That alone would have made my recollections of “Romeo and Juliet” pleasant.  But there was more.  At the supper on the stage after the hundredth performance, Sarah Bernhardt was present.  She said nice things to me, and I was enraptured that my “vraies larmes” should have pleased and astonished her!  I noticed that she hardly ever moved, yet all the time she gave the impression of swift, butterfly movement.  While talking to Henry she took some red stuff out of her bag and rubbed it on her lips!  This frank “making-up” in public was a far more astonishing thing in the ’eighties than it would be now.  But I liked Miss Sarah for it, as I liked her for everything.

How wonderful she looked in those days!  She was as transparent as an azalea, only more so; like a cloud, only not so thick.  Smoke from a burning paper describes her more nearly!  She was hollow-eyed, thin, almost consumptive-looking.  Her body was not the prison of her soul, but its shadow.

On the stage she has always seemed to me more a symbol, an ideal, an epitome than a woman.  It is this quality which makes her so easy in such lofty parts as Phedre.  She is always a miracle.  Let her play “L’Aiglon,” and while matter-of-fact members of the audience are wondering if she looks really like the unfortunate King of Rome, and deciding against her and in favor of Maude Adams who did look the boy to perfection, more imaginative watchers see in Sarah’s performance a truth far bigger than a mere physical resemblance.  Rostand says in the foreword to his play, that in it he does not espouse this cause or that, but only tells the story of “one poor little boy.”  In another of his plays, “Cyrano de Bergerac,” there is one poor little tune played on a pipe of which the hero says: 

     “Ecoutez, Gascons, c’est toute la Gascogne.”

Though I am not French, and know next to nothing of the language, I thought when I saw Sarah’s “L’Aiglon,” that of that one poor little boy too might be said: 

     “Ecoutez, Francais, c’est toute la France!”

It is this extraordinary decorative and symbolic quality of Sarah’s which makes her transcend all personal and individual feeling on the stage.  No one plays a love scene better, but it is a picture of love that she gives, a strange orchidaceous picture rather than a suggestion of the ordinary human passion as felt by ordinary human people.  She is exotic—­well, what else should she be?  One does not, at any rate one should not, quarrel with an exquisite tropical flower and call it unnatural because it is not a buttercup or a cowslip.