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

[ADSGarson O'Toole]

The Quote Investigator website now has two entries on this topic, and
Chris Waigl is acknowledged.

An Empty Carriage Drove Up To the Théâtre Français and Sarah Bernhardt
Alighted From It
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/04/29/empty/

An Empty Taxi Arrived and Clement Attlee Stepped Out of It
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/04/30/empty-taxi/

The complex French quotation has not yet been added to the Bernhardt
article. I wish I could find a simpler French statement circa 1878.
Garson

On Sat, Apr 29, 2017 at 5:51 PM, Chris Waigl <chris at lascribe.net> wrote:
> 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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