Levels of Life Read Online Free PDF

an officer of the Commune, who was rightly suspicious of the stiffness of my leg. He charged me with carrying a concealed weapon. I immediately acknowledged the offence, but informed him that I was returning to visit my sick father, and that I only sought peace. Rather to my surprise, he allowed me to continue on my journey.’
    Now the story did seem to have ended, but its point eluded her.
    ‘And how was your father?’
    ‘Oh, he was much restored by the time I reached Somerby. Thank you for your consideration. The point of the story – well, to repeat what I told the fellow who arrested me, in Paris I only seek peace.’
    She looked at him, at this enormous, uniformed, moustachioed, francophone Englishman, whose thin, piercing voice came strangely out of a vast body. And since she lived her life amid complication and artifice, simplicity always moved her.
    ‘I am touched, Capitaine Fred. But – how can I put it? I am myself not yet ready for a quiet life.’
    Now he was embarrassed. Had she taken his remark amiss?
    ‘You will come back tomorrow,’ said Sarah Bernhardt.
    ‘I shall come back tomorrow,’ replied Fred Burnaby, giving her a farewell of his own devising: a military self-dismissal combined with a bohemian’s eager promise to return.
     
    The women she played were passionate, exotic, operatic – literally so. She created Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias before Verdi reimagined it; and was Sardou’s La Tosca, a role now only known in Puccini’s version. She was operatic without needing music. She had a ménage of lovers and a menagerie of animals. The lovers seemed to get on with one another, perhaps because there was safety in numbers; also because she was good at turning them into friends. She once said that if she died prematurely, her admirers would still continue to gather regularly at her house. This was probably true.
    Her menagerie had begun humbly enough, when she was a girl, with a pair of goats and a blackbird. Later, the wildlife became wilder. On tour in England, she bought a cheetah, seven chameleons and a wolf dog in Liverpool. There was Darwin the monkey, Hernani II the lion cub, and dogs called Cassis and Vermouth. In New Orleans she bought an alligator which reacted to its French diet of milk and champagne by dying. She also had a boa constrictor which ate sofa cushions and had to be shot – by Sarah herself.
    Fred Burnaby was not abashed by such a creature.
     
    The next evening, he watched her performance, came to her dressing room, and saw many of the same faces. He made sure to pay proper attention to Mme Guérard: having been in foreign courts before, he knew to recognise the power behind the throne. Soon – much sooner than the fiercest optimism could have imagined – she came across, took Burnaby’s arm, and bade her coterie goodnight. As the three of them left, the scrimmage of Parisian dandies took care not to appear put out. Well, perhaps they weren’t.
    They rode in her carriage to her house in the rue Fortuny. The table was laid, the champagne on ice, and through a half-open door Fred glimpsed the corner of an enormous cane bed. Mme Guérard retired. If there were servants, he did not see them; if there were parrots or lion cubs around, he did not hear them. He heard only her voice, which had the clarity and range of a musical instrument yet to be invented.
    He told her of his travels, his military skirmishing, his balloon adventures. He spoke of his ambition to fly across the German Ocean.
    ‘Why not the Channel?’ she asked, almost as if it were uncivil of him, wanting to fly in any direction other than towards her.
    ‘That has also been my ambition. But the winds are the problem, ma’am.’
    ‘Sarah.’
    ‘Madame Sarah.’ Stolidly, he continued: ‘The fact of the matter is, that if you take off from almost anywhere in southern England, you generally find yourself landing in Essex.’
    ‘What is this Essex?’
    ‘You do not need to know. It is not exotic,