Disclaimer: Regarding the errors in the following article, cut Thos. W. Herringshaw a little slack. He may have been spoonfed the misinformation by Sarah herself, who never let the truth get in the way of a good story or good publicity.
A Sarah Bernhardt exposition at the Bibliotheque Nationale France (__ 2000 - January 14, 2001) was titled "Sarah Bernhardt and the Divine Lie".
She was supposedly skinny (in a time that worshipped voluptuousness) but her friend, Alexander Dumas the younger, once said, ''You know she's such a liar she may even be fat.''

Since the "The divine Sarah" made her first tour of the United States in 1880, she has grown stouter. She still possesses the remarkable knack of dressing unlike other women, yet dressing well, and the materials of her gowns are very handsome and costly. Her place at the head of her profession she still retains. Speaking of her recent appearance in Washington, a correspondent says: "She is still lithe and surpassingly graceful, soft, loving, fierce as a tiger, alluring as a siren, fitful, capricious, intense, everything that is gracious, ravishing, sad and terrible in human nature." There is and can be but one Sarah Bernhardt.

She is fresh from triumphs in South and Central America, by which nearly seven hundred thousand dollars were taken into the managerial treasury. Her art has been rewarded with munificent public liberality, but she says she never has any money. [True. She spent hundreds of thousands of dollars as quickly as she made them.] At the present time she is trying to remember that the time will come when she will not be able to earn more. She is no longer young.

She was one of eleven children of a wandering Jewess who lived in Paris at the time of Sarah's birth [From historical accounts, Bernhardt was the oldest of three surviving daughters born to a Paris-based courtesan, Judith "Youle" Van Hard. Sarah's elder twin sisters died a week after their birth.]; and was christened in the Roman catholic church, receiving her early education in a convent. While a young girl she was sent to Amsterdam to be reared by her maternal grandmother. [From historical accounts, Bernhardt was reared as an infant/toddler in Brittany by a peasant wet nurse.] In her teens she was taken back to Paris, where it is said she lived in a wretched set of rooms in the top story of an old house in the Rue St. Honore, [The statement could imply she stayed with the supposed grandmother, and at a convent until her teens. In contemporary biographies 4-year-old Sarah had been abandoned with a maid at 65 rue du Provence. Upon spotting her courtesan Aunt Rosine, she jumped out of a window to escape her situation and get her aunt to take her -- now-injured -- back to her less-than-pleased mother (at 265 rue Saint-Honoré, pictured) who didn’t seem to intend to ever fetch her back from the maid. When Sarah was seven Youle sent her away to boarding school, and at nine to the convent. When returning to Paris and Youle, it is hard to believe that a successful courtesan (whose clients included the elder Alexander Dumas, Rossini, and other notables) would live in a "wretched" anything. Sarah didn't endure wretched until her late teens/early twenties when Youle threw her out because Sarah was unwed and pregnant with a Belgian prince's child.] and had for her neighbors the family of a costumer in the theater Francais. [This implies her neighbor got her into the acting academy which got her into the Comedie Français. The elder Dumas was responsible for introducing her to and pushing her toward the theatre. Youle's other clients pulled strings to get Sarah into the Conservatoire and then the Comedie Français.] Her first efforts at the Francais were unsuccessful, [True! She was happy to resign after slapping one of the grand dames.] and it is said that she was thinking of committing suicide when she received encouraging advice and assistance from George Sand of the Odeon; but becoming disgusted with her experience she ran away from the theater [False.]. Eventually, after more than eighteen years of intercession [FALSE!] on the part of George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt was cast in "Hernani," to be put on the at the Odeon. Her appearance was a complete triumph, and the press of Paris over-rated her as much as it under-rated her before. Since that time she has interpreted many of Victor Hugo's dramas and other masterpieces of the French stage.

In June, 1879, she made her first appearance in London, which was a great success. Her visit to this country was a great event in the story of its amusements. In 1883 she bought a theater in Paris, her management of which did not prove successful. Arrangements for the tour, of which that in the United States is a party, were made in the spring of 1886. Sarah Bernhardt was the mother of several children [From all historical accounts, Bernhardt's only child was Maurice.] prior to her marriage to M. Damala, a Greek, in 1882, and from whom she soon separated [She never divorced Damala, putting up with his rages, extravagances, dalliances, and addiction for quite some time (she herself was prone to the same, excepting drug addiction).].

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