the screen now. He was the half-brother… He was also illegitimate, actually, but he was the half-brother of the emperor Louis Napoleon. And in the early part of the second empire, he was effectively prime minister, and apparently a very brilliant, very capable man. And it was very unfortunate, in a way, that he died. He apparently died of an overdose of an aphrodisiac that he took.

And there’s been lots of speculation, too, about what would’ve happened if he had lived. He was a pretty smart guy. He might have avoided the trap that Bismarck set for Louis Napoleon, in which case there would’ve been no Franco-Prussian War, in which case there probably would’ve been no First World War, no Second World War, maybe no Holocaust. So it’s one of those strange quirks and accidents of history. But the speculation about him being the father of Sarah Bernhardt is because he clearly took a great interest in her early career. It was through his influence, in fact, it was his suggestion that she should become an actress. She had very theatrical qualities as a child, and he thought she would be good as an actress. He pulled strings to get her into the Paris Conservatoire, which was not an easy thing to do. And later, when she failed to win the necessary prizes to enter the Comedie-Francaise, he once again pulled her strings and got her in. This is her son, Maurice. Actually, maybe I’ll come back to him. I’ll come back to him a bit later. These are the men in her life. She only married once. She married a very handsome Greek actor, called Damala, who you see on the right-hand side. And it was a quite short marriage. He was 11 years younger than her.

He was a wastrel, alcoholic, drug addict. And very, she supported his career, but he was apparently very untalented. And he topped himself with too many drugs and alcohol and died at the age of 34. The man in the middle, the man in the red coat, famous portrait by Sargent of Dr. Pozzi, she always said that he was her best lover, of the great many that she had. And as you can see, a very, very handsome, very seductive man. He was her doctor. She relied on him. She went to him much later in life, when she wanted to have a leg amputated. And I don’t know if he actually did it himself, he certainly supervised it. Bottom middle is the actor, Jean Mounet-Sully. He was considered the greatest male, he was the most famous male actor in France at the same period. And they worked together in many plays at the Comedie-Francaise. And she was one of those actresses, who I think so entered her role that she was inclined to fall in love with whoever she was acting with. And they certainly had quite a passionate and torrid affair. Top left, a great friend throughout her life, Comte de Montesquiou. He is mainly famous these days as the model for various famous literary characters, des Esseintes in Huysmans’ novel, “A Rebors.” Charlus in “A la recherche du temps perdu” of Proust. He was thoroughly and completely homosexual. But she thought, “Oh, well.” It’s a mistake that many women make, I suppose. She thought, “Well, all he needs is a good woman.” So she actually seduced him. They did have sex once, but it didn’t work out very well. And he vomited continuously for three days afterwards. This is a funerary monument that she made of her husband, Damala.

And obviously, despite his very bad behaviour, she still loved him enough to make this after he died. Now to go back to the beginnings of her career, this is the Conservatoire in Paris. It’s in the 9th Arrondissement. I’ve walked past it very often. You can still hear sounds of actors and musicians rehearsing inside this building. So I said the Duc de Morny managed to get her a place. She was rather an unruly and rebellious student, and frequently got into trouble. On one occasion, she smashed her umbrella over a doorman who she felt had talked her disrespectfully. But typically of her, she was full of contrition afterwards. She apologised greatly to him. And also very typical of her, many years later, when he retired, she bought him a cottage in Normandy. She was impulsive, passionate, short-tempered woman, but immensely generous. I think I find her, actually, a very likeable character. So as I said, she failed to get the necessary… You had to get a first prize in a category to be taken on by the Comedie-Francaise. And she didn’t get that, but she still managed to wangle her way in. Again, her career got off to a very bumpy start. And after a couple of years, she was forced out because she got into a physical fight with another actress who was sort of higher up the ladder within the Comedie-Francaise. And she refused to apologise, so she was out. And she fell back on her mother’s career, into high-class prostitution. And she was the lover of a Belgian prince, the Prince de Ligne, and it’s thought that he was the father of her son, Maurice, who I showed you briefly a couple of images back. And she was actually, despite her busy career, a very loving lover. So then after a couple of years of, high-class prostitution, she went back to the theatre. And in 1860, she was taken on by the other great prestigious theatre in Paris, which is this wonderful building, the Odeon, great neo-classical building on the other side of the river, near the Luxembourg Gardens.

And it was in 1869 that she got her big breakthrough. She was in a new play by Francois Coppee called “Le Passant.” And she had to play a page boy. And she was very thin. So she was actually rather suited to playing the role of a page boy. In all of Paris, she was suddenly famous. She was the toast of Paris in 1869. And as a result of that, a series of photographs were made of her by the great photographer Nadar, which are arguably the first glamour photographs taken of a performer. And you could see it there. She’s very young girl at this point, very beautiful and extraordinarily beautiful and expressive face. And what is interesting, I think, is that throughout her career, she was very, very quick to pick up on new technological developments, photography, moving film, new methods of travel. She was really a woman of her times and very alert to all the new possibilities of technology in the 19th century. She made… She was one of the first great actresses to make recordings. And I will play you a couple of her recording later. Towards the end of her career, she made movies. So you go on YouTube and you Google her, you put in her name, you’ll find excerpts from her movies. And she had an incredible flare for self-promotion and publicity. I would say her genius, I mean, she was clearly a great actress who thrilled people, but in a way, I think her genius was more for publicity and self-promotion than it was for acting. And she was acting the role of the diva. And quite early on, she picked up this fashionable idea of the femme fatale. It’s a very big theme, of course, in late-19th-century literature and art. And she played the femme fatale in life, and she took on all the trappings of the femme fatale. To my mind, this really was playing a role. Because she wasn’t actually like that at all. She was really, what can I say?

She was a nice Jewish girl who liked people, who was kind to people, who was generous, loved feeding people. Although she didn’t eat much herself, she liked feeding other people. Trudy Gold, who always says to me, “In the Jewish world, food is love. You offer food to people you love.” But here, she was very good at publicity stunts. and you can see her here on the left, photograph she had taken of herself sleeping in a coffin. And she told the press that she always slept best when she was sleeping in her coffin. And she took on all rather sinister trappings of the femme fatale. This is a skull that was given to her by the great writer Victor Hugo. And so she made sure that all the newspapers knew that she slept in a coffin. Well, I wonder if she really did, but pretended to. And here you can see, when she travelled to America, the press having a little fun at her expense with a coffin amongst her luggage. And as I said, she was very good at pulling stunts. And one of them in 1879, that gained her an enormous amount of publicity, was taking a balloon trip across Paris and out into the French countryside. And she published a book about this. So she must have been… I don’t know if it was, how many there were before her, but she must have been one of the first women to fly. And here are images by Clairin of her precarious trip in a balloon. She also promoted this fatale image of her herself in self-portrait sculptures. You can see this one on the right-hand side where she’s shown herself with rather sinister bat wings. She was actually a very gifted… She’s multi-talented. She was quite a good painter, and really a very good sculptor. There’s a, if you get to Paris in the next few days, there’s a huge Sarah Bernhardt show in Paris.

And they have lots of her sculptures in the show. Here she is again in her studio, and with one of her, again, slightly sinister sculptures. But I think she could have been a professional artist. So after the Franco-Prussian War, 1872, she returns to the Comedie-Francaise. And she is at the Comedie, part of the company of the Comedie-Francaise, most prestigious theatre company in France, through most of the 1870s. But she was never really a team person. And eventually, she broke with the Comedie-Francaise at the end of the 1870s. A big factor was that, in 1878, the Comedie-Francaise paid an official visit to London. She came with them. And she was the one who got all the publicity, partly ‘cause she just knew how to play the game. And she was invited everywhere. And it’s oddly, the English, in this respect, proved to be less uptight and less prudish than the French. We always think of the English as being rather, you know, “No sex, please, I’m British.” Or, you know, “Lie back and think of England.” There are all these things about 19th-century British being so prudish, but they were much more… In France, an actress was assumed to be also a prostitute. It was a kind of a given that they had loose morals. And no actress at this time, in the 1870s, would have been received in French high society. But in England, Sarah Bernhardt was invited everywhere. By this time, her son was… He must have been in his teens, I suppose. And she’d be invited to very smart occasions in London. And she would be announced and She would take her son with her, and she’d have herself announced as Madamoiselle Bernhardt, with her son Maurice.

So she couldn’t have been more in your face, really, about her lack of traditional, respectable models. So by 1880, she’s really had it with the Comedie-Francaise. And all her colleagues, of course, are very jealous of her. So she breaks with them and she is her own mistress for the next 43 years of her career. And in 1880, she sets off on a tour of North America. In fact she did, altogether, she did nine tours of North America, taking in Canada as well. First tour she visited 50 cities and gave 150 performances. And she had her own luxurious private train to go backwards and forwards. Here you can see a telegram from her negotiating with her manager. And you can see, if you can read that, you can see she was a tough, astute businesswoman who made immense amounts of money. She probably made more money than any woman before her up to that time. Although she never really experienced financial difficulties, but she was spendthrift as well, and as I said, she was extremely generous towards other people. So there she went backwards and forwards in this train. They would stop in a town in the middle of the United States, and she’d give a performance and everybody was mesmerised her. Although I think in most of these smaller towns or middle towns in America, there can have been very few people who understood a word of what she was saying, 'cause it was all in French. But they responded to the hyper-emotion of her performances. Apparently on some of these trips, she became very exhausted and, you know, in the middle of a great monologue from “Phedre,” she’d have a memory lapse, and she would just go into a shopping list, but on the same level of extreme emotion, and nobody in the audience knew that she deviated from Racine’s text into a shopping list. And she was appearing to immense, immense crowds that had these huge tents.

This is her in the Berkeley Greek Theatre, the Hearst Greek Theatre in 1906. You can see the immense crowd. This is well, well before microphones, but she had the ability to project across vast spaces to vast audiences. Here we have evidence of her… She went on a world trip that was 1891 all over Europe, North America. Where else did she go? She went to Australia. She went to the Pacific. She went to Tahiti. She went to Turkey. She went to Russia. And in one of the towns she played in Russia, she managed to provoke her own personal , 'cause there were, I mean, she never hid her Jewishness. She was always very proud of it, even though she wasn’t practising , she wasn’t religious. And all the publicity about her arrival in Russia and the huge fees that she was being paid prompted a local So I wanted to talk a bit about her style of acting. And it’s no coincidence, really, that so many of the plays in which she starred or which were written for her were turned into operas, almost all of them actually. And her style was extremely operatic. And she attended the famous seances of Dr. who used to demonstrate female hysteria. This is the famous painting of one of his seances, and one of his patients, or you could say one of his victims, later became very famous, the dancer, Jane Avril, and she says in her memoirs that in fact the hysteria was completely faked. And the seances were absolutely fraudulent, but people loved them. And Sarah Bernhardt went along to them to pick up a few hints for her performances. Her death scenes were particularly famous. She was wonderful. She gave really good death scenes. And one of the most famous, of course, was in “The Lady of the Camellias,” where she sort of writhes hysterically at the end, and falls precipitously. And people were fearful for her that she fell so violently at the end of the play.

Here, she’s in two roles that were written for her by the playwright Victorien Sardou. He was the most successful French playwright of the period, and particularly in combination with her. And he wrote roles that were absolutely tailored to her talent. And “Tosca” on the left, “Fedora” on the right. Both of course, much better known today as operas than as plays. Nobody performs Sardou’s plays anymore, but “Tosca” is one of the most frequently performed and one of the most effective of all operas. And “Fedora” is quite popular too by Giordano. Ah, yes. So it was one of the criticisms that was made of Sarah Bernhardt by serious, uppity intellectuals, was that she devoted her talents to trash, that she didn’t play many great roles from the classics. And it was really the rubbish, rubbish-y plays of like Sardou where she was most effective. But there was one great classical role that she played again and again throughout her career, and she absolutely thrilled audiences, and that was in Racine’s “Phedre.” So now I’m going to play you an excerpt of a recording of her in one of the big monologues from “Phedre,” and you’ll see, oh, she announces herself that it’s Madamoiselle Bernhardt, and she’s going to do the scene from “Phedre,” and then she immediately launches into this completely hysterical rant that is really more singing than it is speaking.

• [Instructor] Right. Here she is in the role of Cleopatre. This was a role based on Shakespeare, but rewritten for her to show off her talents, by Sardou, and she had a tremendous success internationally with this. And there was a famous occasion where she came to London and she was performing it and going way over the top, as you’ve just heard in that excerpt. And of course, that led to one of the most famous quotes in British theatrical history of two elderly Victorian ladies coming out of the theatre, deeply shocked by the shenanigans of Sarah Bernhardt. One says to the other, “So unlike the home life of our own dear queen,” referring of course to Queen Victoria. She was famously thin in a period that actually didn’t rate thinness. It was at the beginning of her career, she was often criticised for being too thin. And she may actually, possibly have been anorexic, but the thinness did make her suitable for travesty roles. She was very famous for playing men, male roles, like “Lorenzaccio” of Alfred de Musset. And she frequently performed “Hamlet.” And she also performed Pelleas to the Melissande of Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Mrs. Patrick Campbell, also a kind of monstre sacre. Fascinating woman with a very interesting life, who would probably deserve a talk for Lockdown. These very egotistical women, both them huge divas, but actually they got on really, really well, and they toured the British House performing both “Hamlet” and “Pelleas and Melisande” in French. And they developed a funny kind of friendship where they did the most appalling, practical jokes on one another during performances to try and make each other laugh. Now, as I said, Sarah Bernhardt was incredibly alert to all the new possibilities of the 19th century.

And in the 1890s, a new art form was the poster. If you see photographs of European cities in the 1860s and '70s, you do see posters, but the posters are just for information. They’ll just announce the titles and the venues and the actors, and all that kind of thing. Very occasionally there will be a picture, but it’s separate from the written information. But from the 1880s, first of all, Jules Cheret and then into the '90s with Toulouse-Lautrec and Mucha, you have the development of the, as I said, of the poster is an art form. Again, it’s partly a matter of new technology, colour lithography, that you could make big coloured images and mass produce them with colour lithography. And it’s also partly the influence of the Japanese woodcut print, which showed artists how to integrate written information with visual imagery. So Sarah Bernhardt in the '90s, she was commissioning posters for all her plays. And now Christmas 1894, she was in a new play by Sardou called “Gismonda,” and she needed a poster quickly. But because it was Christmas, the printers couldn’t get hold of an artist to design the poster. They were all away or busy with other things. And as it happens, a young Czech artist, who up to this point had not achieved any kind of success, called Alphonse Mucha, went into the printers and they said, “Well, do you want to have a go at this?” And he said, yes, he would, and they arranged tickets for him, and he went to a performance, and, really, within a day or so he produced this, practically overnight, he produced the poster that you see on the right-hand side. And so that went up on the walls of Paris just after Christmas of 1894, and it was a sensation. It made his reputation and everybody wanted it, and wanted copies of it, and as I said, Sarah Bernhardt, she was very, very astute business-wise.

And she immediately summoned Mucha in and she signed a contract with him. And she actually, well, both of them made a lot of money from these posters. There was series of posters, wonderful posters that he made for all her plays through the 1890s. You could see “The Lady of the Camellias,” “Hamlet,” “Tosca.” There are many more. And he also became her personal designer. He designed costumes. He designed jewellery for her, like this. I mean, can you imagine? This is the days when you greeted a lady, you kissed her hand. Well, it’d be quite something if she held out her hand with this on it and you had to kiss it. The Dreyfus Affair for her, as for many people, was a moment of crisis in her career. As I said, she was very proud of being Jewish, and always… I won’t say admit, 'cause why should she admit? No, she proclaimed that she was Jewish, and belonged to a very ancient people. And that of course, at this point, in the late '90s, made her vulnerable with the rising tide of anti-Semitism generated by the Dreyfus case. But she immediately came out in favour of both Dreyfus and Emile Zola. You can see here the letter that she wrote in January, 1898 to Zola in support of him. So this was, I think a very brave thing to do. It would’ve put her in a very dangerous position physically. I think she would’ve been physically endangered, and of course she was endangering her career. And oh, here is her obnoxious son, Maurice. I mean, the trouble was, he was spoiled and pampered from day one, and brought up to be a prince He didn’t want to be identified with Dreyfus and Zola. And so that was, I think for about two years, Maurice and Sarah were not talking with one another.

And of course, the Dreyfus case, it was a bit like Brexit in this country, or Trump in America. It was something that divided families. And this is a famous caricature on the right-hand side of people having a perfectly nice dinner party, but somebody mentions Dreyfus and suddenly everything is smashed and everybody’s at each other’s throats. So she ran her own company. She hired the actors to play with her. She was very entrepreneurial. And in the early 1890s, she took on this very pretty theatre, Theatre de la Renaissance. I pass it, you know, several times a week when I’m in Paris or when I’m on the 38 bus. Let me see, very pretty neo-Baroque inside and out. So this was her theatre. Now, she was certainly the most famous actress in the world, but not everybody thought she was the greatest. The theatre world was divided between partisans of Sarah and the great Eleonora Duse. She was just known as La Duse. So more serious theatre people, like George Bernard Shaw, wrote articles in which he said that he thought that Sarah Bernhardt was a total amateur compared with the greatness of Duse. This must have really touched her to the quick. And in 1894, she, rather rashly, invited Duse to perform in a season at her theatre, the Theatre de la Renaissance. And it was really set up as a kind of dual between these two monsters of the theatre. And initially it started off quite cordial. And de Montesquieu who always remained a friend of Sarah, the Duc de Montesquieu. He said that when they, he described when they first met, he said, “They hugged each other so tightly, it was more like a head-on collision than an embrace.”

But things were too soon to turn quite sour, because they were alternating in the same roles. And La Duse made the rash decision to make her debut in the season in a role that was particularly associated with Sarah Bernhardt, the role of the Lady of the Camellias. And it was not, apparently, one of her best performances. And unsurprisingly she was rather put off, because Sarah, she arranged with the electrician of the theatre. By this time, the 1890s, you got electric light, of course, introduced the decade before. And she stood in her box all the way through the performance of La Duse in La Dame aux Camélias, apparently as a mark of respect for another great actress, but she’d arranged with the electrician that there was a beam of light focused on her face. So it meant the whole audience, 'cause their tension was divided between what La Duse was doing on the stage, but they really wanted to study the face of Sarah Bernhardt to see how she was reacting to it. So it went from bad to worse. And by the end of the season, of course, they were bitter enemies. This is, so the theatre that she took on at the end of the 1890s and kept for the rest of her life, it’s one of the biggest theatres in Paris. You can see it was named the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt, and it continued with that name actually until the German occupation. They obviously weren’t going to have a Jewish name on a major theatre in Paris. They changed it to Theatre de la Cite, reverted to being Theatre Sarah Bernhardt after the war. But now to my sadness, actually, I don’t know for what reason, it’s called the Theatre de la City again, and not the Theatre Bernhardt.

You can see it’s absolutely enormous theatre. And in 1900, she had one of her greatest successes. So she’s 56 years old by this time, and no longer quite as slender as she had been through much of her career. And she appeared in a play called “L'Aiglon,” “The Little Eagle.” And this was written for her by Rostand, great playwright. Well, he was great, I suppose for just, these days for one play, “Cyrano de Bergerac,” which had a huge success with that two years earlier, in 1898. And so Sarah commissioned this play from him where she plays Napoleon’s only son, the Duc de Reichstadt, who died of tuberculosis at the age of 21, much warned by the French, who hope that he would inherit his father’s genius. And it’s a huge historical epic full of great tear-jerking scenes. And you know, looking at these photographs of it, you might think, oh dear, she looks slightly ridiculous, corseted up and pretending to be a 21-year-old boy, this 56-year-old woman. But it worked, and it played for an enormous run of a couple of years, and audiences were incredibly moved. They were in floods of tears. Here again. This is a, you see her as L'Aiglon in the middle. And of course another way in which she, like other actors of her time, took advantage of new developments, was the postcard. The period between 1890 and 1914 was the great period of the picture postcard. People were sending them to one another all the time. And you’d go to Paris flea markets and you can find mountains of these picture postcards of this period, sometimes of places you’ve been to, but very often of popular actresses. And it was another method that she used to increase her fame. And two more images of her in L'Aiglon.

So indomitable. I mean, she was always a woman who actually suffered from poor health, and it’s rather extraordinary that she lasted as long as she did through a very, very tough career travelling around the world. And around the turn of the century, she had an accident on stage that damaged her leg, and it became a chronic condition. She was in agony. And she decided that she couldn’t stand the pain anymore, that she would have the leg amputated. And that’s what she did in 1915 at the height of the First World War. And unfortunately it didn’t help. She could still feel the pain in the leg after it had been amputated, but nothing was going to stop her, and she of course was an incredibly patriotic woman. And so she, this I think troops must have been very impressed by this, by now elderly woman, by the standard of the time, a woman in her 70s was old, with a leg amputated, was still off to the western front to try and boost the morale of the troops. And this is one of the very, very last images of Sarah Bernhardt. And as I said, she kept going to the very end. A week before she died, she was making a film called “La Voyante.” And this is a still from that film, the film was incompleted. So I think it’s a wonderful thing really, that she was able to keep going almost to the moment of her death. And here again we are back at the funeral, as her monument, as I said is in Pere Lachaise. Trudy and I have been there to pay respects to the great Sarah. And I’m finishing a little bit prematurely, but perhaps you have some questions. So I’ll see what you’ve got.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: “Was Sarah Bernhardt Jewish?”

A: Yes, she was. I mean, as I said, we dunno who the father was for sure, but her mother was Jewish, and that I think, I believe that’s enough.

Yes, but I go to a lot of trouble of course to try and find the best photographs.

Q: “Where did she learn to sculpt?”

A: She went, I’m trying to remember where it was. She did go to a very well-known sculptor. Oh, famous old anecdote.

“Note how the placement of two commas changes the meaning of two sentence. Sarah Bernhardt says Eleonora Duse is the greatest actress. Sarah Bernhardt says Eleonodura is.” I have to really… How the two commas. I don’t quite get that. I’ll have to think about that, Dennis. I’ll think about that.

“Sorry you lost the recording of Phedre.” I know. When I’m in London, I’m sorry, the internet is a bit problematic. Wildenstein Gallery 1984, “Sarah Bernhardt and Her Times.” I think there probably have been a number of good exhibitions, but the one in Paris that’s on at the moment is really spectacular.

This is Cheryl saying, “My mother in South Africa used to quote her mother as often saying 'How unlike the home life of our own dear queen.’ I never knew the origin.” Well, now you do. This is Anne saying it’s amazing to hear the recording of “Phedre.” So maybe it came better through to some people than to others. And she worked on the TV drama titled “Sarah” starring Zoe Caldwell, produced in Toronto by the CBC. Love to see that, that it’s very good. I don’t think she ever performed in any other language than French. I think everything was performed in French.

Film of Sarah Bernhardt, “Mothers of France.” Somebody’s given the link to that. Thank you very much.

And this is James saying, “She was a highly talented sculptor.” Indeed, she was. A stunning relief of Ophelia sold for about 300,000. Well, of course, I mean, you know, she’s such a legend, that was going to contribute to the price. I know there’s been, yes, a big exhibition in Prague about Mucha and the jewellery that he designed for her.

And this is Patricia who saw Janet McTeer on Broadway. Abigail, I’m afraid that is rather ambiguous comment by your grandfather. He might have thought you were being a little prima donna.

Q: “What happened to Maurice?”

A: Well, he certainly survived her. I dunno what happened to him in the end. Where are we?

Q: “Where did the Bernhardt name from?”

A: I think it’s a German name. I mean she always used to emphasise that her family were Dutch, but I think that if you go back two generations, they’re German and that was something that she really, I mean she didn’t mind being Dutch and she was very happy to be Jewish, but she surely did not want to be German.

She isn’t buried in a church, and she is, I think she’s… It’s a while since I’ve been to Pere Lachaise. There is a whole Jewish section in Pere Lachaise, and I can’t remember for sure whether she’s in the Jewish section or not. And that seems to… You don’t receive the recordings, because they’re all… At last, at last, at last, after a long prevails and many efforts, everything is going to be put online, so if you can wait just a little bit longer, you should be able to get everything that you want online. I don’t think she spoke any English. I think she only spoke French.

And that seems to be it. Thank you all very, very much. And I’ll be away. I’m going to Italy for the Pacini Festival with a group, and I’ll be back in Paris, and I hope I’ll have a better internet connection from Paris. Thank you very, very much. Bye-bye.