Barely 20, Sarah Bernhardt was then still a promising young actress. Félix Nadar draped her frail silhouette first in black velvet, then in a large, white-wool burnous. The truncated column, a clichéd accessory in photography studios that Nadar rarely used, stands in for a theatre set here. It seems to foreshadow the fate of the woman about whom Cocteau would coin the term "monstre sacré" (literally a "sacred monster," meaning a celebrity who is so beloved by the pople as to be above criticism).