Levels of Life Read Online Free Page B

was photographed by Nadar – first the father, later the son – throughout her life. Her first session took place when she was about twenty, at the time Félix Tournachon was also involved in another tumultuous, if briefer, career: that of The Giant . Sarah is not yet Divine – she is unknown, aspiring; yet the portraits already show her a star. She is simply posed, wrapped in a velvet cloak, or an enveloping shawl. Her shoulders are bare; she wears no jewellery except a small pair of cameo earrings; her hair is virtually undressed. So is she: there is more than a hint that she wears little beneath that cloak, that shawl. Her expression is withholding, and thus alluring. She is, of course, very beautiful, perhaps more so to the modern eye than at the time. She seems to embody truthfulness, theatricality and mystery – and make those abstractions compatible. Nadar also took a nude photograph which some claim is of her. It shows a woman, naked to the waist, peek-a-booing with one eye from behind a spread fan. Whatever the case, the portraits of Sarah cloaked and shawled are decidedly more erotic.
    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