YOULE VAN HARD : CRUEL COURTESAN MOTHER OF SARAH BERNHARDT? : DID SHE KNOW WHO SARAH'S ABSENT FATHER WAS? OR TELL MORE THAN ONE MAN HE WAS THE FATHER?

While reading Sarah by Robert Gottlieb I found myself speculating quite a bit and I realized something. The story of Sarah Bernhardt's childhood as the daughter of a Courtesan who was sent away to be raised by others or put into a convent, reminds me of other women I've featured here at MISTRESS MANIFESTO who were sent away... Do you know who I mean?

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Not one of the 'Grand Horizontals', but a woman with a "protector" or a few, according to author Robert Gottlieb, Sarah's mother, Youle Van Hard - also called Judith or Julie Van Hard - was a pretty blond with some lazy charm but surprising strong willpower... And seems to have been too busy elsewhere to give a damn about Sarah. Though the story is not straight and there are varying accounts.

Excerpt page 3: "Youle conducted a relaxed salon to which a group of distinguished men gravitated, among them her lover Baron Larrey, who was the Emperor Louis-Napoleon's doctor and composer Rossini, the novelist and playwright Dumas's father, and the Duc de Morny, known as the most powerful man in France, who was Louis-Napoleon's illegitimate half-brother. It was Rosine, Youle's younger, prettier, livelier sister, who was Morny's mistress except when Youle herself was; in these circumstances it hardly mattered..."

.

"Youle (Sarah's mother) and Rosine (Sarah's aunt) had come a long way. Their mother, Julie (or Jeanette) Van Hard, a Jewish girl of either German or Dutch in origin, had married Maurice Bernard, a Jewish oculist in Amsterdam. When their mother died and their father remarried, Youle and Rosine struck out on their own, first to Basel, then on to London and le Havre, where in 1843 Youle - perhaps fifteen years old - gave birth to illegitimate twin girls, both of whom died within days... 

Undeterred, the ambitions Youle quickly set out for Paris, her daytime occupation seamstress, her nighttime career a quick ascent into the demimonde."

It seems to me that a mother's remarriage would not necessarily be the whole story on why two teenagers left home knowing they'd have to support themselves and found that way by becoming courtesans.

Rosine became a courtesan in Paris, while sister Henriette made a decent and respectable marriage. And then Youle was pregnant again, this time with Sarah. It is understood that Youle simply was never much interested in Sarah, while she did take interest in the next child she gave birth to, another girl, who was also illegitimate. (Youle would eventually have three daughters and it is understood that she tried to introduce Sarah into her world.)

Youle's disinterest in Sarah might have had something to do with who the father was. The best candidate?

It's implied that the Duc de Morny might have been Sarah's father.

There was a young navy officer, surname Morel. There was some money intended for Sarah from Morel or his family - eventually.

Sarah's father might have been a college student. 

The father's name on her birth certificate, Edouard Bernhardt, is also a confusion. One wonders if Youle just made up the name. (It is awfully close to the name Bernard.)

Sarah had memories of being a young child who was sent away to a small village in Brittany where a nurse substituted for her mother as a kind of foster parent. (Eventually she and the nurse were moved closer to Paris.) Sarah would write that her father had been in China for a couple years, which sounds to be something Youle - or Sarah - made up to explain the absence of a father to Sarah. Her mother was only nineteen when Sarah was three, and her youth and circumstances might be partly to blame for being uninvolved in her daughter's life. But, be it that an Edouard Bernhardt was the name given on her birth certificate as her father, or not, there was no consistent presence of a father figure as she grew up. At best she might have had a few visits from him at school or understood him as interested in her education and religion. In her memoir, 'A Double Life,' Sarah gave credit to her father for her attendance at an elite convent - ie. boarding school.

It is just as likely, in my opinion, that Youle may have told more than one man he was the father of her child, or come up with the money for Sarah's boarding through her own efforts. (Which could include investing money she'd been given or paid.)

Though author Gottlieb doesn't suggest this, it comes to me that perhaps Youle's rejection of Sarah, which caused her so much emotional pain throughout her life, while being clearly capable of loving her next born daughter, might have been due to something more horrible than not knowing which patron was Sarah's father. For Youle, according to Sarah, was, in my word choice, abusive. It was reported by the wife-author of one of Sarah's lovers that Sarah said her mother was not just distant but disapproving and cruel and had the power to wound her. 

However, Sarah herself reported that during her childhood, both her Aunt Rosine and her Aunt Harriet were somewhat in her life and it occurs to me that, however judicious in his reportage author Robert Gottlieb has, we may not get too close to the whole story.

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SARAH BERNHARDT : DAUGHTER OF COURTESAN YOULE VAN HARD : TRANSFORMED HERSELF INTO A WORLD FAMOUS ACTRESS AND A NATIONAL ICON OF FRANCE KNOWN FOR HER OWN "SCANDALOUS" LIFE

SARAH BERNHARDT  

(1844-1923) 

Baptized Sarah Marie Henriette Bernard but born Jewish

Eventually Called The Girl With The Golden Voice

I've had Sarah Bernhardt, who was considered the best actress of her generation, on my list of future subjects for some time. My search for books in English that are well regarded lead me to this one by author Robert Gottlieb, which is primary reference for this month's posts, along with some interesting web sites and YouTube videos. Gottlieb states that Sarah herself spun stories and that some of the people who wrote about her had agendas and so, perhaps, it's not possible to know the true or whole story. But he does try.

I think Sarah Berhardt had a hard life but like many of the people profiled here, she made the best of what she had to deal with.

What surprised me was learning that Sarah's mother, Youle Van Hard, was a courtesan in Paris and that she was born illegitimate and unloved. I was also surprised to learn that after Youle took Sarah out of school, she encouraged her to become a teenage courtesan. Youle had three illegitimate daughters over the years. You could say she set her daughters up to be courtesans, and, though youthful Sarah did have patrons for at least some of the time in her youth, her younger sister reportedly became a prostitute and had an even harder life. 

Sarah's eventual successes may have begun because it seems that her mother, a patron, or most likely her birth father, were willing to provide an education for the girl. This was a time when women often went without an education. She took an early interest in acting and the theater and was educated at a good convent school and then a school for acting, but she was also born into a world where her gender - her family's situation - her class at birth - and her Jewishness came with limits. If you've been reading Mistress Manifesto, then you know that many a courtesan in previous centuries was also an entertainer. It was beauty, talent, and fame that attracted patrons and who knows what came first. Acting has become a respectable profession but it wasn't always. It was long assumed that any actor, any theater person, was living a scandalous life.

Sarah Bernhardt eventually became world famous - a celebrity - while also known for her 'love life.' I think that Sarah was expert at marketing and promoting herself, kind of like the way the singer-dancer Madonna, an expert at reinvention, has been. As an example, in her youthful days, Sarah posed with a hat that had a bat on top rather than a bird and took a coffin with her on her travels, and may have slept in it, which is sort of "ghoul school." Or was that just for a photo? I suspect that, if she took her coffin seriously, it was to remind herself to live life to the fullest rather than any darker reason such as thinking of herself as a Parisian vampire.

Sarah Bernhardt may have been known to love her independence. Was she a feminist? We can't say that just becoming an unmarried mother who has to support a child makes a woman a feminist. What went on in Paris, where courtesans had their place in society was one thing. Her behavior and attitudes were even thought to be part of an exaggerated or unstable personality. And maybe she did have some sort of breakdown at one point or another. 

Sarah Bernhardt was Jewish by birth but her father was Catholic. She, and her sisters, were baptized eventually. She was placed in a Catholic orphanage. But who really was her father? 

It wasn't common for a discarded orphan to leave a convent at thirteen years old and begin school at the Conservatoire de Musique et Declamation in Paris. Someone was interested in her education and her religion and wanted to give her a chance at success. Was that person her mother, who she believed - with good reason - didn't love her but who might have set aside some money? A father?

Excerpts from EBSCO.com: "Although she won second prize for tragedy in 1861 and second prize for comedy in 1862, she regarded the conservatory’s methods as antiquated. She left the conservatory in 1862 and accepted a contract with the national theater of France, the famed Comedie Francaise....In 1867, when Bernhardt was twenty-two years old, she became a member of the company at the Odeon, where she found definite successes in roles such as Cordelia in a French translation of William Shakespeaer's play King Lear (pr. c. 1605-1606), as Zanetto in François Coppée’s verse play, La Passant (1869), and as the queen in Victor Hugo's Ruy Blas (1838). Indeed, it was Hugo himself who called Bernhardt the girl with the Golden Voice (vox d’or)—a name that stayed with her throughout her life. Meanwhile, Bernhardt’s success was so immediate that she even gave a command performance for France’s Emperor Napoleon III. However, the Franco-Prussian War interrupted her rising career with the closing of the Paris theaters in 1870."

Like several of the women I've featured here, Sarah was a woman who inspired artists to portray her. Alphonse Mucha, whose posters are rather well known to this day, was a collaborator with Sarah. She posed for him and he also designed costumes, sets and jewelry for her. He even enjoyed a seven year contract with Sarah. Their professional relationship began when Mucha designed this poster for her, as she starred in the play 'Gismonda.'

These posters were all over Paris the first of January, 1895.

Also, like several of the women I've featured here, a flower was created and named for Sarah, which is a peony.

In Robert Gottlieb's book we learn early that Sarah was not exactly the most truthful person, though her lies, as I see it, were out of concern for her reputation, her career, and ultimately her ability to support herself and her son. He says on page one that she was "a complete realist when dealing with her life but a relentless fabulist when recounting it." One of the questions was what year she was born and where. The 1844 above is the earliest year. One page 2 he says, "There are three basic components to her experience of childhood, two of them enough to derail an ordinary mortal: Her mother didn't love her and she had no father. What she did have was her extraordinary will: to survive, to achieve, -and - most of all - to have her way."

Sarah Bernhardt's son, Maurice Bernhardt was well loved. Never loved by her own mother, Sarah was determined to love him. She had been sent away to be raised by others and then introduced to the world in which men gave money to women for sexual favors, although that's not to say that there was always the possibility that the relationships her mother had - or she had - entailed far more. For at least a couple years after the birth of her son, someone supported her. And she took lovers, even when someone might be considered to be far too old for her.

She was bisexual, had romantic affairs with both men and women and played both male and female parts on stage. She was creative. Besides her talent for acting and singing, she became an accomplished painter and sculptor. She was also a woman of business.

Sarah married one time, to a Greek military officer and actor ,Aristides, also called Jacques, Damala. They married in 1882 when she was in her late 30's He was a decade or so younger than her, they separated, but stayed married until his death in 1889. Damala was an opium and morphine addict and a womanizer who died of an overdose.

Perhaps she proved her strength of spirit and courage most during World War I. In 1915 she had a leg amputated but soon after she volunteered to perform for the troops, to improve moral, and insisted on being carried to the front lines. She appeared in propaganda films and patriotic plays.

Gottlieb's book is short but sweet. I'm challenged to post what would be most interesting to my readers about this fascinating woman! Read on!

Missy

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*** She was photographed sleeping in a coffin.

The following web sites and articles are reference or this post

MUCHA FOUNDATION ORG See other posters that featured Sarah Bernhardt and read about the artist.

EBSCO RESEARCH : SARAH BERNHARDT

NOVEMBER'S MISTRESS MANIFESTO POSTS BEGIN TOMORROW!

This poster by Alphonse Mucha is a clue ...

"Alfons Maria Mucha, known internationally as Alphonse Mucha, was a Czech painter, illustrator, and graphic artist. Living in Paris during the Art Nouveau period, he was widely known for his distinctly stylized and decorative theatrical posters, particularly those of _________________________."

 

SUICIDE? DEPRESSION? HERE'S A NUMBER TO CALL IF YOU'RE FEELING THERE'S NO WAY OUT

 

988 is the designated number to go right to 

SUICIDE PREVENTION and CRISIS HOTLINE 

and you can SMS (text) with them too.

CARRIE STERLING and GEORGE STERLING : AN UNHAPPY MARRIAGE ENDED BUT THEY BOTH COMMIT SUICIDE BY CYANIDE

Caroline “Carrie” Rand Sterling was in a bad marriage and her way out of her unhappy life was suicide. Nora May French commit suicide while staying as a guest in her home. I sought out some information of Carrie and George aside this book which has been the primary reference for this month's posts. See the link below for a good explanation of their suicides!

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Nora May French commit suicide in 1907 by cyanide. She was unmarried.

Carrie Sterling commit suicide in 1918 by cyanide. 

George Sterling commit suicide in 1926 by cyanide. These two were husband and wife.

As I stated when I first began the review and selection of excerpts from this book, I felt the title implying a love triangle wasn't quite accurate. I stick by that. 

One of the problems of implying a Love Triangle is that all three persons are in love with each other, romantically and (usually) sexually involved as well, at the same time, which can also imply that one or all of them are bisexual. Rather it seems Carrie Sterling was a traditional wife with traditional expectations who was humiliated and disappointed in her husband. If she preferred not to be a divorced woman because she had to depend on George to support the two of them (no children!) well - He did try hard but his interest in being a poet and impressing his fellows at the Bohemian Club was more important as was what was likely alcoholism and sex addiction. George would turn down paying work to write a play instead. It got to where George had to go out hunting for wildlife to feed the two of them - and guests. Meanwhile his dream of turning Carmel into an artists and writers colony was never fulfilled by his attempts to market the town as such. He wanted the literary luminaries and got average people to buy or built or rent.

Excerpt pages 126-127: (Remarking on the Bohemian Club and other visitors to Carmel and the Sterlings where the emphasis was on nature.)

They could have just bought a can of abalone from the grocery store and saved themselves the trouble. The verses (of George's song about living on abalone) began to grate on Carrie's nerves. Midway through July she had seen one rich person too many sing about poverty while walloping a shellfish. She had always thought that her marriage had allowed her to escape her mother's fate of running a boardinghouse, but now, making up the spare room for every new guest, she realized how wrong she'd been. She was beginning to wonder if she couldn't kick them al out and take $50 for a decent, stable, nonartistic tenant.

Crass as charging rent for boarders might be, it would at least bring in some money Otherwise, what was she getting out of Carme's success? She had abandoned the notion that Carme would reform George. His halfhearted attempts at sobriety had all failed. At the age of forty, he was drinking as if he were still twenty years old. If anything, he was getting worse, while she scraped pots and pans till her knuckles were raw. Meanwhile, her sisters Mrs. Havens and Mrs. Maxwell, were wearing furs on their backs and diamonds around their wrists.

George went off to the Bohemian Club and spent two weeks camping with Jimmy Hopper and Harry Lafler.  All three of these men had some sort of affair with Nora May French. 

So, my readers, I cannot help but feel they passed her around.  

HATI and SKOLL GALLERY ; CARMEL and THE STERLINGS SUICIDES  This link has some photos. Portrait of Carrie Sterling! As well as some poetry George Sterling left.

Excerpt: 

But returning to Carrie, Carrie divorced George Sterling in 1914, after which she lived in Piedmont, California, her sister Lila Havens having found her a job as curator at the Piedmont Art Gallery, which contained Lila’s husband’s private art collection. It is said, that she and George Sterling regretted their separation and divorce. On November 17, 1918 in her Piedmont bedroom Carrie put on an elegant gown, put Chopin’s “Funeral March” on the Victrola, and drank a vial of cyanide.

Eight years later to the day, in the early morning hours of November 17, 1926, a despondent George Sterling locked himself in his room at the Bohemian Club and he too died by drinking potassium cyanide....

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THE SUICIDE OF NORA MAY FRENCH AND MORE BLAMING HER : THE FRIENDS SHE LEFT BEHIND PROMOTED THE NOTION THAT SHE WAS DESTINED FOR SUICIDE

This passage in Catherine Prendergast's book is quite dramatic. A number of men had tried to have their way with Nora, and then she became engaged to Captain Hiley, who would eventually not follow through and marry her. Jimmy refers to Jimmy Hopper who was interested in Nora shortly before she commit suicide and was married but separated from his wife at the time. Jimmy regularly borrowed money from George Sterling, who then borrowed from Jack London. After her death, George Sterling revealed to Jimmy that Nora was pregnant before she died and that his wife, Carrie, knew about it. Who was the father?

Excerpts pages 203-205:

On the evening of November 13, Jimmy had been dancing with Nora at the Arts and Crafts Club and likely went to sleep that night with thoughts of her whirling though his mind. He was awakened by a loud banging on his cabin door. Carrie Sterling stood outside, her overcoat thrown over her nightdress, shaking and crying so violently he could barely make out her words. Once he understood that Nora's life was in danger, he grabbed his shoes and ran to their bungalow as fast as his athletic legs would carry him. Flying through their living room, he made for the bedroom. Nora lay on the sheets, as still as marble statue, though not white. Her freckled cheeks, which he had been gazing at over dinner only hours before, flushed as vividly as a painting - the tell tale of cyanide in the blood. When he reached for her hand, it was cold.  Remember, Jimmy had dug mangled women out of piles of rubble during the earthquake.  As he left the bungalow and ran for the doctor, he would have already known Nora was gone. ....

.....  Jimmy seemed to develop a conscience. He next wrote George that Nora had not toyed with men as much as they had toyed with her, all the while pretending to help her. "We thought we had the lifeboat out, but we were only hitting her on the head with our oars.".... But Jimmy felt strongly that Nora's friends had failed her most, including Carrie. He blamed Carrie for scuttling his nascent relationship with Nora. Carry could accept only a single path for love, one that followed the strict line of courtship, marriage, fidelity, and death - even though she herself was trapped in a marriage to a man who humiliated her at every turn. 

Apparently Jimmy thought he could have saved Nora by also arranging a surgical abortion for her. Implied is that she was pregnant by Jimmy Lafler. The American Medical Association was cracking down on doctors who performed abortions.  If Nora was pregnant at death, this would have been yet another pregnancy. There must have been some shared guilt though, for the author found letters discussing Nora and her suicide even though George Sterling was known for burning letters. Jimmy eventually could barely hide his upset with George and Carrie Sterling and wrote that he could barely stand the thought of ever seeing Jimmy Lafler again. Nora was not forgotten in Carmel and all that blaming implied guilt.

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NORA MAY FRENCH POETESS ENDS LIFE BY TAKING POISON

NEWSPAPERS.COM : San Francisco Chronicle Nora May French Poetess Ends Life

Nora had written a letter to her boyfriend after taking abortion pills... And this last poem was found in the pockets of some of  those who committed copycat suicides. Also discovered by the author, Catherine Prendergast, is that Nora once wrote a story about the inner feelings of a man who commit suicide, which was not published.

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GEORGE STERLING'S ROLE IN NORA MAY FRENCH'S UNHAPPINESS ? : GEORGE WAS NEVER A GOOD CANDIDATE FOR HUSBANDING

While reading this book, I thought about George Sterling, a man who made his living and supported his wife through selling land for building, you could say a real estate agent or maybe a developer, of Carmel-By-The-Sea. Carmel is in the Monterey Bay area south of San Francisco and after the historic San Francisco earthquake many unhoused people made their way to Monterey. 

George Sterling was torn because he had entered into a conventional marriage with his wife, Carrie, but was not capable of being a faithful husband. Rather he was a womanizer and alcoholic. I see him as a man out of control of himself. He was so torn up, especially after Nora May French commit suicide by cyanide poison while an ongoing guest in his marital home, that - eventually - years later - he too commit suicide. At least that's a notion. Maybe he was a bit tortured because they'd had an affair and he was not free to be with Nora, but somehow I don't think this man, who seems to have been ruled by his emotions, would have divorced Carrie and married Nora. There was, in my opinion, much more wrong with him and his life that he couldn't bear.

But of fascination is that George had business connections that meant that he was one of the early members of the Bohemian Club, which is now the mysterious and controversial Bohemian Grove, a big boy's camp that has attracted world leaders and Presidents of the United States to its get-aways from the world. Rumors persist that Satanic rituals occur there but I personally have no idea if that's true. It seems to mainly be a men-only club for the very rich, some of whom probably were in secret society type fraternities when youth in college.

What George Sterling wanted was to be a literary person, a poet, to attract such persons to buying land and building homes in Carmel, to put that village on the map as an artists colony. Although his marketing and public relations had that effect, he actually wasn't successful selling property to people who had unsteady or inadequate income. How he hoped literary luminaries like writer Jack London would settle there.

Many of George's friends blamed Nora's death as his undoing. Or women in general. He and his friends attempted to pick up "Bohemian" women on the poetry scene in San Francisco and George was not the success at it. Further, Nora seems to have been given way too much credit for being a "femme fatale." While reading about these men and their ways, I couldn't help but think they were immature and how stuck the women at that time who married men like this were.

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