A short, theatrical fictional portrait of Sarah Bernhardt by Françoise Sagan, written as an intimate act of literary ventriloquism.

Sagan imagines Bernhardt from the inside: proud, dramatic, vain, wounded, amused by herself, alert to money, admiration, insult, stagecraft, beauty, and the uses of scandal. 

Very much one for the Sagan shelf if you know and love her, but also for readers interested in theatre, women artists, celebrity before celebrity, and the cultivated drama of public life. Bernhardt appears here not as a museum figure but as someone alive to appetite, humiliation, ambition and glamour — a woman turning herself into an event before modern fame had quite learned its own machinery.

Elegant, slightly camp, sharp around the edges, and much more interesting than a plain “life of” treatment would have been.

First UK edition published by Macmillan London in 1989. Originally published in France as Sarah Bernhardt: Le rire incassable in 1987; this English translation first published in the US by Seaver Books / Henry Holt in 1988. Good second-hand hardback condition, with light handling, mild page toning.