The Night a Twelve-Year-Old American Heiress Watched Joan of Arc Burn
From the unpublished diaries of Alberta Sturges, Paris, January 1890
Her aunt was ill. That was all. A small domestic fact — a headache, perhaps, or a chill — and so the theatre ticket passed to the next person in the household who could use it.
That person was Alberta Sturges, twelve years old, American, living in Paris with her family in the winter of 1890. And the performance she was sent to see was Jeanne d’Arc, starring Sarah Bernhardt.
Alberta had been keeping a diary since she was ten years old, writing in a mixture of English and French, in the cramped and earnest hand of a child who understood, even then, that things were worth recording.
She was not from a famous family. She was not herself famous. She was a bright, observant girl growing up between London, Paris, New York and Scotland — attending concerts, visiting Versailles, watching the illuminations on Regent Street for the silver wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales, noting the death of Emperor Frederick of Germany (”at 11 o’clock, it was very sad”), going to hear the child prodigy Otto Hegner play piano (”He is eleven years of age, and he looks so happy”). She went horseback riding every week on the Avenue d’Iena on a horse called Brilliant. She had her portrait painted for a salon. She read everything she could get her hands on.
January 1890 found her at 50 Avenue d’Iena, Paris, newly moved in, contentedly skating on the stone terrace in the garden and writing long letters to her mother in America. It was a full and happy life. But nothing in it had prepared her for the evening of January 21st.
