The book follows the dizzying career and stormy personal life of the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt. Among her friends were the greatest personalities of the French intellectual elite of the time, such as Théophile Gautier, Gustave Doré and Victor Hugo. She sided with Émile Zola in the Dreyfus Affair, gave performances for soldiers at the front during the First World War, and dictated the rules of social life until her death. The story of this world-famous legend is also a colorful history of the golden era of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.