Love Quote by Sarah Bernhardt

Bernhardt’s little gush about cricket is doing more than complimenting a sport; it’s a quick, theatrical bow to England as a brand. “So very English” is the operative phrase: less a description than a shortcut to a whole package of associations - restraint, ritual, class codes, weather, lawns, empire. Cricket isn’t just a game in this line; it’s a national costume.

Coming from Sarah Bernhardt, the famed French actress who toured internationally and cultivated celebrity before “celebrity” was a modern industry, the remark reads as savvy cultural diplomacy. Praise the local obsession, and you flatter the audience without sounding like you’re trying. The “I do love” has the cadence of a performer leaning into a role: a touch of exaggeration, a knowing smile. She’s not arguing that cricket is objectively superior; she’s admiring the way a society stages itself through its leisure.

The subtext also carries a faint, delicious ambiguity. “So very English” can be sincere and lightly barbed at once: admiration for a tradition so committed to formality it can make even competition feel like etiquette. For a French artist from a rival national tradition - one steeped in different ideas of spectacle and passion - cricket’s slowness and ceremony would register as both charming and slightly absurd. That tension is why the line works. It turns cultural difference into a compliment that still leaves room for an actress’s favorite tool: a wink.