SARAH BORE HER SON MAURICE AND NO DOUBT BECAME A COURTESAN FOR A WHILE

There were so many stories of Sarah's son's fatherhood, some from her, that overall, there is no way to know. Prince Henry de Ligne is said to be the love of her life. But it would be like a courtesan to claim a royal or aristocratic man as the father of her child. It would be like a royal or aristocratic man to be the patron of a courtesan. Or did she spin a story or have a fantasy?

Did she tell him right away? Did he find her? Did his rejection create such turmoil that she became a patient in a psychiatric hospital?  Apparently Sarah had a difficult birth of Maurice.

Page 43 Excerpt: Even so, her amorous life was proceeding far more successfully than her professional life. Beginning in April 1864 when she abandoned the Gymnase, she had no work in the theater for more than two years, expect for a short run as a replacement in a kind of fairy spectacle called La Biche au bois. So far she had made no impression at all as an actress. What was she doing?

 According to author Robert Gottlieb, having Maurice changed Sarah because she became determined she would support her son. (Page 43) "Every aim of her existence was to provide for him while he was young the shield of respectability she herself had never known." When she appealed to Prince de Lingne for support of Maurice, down to her last dollars, "The prince's reply was brutality itself: "I know a woman named Bernhardt, he wrote, 'but I do not know her child."

Excerpt: "This period of her life has been fudged over by her first biographers, starting with herself, but it's now clear that she was living by her wits -- and her body. Not of course, as a common prostitute of kept woman, but in an unique situation that she fashioned through her sexuality, her charm, and her common sense. In the white-satin salon of her new apartment in the rue Duphot she managed to establish a kind of court, made up of a group of distinguished men who were seemingly content to pay joint homage (and a fairly allocated tariff) to her while sharing her favors openly and with equanimity. "What's odd," she told Colombier -- if you can believe Colombier, and in this case I do --- "is how well they get along together.  They never quarrel and they seem to adore one another. I sometimes think that if I were to disappear, my menagerie would go on congregating in my apartment with the greatest of pleasure."  Apparently, among their joint ventures was chipping in to buy Saran the elaborate coffin she had always wanted, and which famously accompanied her thereafter wherever she went.

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