This is the kind of book report-review that I like to do in order to get the information I think my readers are most information into this blog:
Sarah, at the age of seven, couldn't read, write, or do arithmetic and so it was decided that she would go to Mme. Fressard's boarding school. It was fashionable and in a suburb of Paris called Auteuil. She was there for two years learning these basics as well as singing and the lady-like art of embroidery. She made friends and Mme. Fressard was a kindly person, so this experience was a good one. However, she was also bullied by the mean girls at the school and she fought back physically as well as having "fits of temper." (page 12-13)
This school experience is said to influence her interest in the theatre due to an actress that came once a week to recite poetry and because she made her first appearance as an actress in a school play.
Sarah would soon realize that her mother didn't love her or loved her new baby sister more. This would effect her emotionally for the rest of her life.
Her mother only came to see her twice at school and her father only once, but that means that her father was aware of her and took some interest in her. Or was it that her father identified himself to her and came to visit her several times, deciding that her religious education required that Sarah be moved to a different school where she would be raised as a Roman Catholic.
Page 13 Excerpt: ..."Alas! This was not the last time that my mother's chilly behavior toward me threw me into a paroxysm of misery resulting in illness. I never grew callous to her disapproval of me; her cutting criticisms always had the power to would me to the heart." (according to biographer Therese Berton, who was a contemporary of Sarah's on page 13.)
It was Duc de Morny who paid for Sarah's education there, according to Wikipedia, which could indicate that he was her father, or it could simply indicate that he was involved with her mother. Gottlieb writes that it was her mother who took her to the school, where she was a student for six years with Mother Saint Sophie as her mother substitute. She loved it there but she was a prankster and always close to being expelled. Here again she was drawn to be a stage actress.
Her Jewishness, born of a Jewish mother, became a situation. She was baptized - along with her baby sister.
Page 17 Excerpt: "The years at the convent accomplished what they had been meant to accomplish "The Little Jewish girl" had learned the manners and speech of upper-class Paris, and now not only was officially a Catholic but had thrown herself, with her typical dramatic intensity, into her new religion. (Sarah considered becoming a nun.) ... Her passionate desire to stay on permanently in the convent was something not to be considered by Youle, nor - unsurprisingly - did Mother Saint Sophia detect much of a true calling in the unruly Sarah.... .... It was 1859, and Sarah was almost fifteen - more or less a grown woman.
And, Gottlieb writes, marriage was out of the question despite her Catholic education because she was the daughter of a Jewish courtesan. But Youle did get her a chaperone and governess who was good to Sarah. Mme Guerard turned out to be a close, reliable, life-long friend (Mme died in 1900) who was also a mother figure to Sarah... and a witness to her life, including the birth of her son, Maurice...
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