SOURCE: "Sarah Bernhardt," in Fantasies and Impromptus, E. P. Dutton & Company, 1923, pp. 33-52.

In the following essay, Agate offers a critical assessment of Bernhardt's body of work on the occasion of her death.

I

For some whose business it is to write of the theatre it is as though Beauty had veiled her face; so determinate, so utterly beyond repair is the sense of loss. It is not that the stock of loveliness is diminished for a time, as the blossoming earth is subdued by winter: there will be other flowers, but the rose is gone for ever. Those who would charge me here with phrase-making can have known nothing of Bernhardt; she can have meant little to them, and their praise was lip-service. To them such a line as—

Elle avait un petit diadème en dentelle
    d'argent

brings up no picture the like of which they...