[Ads-l] Request help with French: Quote: An empty carriage drove up to the stage door and Sarah Bernhardt alighted

[Chris Waigl]

OK, this clarifies it. I'm not used to the style of the Revue Bleue and
certainly don't get half of the allusions to the literary and theatre
gossip of late 1870s Paris even with the help of Google, but the snippet
is from a gossipy review of Sarah Bernhardt's, uh, memoir? text? "Dans
les nuages", the fictionalized adventures of a chair attached to a
balloon, which she wrote immediately after traveling herself in a
balloon. She apparently got very interested in balloons when she
encountered them around the 1878 Exposition Universelle. She describes
the adventure in her memoirs (in English here:
https://books.google.com/books?id=5VAnwxiuxN4C&pg=PA283&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
), and it's an entertaining read. (Perrin was a painter and her lover,
Clairin another painter of the same artistic/theatre circle, and Godard
was the balloon navigator.) Anyhow, the jocular bit about arriving in an
empty carriage was not just about her being airy and light, but the
whole idea of her being attracted to flying in a balloon. (The memoir
excerpt also claims that she kept her intention to take a balloon trip
away from the press as she didn't want her family to dissuade her, or
possibly be mobbed -- she must have been quite a sensation at the time.
So the assurance of the Revue Bleue writer that yes, he saw it himself
and she really went up there, make sense.)

Chris


On 4/29/17 12:57 PM, ADSGarson O'Toole wrote:
> Thanks very much for your help Chris. The Google Books text should be
> completely visible. If you click on the segment that is initially
> displayed then GB should show the entire page.
> Garson

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