Thing People - Sandra Leigh Price's Bernhardt in Paris

I had a sense that Sydney writer Sandra Leigh Price would be a 'Thing Person'. Her screenplay Dear Dove Divine is currently in development in the U.K. And 'The First Seduction of Billy Little' from her forthcoming novel, Tabernacle of the Birds, was published in the Winter Edition of Wet Ink. Here she shares her tale of finding her precious object - a Sarah Bernhardt photograph chanced upon in a Paris antique shop. 

When asked to write about an object, my mind spins with the clicking excitement of a clock overwound, for I am object obsessed. Not with objects that have monetary value or even always aesthetic value, but objects that have the weight of history and story attached to them. For me, these sort of objects act as blue objects for a bower bird. Three objects came to mind, a fox tooth, a blessed rose petal and a signed photograph of Sarah Bernhardt.

I grew up in Canberra. My Grandmother was born in a one street town outside of Canberra. Her Grandmother was born in Ireland married and lived with a notorious bushranger, in the hills outside Canberra, the same year that Sarah Bernhardt made her debut on the Parisian stage. Worlds apart, or so it seemed.

I was in Paris in 2003, my first visit to the city of my imagination. It was so different to the one I had built myself. What my first visit to Paris confirmed was, one has to really visit a place to let its soul mingle with your own, to really have a sense of it.

Paris came at the end of a long trip that included Vienna, Prague, Venice and London. I had been in London on screenplay business and couldn’t believe how far I had come – I had pitched my screenplay to several major Companies, I had met the Director and was impressed by her vision. I had been on the phone with the agent of the Academy award-winning Actress who we had in mind for the lead and then I found myself in Paris, exhausted. A decision was made, that for the five days we had, we would explore the heart of one neighbourhood.

In the middle of winter the place was misty with the past. We walked quiet lanes and discovered small treasures in the faces, the spaces and the very air. In one creeping Arcade, the sort that Zola’s Nana would rack up her debt, we stumbled across a photography shop that still had its portraits of the boyish Rimbaud, stills were propped as advertisement for a professional photographer long since taken to photographing the earth from heaven.

For me photos are always portals to another life – I have been known to purchase lonely brides from junk shops to decorate a mantle or rescue albums from relatives who know not what treasure they have. So when I stumbled into an antique shop and saw a pile of Sarah Bernhardt’s photographs I had to have a closer look.

Sarah Bernhardt always pops up on my radar. Bernhardt was a twenty-first century woman in a nineteenth century package. She saw restrictions as stepping stones. She toured the world including Australia, performing in Sydney in her native French to sold out audiences. She lost her leg to gangrene and continued to perform, including her Hamlet. Bernhardt was the subject of a play at the Canberra Rep, the image of Madame Bernhardt was enlarged to the proportions of a giantess in the foyer by the director Corille Fraser who, bitten by the Bernhardt bug, had written her book Come to Dazzle detailing Bernhardt’s 1891 tour. When I was later in a production of Wilde’s Earnest, an elderly lady from the audience sought me out and declared that I was born to play Bernhardt – a strange compliment. For many years I had her quote on my wall “Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich”, until it became a personal mantra.

The photos had all belonged to one individual, and were addressed to Feydeau in her long slopping hand. Could it be the playwright Georges Feydeau of a Flea in her Ear fame? Whoever had owned the stack of cabinet photographs had been adored by Bernhardt, for she had taken the time to inscribe each one across a career. I just knew I had to have one, burst the bank balance, a reminder to spend myself, to beget more life. I chose the one I did for her gaze – unwavering, her fingers jaunty in her belt, her clothes like a Muscovite prince, the satin like snow. Of course the store owner was very kind enough to lower the price and discuss the wonderful Bernhardt in English, while over her shoulder a stuffed Bear head loomed. Clarifying we were Australian and not British, she rushed to gather a book printed by the Bibliotheque Nationale about the portraiture of Bernhardt and to show us a paragraph about her tour in Australia, only to show us a quote from Corille Fraser’s book, written in Canberra. I had traveled half the world to the City of Light, to the past of Bernhardt, only to have the place where I was raised offered up to me, the world suddenly seemed as small as a pearl.

I am still waiting for that Film to be made, I hope it is a when more than an if. Yet Madame Bernhardt hangs on my wall, and with it her unwavering stare to remember that by spending oneself is how one becomes rich.

(text and photo: Sandra Leigh Price)