BERNHARDT’S SWOLLEN KNEE.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VI, Issue 38, 20 September 1890, Page 16

BERNHARDT’S SWOLLEN KNEE.

It is distressing that some more romantic explanation of Sarah Bernbaidt’s illness lias not been foi thconiing. She had been suffering from an attack of swollen knee and no attempt has been made to cast a glamour over the fact. Pending her London engagement the physicians have forbidden her to move, and to that end the high-strung Sarah has to be strapped to her bed and her disabled member put in a plaster cast. To a correspondent she writes : ‘ I was never designed for a Christian. A little more kneeling would.end my earthly career.’ From the same source it is learned that she spent whole weeks in the little parish churches watching the acolytes about the altar, studying the attitudes of nuns and charity children about the chancel, and later appropriating such suggestions as the life size paintings of knights in armour, soldiers and warriors in the time of Pontius Pilate, hung in the great cathedrals, afforded. As Joan of Arc she had a great deal of kneeling to get through, and having to be done in heavy armour was more than religiously trying. Joan has escaped the deadly peril of the mimic wars ; she has come unscathed through hand-to-hand combats, and lias braved the brutal savagery of the English men-of-war only to fall beneath a swollen knee-cap. The heroine’s fondness for a good stage picture will induce Mme. Bernhardt to suffer and sacrifice body and bone. ‘ Housemaid’s knees.’ it seems, is not peculiar to the stage. Both Mrs Langtry and Mrs Kendal were almost forced to succumb to the malady during the run of ‘ Lady Clancarty,’ and when Ellen Terry played ‘ Marguerite’ and crept round the church door on all fours she was forced to arnica baths and the use of buckskin knee-caps. Even the beauteous Albani as the heroine of Gonoud’s opera wore a red rash on her knees during her stay in New York, and after the opera drove to the hotel in a cab with her mother, her limbs as rigidly outstretched as the driver of a four-in-hand.