By ROBERT GOTTLIEB [The New York Review of Books] – Edmond de Goncourt overheard a conversation in a Paris restaurant: “The Sarah Bernhardt family—now, there’s a family! The mother made whores of her daughters as soon as they turned thirteen.” For once, the gossip was more or less true. Sarah’s sister Régine died at the age of nineteen, “after a miserable life of neglect and prostitution.” Sarah seems to have taken a more businesslike approach to prostitution. She collected about her a group of male admirers whom (according to a rival actress) she called her “stockholders.” One of those investors may have been the father of her son, Maurice, who was born in 1864.

She was, in effect, performing to a small, select audience, and earning far more money than she would have earned in the theater. After leaving the Comédie-Française, she spent a year playing minor roles as an understudy at a boulevard theater and then another two years during which she hardly acted at all, yet she was soon wealthy enough to acquire a new apartment with a white-satin salon in the rue Duphot, not far from La Madeleine, in one of the most expensive parts of Paris.

Sex would continue to be a large part of Bernhardt’s life, either for its own sake or as a means of supplementing her income. Even in the 1870s, when she had made a name for herself, police spies reported high-ranking customers, including members of Parliament, “visiting” her apartment and leaving money and valuable gifts. It is a shame, therefore, that the information about her parallel career is so sketchy and monotonous: very little about the actual performances, and nothing at all about the practical arrangements.

Continued at The New York Review of Books | More Chronicle & Notices.