Scarcely five feet tall, she was not considered the right size for an actress; also, too pale and too thin. She seemed impulsive and natural in both life and art; she broke theatrical rules, often turning upstage to deliver a speech. She slept with all her leading men. She loved fame and self-publicity – or, as Henry James silkily put it, she was ‘a figure so admirably suited for conspicuity’. One critic compared her successively to a Russian princess, a Byzantine empress and a Muscat begum, before concluding: ‘Above all, she is as Slav as one can be. She is much more Slav than all the Slavs I have ever met.’ In her early twenties she had an illegitimate son, whom she took everywhere with her, heedless of disapproval. She was Jewish in a largely anti-Semitic France, while in Catholic Montreal they stoned her carriage. She was brave and doughty.
Naturally, she had enemies. Her success, her sex, her racial origin and her bohemian extravagance reminded the puritanical why actors used to be buried in unhallowed ground. And over the decades her acting style, once so original, inevitably dated, since naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel. If the magic always worked for some – Ellen Terry called her ‘transparent as an azalea’ and compared her stage presence to ‘smoke from a burning paper’ – others were less kind. Turgenev, though a Francophile and himself a dramatist, found her ‘false, cold, affected’, and condemned her ‘repulsive Parisian chic’.
Fred Burnaby was often described as bohemian. His official biographer wrote that he lived ‘entirely aloof, absolutely regardless of conventionalities’. And he had known the exoticism which Bernhardt merely appropriated. A traveller might bring reports back to Paris from afar; a playwright would pillage them for themes and effects; then a designer and costumier would perfect the illusion around her. Burnaby had been that traveller: he had gone deep into Russia, across Asia Minor and the Middle East, up the Nile. He had crossed Fashoda country, where both sexes went naked and dyed their hair bright yellow. Stories that adhered to him often featured Circassian girls, gypsy dancers and pretty Kirghiz widows.
He claimed descent from Edward I, the king known as Longshanks, and displayed virtues of courage and truth-speaking which the English imagine unique to themselves. Yet there was something unsettling about him. His father was said to be ‘melancholy as the padge-owl that hooted in his park’, and Fred, though vigorous and extrovert, inherited this trait. He was enormously strong, yet frequently ill, tormented by liver and stomach pains; ‘gastric catarrh’ once drove him to a foreign spa. And though ‘very popular in London and Paris’, and a member of the Prince of Wales’s circle, he was described by the Dictionary of National Biography as living ‘much alone’.
The conventional accept and are frequently charmed by a certain unconventionality; Burnaby seems to have exceeded that limit. One of his devoted friends called him ‘the most slovenly rascal that ever lived’, who sat ‘like a sack of corn on a horse’. He was held to be foreign-looking, with ‘oriental features’ and a Mephistophelean smile. The DNB called his looks ‘Jewish and Italian’, noting that his ‘unEnglish’ appearance ‘led him to resist attempts to procure portraits of him’.
We live on the flat, on the level, and yet – and so – we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracturing force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.
So why do we constantly aspire to love? Because love is the meeting point of truth and magic. Truth, as in photography; magic, as in ballooning.
Despite Burnaby’s reticence and Bernhardt’s waywardness with fact, we may establish that they met in Paris in the mid-1870s. It was not difficult for an intimate of the Prince of Wales to gain access to the Divine Sarah. He sent flowers beforehand, watched her in Bornier’s La Fille de Roland, prepared his words of praise, and went round afterwards. He was half expecting a cohue of effete Parisian dandies in her dressing room, but perhaps some preliminary triage had taken place. He was comfortably the tallest person there, she the tiniest. When she greeted him, he could not help mentioning how the stage enlarged her. She was used to such a reaction.
‘And so thin,’ she added, ‘that I can slip between raindrops without getting wet.’
Fred looked as if he almost believed her. She laughed a little, but without any mockery. He felt at ease. In truth, he felt at ease in most places. He was an Englishman, for a start; he spoke seven languages excellently; while any officer used to giving orders from Spain to Russian Turkestan was well able to cut it among these effusive yet genial gallants who, as it appeared to him, were competing with one another only in flights of language.
They were drinking champagne, no doubt provided by one of these admirers. Fred was always temperate with wine, and so able to observe discreet departures until, it suddenly seemed, there was only a duenna by the name of Mme Guérard to prevent him being alone with her.
‘So, mon capitaine –’
‘Oh, for pity’s sake, ma’am. Fred. Or Frederick. When I enter your dressing room I am without rank. I am …’ He hesitated. ‘I am, as you might say, a simple soldier.’
He felt, rather than watched, her examine his walking-out dress: stable jacket, cavalry overalls, ankle boots, spurs; forage cap temporarily abandoned on a side table.
‘And what is your war?’ she asked smilingly.
He didn’t know how to reply. He thought about wars, where only men were employed. He thought about sieges, and how men were supposed to besiege women until they surrendered. But for once he did not feel bravado, and he was often uneasy with metaphor. Eventually, he replied:
‘Not so long ago, ma’am, I was returning from Odessa. News had reached me that my father was ill. The quickest route lay through Paris. But the city was in the hands of the Commune.’ He paused, wondering what the actress’s view of that pestiferous gang of assassins might be. ‘I had only my travelling bag and regulation cavalry sword. I was warned that all weapons were forbidden. But I have long shanks, and so I hid my sword down the leg of my trousers.’
He paused, long enough for her to think this the end of the story.
‘So I limped. And I was pretty soon arrested by an officer of the Commune, who was rightly suspicious of the stiffness of my leg. He charged me with carrying a concealed weapon. I immediately acknowledged the offence, but informed him that I was returning to visit my sick father, and that I only sought peace. Rather to my surprise, he allowed me to continue on my journey.’
Now the story did seem to have ended, but its point eluded her.
‘And how was your father?’
‘Oh, he was much restored by the time I reached Somerby. Thank you for your consideration. The point of the story – well, to repeat what I told the fellow who arrested me, in Paris I only seek peace.’
She looked at him, at this enormous, uniformed, moustachioed, francophone Englishman, whose thin, piercing voice came strangely out of a vast body. And since she lived her life amid complication and artifice, simplicity always moved her.
‘I am touched, Capitaine Fred. But – how can I put it? I am myself not yet ready for a quiet life.’
Now he was embarrassed. Had she taken his remark amiss?
‘You will come back tomorrow,’ said Sarah Bernhardt.
‘I shall come back tomorrow,’ replied Fred Burnaby, giving her a farewell of his own devising: a military self-dismissal combined with a bohemian’s eager promise to return.
The women she played were passionate, exotic, operatic – literally so. She created Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias before Verdi reimagined it; and was Sardou’s La Tosca, a role now only known in Puccini’s version. She was operatic without needing music. She had a ménage of lovers and a menagerie of animals. The lovers seemed to get on with one anoth
er, perhaps because there was safety in numbers; also because she was good at turning them into friends. She once said that if she died prematurely, her admirers would still continue to gather regularly at her house. This was probably true.
Her menagerie had begun humbly enough, when she was a girl, with a pair of goats and a blackbird. Later, the wildlife became wilder. On tour in England, she bought a cheetah, seven chameleons and a wolf dog in Liverpool. There was Darwin the monkey, Hernani II the lion cub, and dogs called Cassis and Vermouth. In New Orleans she bought an alligator which reacted to its French diet of milk and champagne by dying. She also had a boa constrictor which ate sofa cushions and had to be shot – by Sarah herself.
Fred Burnaby was not abashed by such a creature.
The next evening, he watched her performance, came to her dressing room, and saw many of the same faces. He made sure to pay proper attention to Mme Guérard: having been in foreign courts before, he knew to recognise the power behind the throne. Soon – much sooner than the fiercest optimism could have imagined – she came across, took Burnaby’s arm, and bade her coterie goodnight. As the three of them left, the scrimmage of Parisian dandies took care not to appear put out. Well, perhaps they weren’t.
They rode in her carriage to her house in the rue Fortuny. The table was laid, the champagne on ice, and through a half-open door Fred glimpsed the corner of an enormous cane bed. Mme Guérard retired. If there were servants, he did not see them; if there were parrots or lion cubs around, he did not hear them. He heard only her voice, which had the clarity and range of a musical instrument yet to be invented.
He told her of his travels, his military skirmishing, his balloon adventures. He spoke of his ambition to fly across the German Ocean.
‘Why not the Channel?’ she asked, almost as if it were uncivil of him, wanting to fly in any direction other than towards her.
‘That has also been my ambition. But the winds are the problem, ma’am.’
‘Sarah.’
‘Madame Sarah.’ Stolidly, he continued: ‘The fact of the matter is, that if you take off from almost anywhere in southern England, you generally find yourself landing in Essex.’
‘What is this Essex?’
‘You do not need to know. It is not exotic, Essex.’
She looked at him a little uncertainly. Was this a fact or a joke?
‘A southerly, a south-westerly takes you to Essex. You need a good constant blowing westerly to get you across the German Ocean. But to reach France, you would need a northerly, which is somewhat rare and unreliable.’
‘So you will not visit me by balloon?’ she asked flirtatiously.
‘Madame Sarah, I would visit you by any means of transportation now or yet to be invented, were you in Paris or in Timbuctoo.’ He startled himself with this sudden gust of declaration, and took more cold pheasant as if it were a matter of urgency. ‘But I have a theory,’ he continued, a little more calmly. ‘I am convinced that the winds do not always blow in the same direction at different heights. So if you were caught in … in a contrary wind …’
‘An Essex wind?’
‘Precisely – if you were so caught, you would release ballast and seek the higher altitudes where that northerly might be found.’
‘And if it is not?’
‘Then you would end up in the water.’
‘But you know how to swim?’
‘Yes, but it would do me little good. There are some balloonists who wear cork overjackets in case they land in the sea. But that strikes me as unsporting. I believe a man should take his chances.’
She left that remark hanging in the air.
The next day, all that stopped him from feeling pure exultance was the question: had it been too easy? In Seville, he had spent many hours learning the language of the fan from a solemn Andalusian señorita: what this gesture, that concealment, this tap really meant. He understood and had practised gallantry on more than one continent, and found much charm in female coquetry. What he had not come across before was such straightforwardness, the acknowledgement of appetite and the unwillingness to waste time. He knew, of course, that all was not entirely straightforward. Fred Burnaby was not so naive as to imagine that he was being entertained merely for the attraction of his person. He realised that Madame Sarah was no different from other actresses, and that presents were expected. And since Madame Sarah was the greatest actress of her day, the presents must be similarly resplendent.
Burnaby had previously been in full charge of his flirtations: the girl, nervous of the vast uniform in front of her, would need calming. Now, things were the other way round, which both perplexed and excited him. There was no shilly-shallying about rendezvous. He would ask, she would grant. Sometimes they met at the theatre, sometimes he came directly to the rue Fortuny, a place which – now he had time to examine it – struck him as half mansion, half artist’s studio. There were velvet-clad walls, parrots perching on portrait busts, vases as big as sentry boxes, and as many soaring and drooping plants as at Kew. And among such riot and display lay those simple things the heart desired: dinner, and bed, and sleep, and breakfast. A man scarcely dared ask for more. He could hear himself living.
She told him about her early life, her struggles, her ambition and her success. And about all the rivalry and jealousy that success provoked.
‘They say terrible things about me, Capitaine Fred. They say that I roast cats and eat their fur. That I dine off lizards’ tails and the brains of peacocks sautéed in butter made from monkeys. They say that I play croquet with human skulls wrapped in Louis Quatorze wigs.’
‘I can’t see the sport in that,’ commented Burnaby, frowning.
‘But enough of my life. Tell me more about your balloons,’ she asked.
He pondered. Lead with the ace, he thought. Best foot forward, best story forward.
‘Last year,’ he began, ‘I made an ascent from the Crystal Palace with Mr Lucy and Captain Colvile. The wind was moving between southerly and westerly and back again. We were above the cloud, and our guess was that we were probably crossing the estuary of the Thames. The sun was full above us, and as the captain correctly observed, it was confoundedly hot. So I took off my coat and hung it on one of the spikes of the anchor, and replied to him that there was at least one comfort in being above the clouds. Namely, that a gentleman could sit in public in his shirtsleeves.’
He paused and laughed, expecting laughter in return, as in London, but she had a small smile on her face, and a quizzing look. Alarmed by her silence, he pressed on.
‘But then, you see, as we were sitting there, with so little wind that we felt almost becalmed, we dropped our eyes – well, one of us did, and then alerted the others – downwards. Imagine the scene. There was a broad expanse of fleecy cloud beneath us, preventing our view of the land, or the estuary, below, and then, there, we saw an amazing sight. The sun’ – he held up a hand to indicate its position – ‘was casting on to this flat surface of cloud the very shape and shadow of our balloon. We could see the gasbag, the ropes, the cradle and, strangest of all, our three heads clearly outlined. It was as if we were looking at a colossal photograph of ourselves, of our expedition.’
‘Larger than life.’
‘Indeed.’ But Fred was aware that he had rather garbled his story. The strength of her attention had panicked him. He felt deflated.
‘As we both are. I am larger than life on the stage, as you yourself remarked. And you are larger than life in your very being.’
Fred sensed a pull and lift in his heart. He had deserved censure and received praise. He enjoyed flattery as much as the next man – but again, her words struck him as mere straightforwardness. And here was the paradox of their situation. They were each, by the standards of conventional life, exotic beings, and yet when they were together he discerned no play, no acting, no costume. Even though he was in the walking-out dress of the Blues, and she had only just cast aside furs and a hat which appeared to have a dead owl roosting in
it. He was, he admitted, half confused and probably three-quarters in love.
‘If ever I take a balloon flight,’ she said, with a slight, faraway smile, ‘I shall think of you. I promise you that. And I always keep my promises.’
‘Always?’
‘Always if I intend to. Of course there are promises I do not intend to keep when I make them. But those are hardly promises, are they?’
‘Then perhaps you might honour me by promising to make an ascent with me one day?’
She paused. Had he gone too far? But what was the use of straightforwardness, if not saying what you mean, what you feel?
‘But Capitaine Fred, might it not be a little difficult to balance the vessel?’
This was a good practical point: he weighed at least twice as much as she did. They would have to put most of the ballast on her side, but if he then had to cross the basket in order to release it … He was imagining the playlet as if it were real, and only later began to wonder if she was talking of other things. But then, metaphor often confused him.
No, he wasn’t three-quarters in love.
‘Hook, line and sinker,’ he said to his uniformed reflection in the cheval glass of his hotel bedroom. The dull gold of its frame yielded to the brighter lace edgings of his stable jacket. ‘Hook, line and sinker, Captain Fred.’
He had often imagined this moment, tried to see how it would compare with those previous times when he had been only half in love – with a pair of eyes, a smile, the shimmer of a dress. On those occasions he had always been able to picture the next few days – and sometimes those next few days had turned out exactly as he had predicted. But then, the imagination and the actuality had stopped; the dream and the desire had been fulfilled. Now, though the desire had, in one sense, been fulfilled sooner and more giddyingly than he could possibly have dreamed, it merely aroused greater desire. The small time he had spent with her aroused the desire for greater time, for all time. The small distance they had travelled from the theatre to the rue Fortuny aroused a desire to travel greater distances: to all those countries whose inhabitants she had portrayed onstage – and then to all the remaining countries in the world. To go everywhere with her. Someone had remarked to him upon her Slav beauty. And so he imagined travelling east with her, comparing her features with those around them until she blended entirely into the physiognomical scenery, and there was nothing left but a sea of Slavs and Captain Fred. He imagined her tiny, lithe figure at his side, on a horse she would mount not woman-fashion but astride, in another trouser role. He saw them sharing a horse, he behind, she in front, enclosed by his arms as he held the reins.