Chapter XXXIV: Last Scene of All 227 (2)

"At first he used arguments and persuasion, and finding that these
failed, he tried force; and then, of course, there was an explosion,
which soon settled the matter, and convinced Mr. David Craigie that he
might go back to the little dull town of Perth as soon as he pleased,
without the little grass-widow. Now she was left in London, sole
mistress of her own fate. She had, besides the cheque given her by her
stepfather, between five and six thousand dollars' worth of various
kinds of jewellery, making her capital, all counted, about ten
thousand dollars--a very considerable portion of which disappeared in
less than one year by a sort of insensible perspiration, which is a
disease very common to the purses of ladies who have never been taught
the value of money."

It was in the early spring of 1842 that Lola set foot in London. Considering the rapidity for those times with which her husband became informed of her next movements, these must have been amazingly open; and it is hard to resist the conclusion that she was deliberately trying to bring about a divorce. She knew that the English law grants no relief to those who come to it both with clean hands. She knew also that so long as her husband neither starved nor beat her, she could not set the law in motion against him. English law, supposed to vindicate the sanctity of marriage, sets a premium on adultery and cruelty: these are the only avenues of escape from unhappy unions into which high-minded men and women may have been betrayed by youthful folly, by over-persuasion, by sentiments they innocently over-estimated. If Lola Gilbert at the age of eighteen had signed a bill for ten pounds, the courts would have annulled the transaction, on the ground that her youth rendered her incapable of appreciating its gravity. As it was, she had signed away her life--a less important thing than property--and our Rhadamanthine law sternly held her to her bargain.

James was not slow to avail himself of the pretext she afforded him. He instituted through his proctors a suit against her for divorce in the Consistory Court of London, to which jurisdiction in all matrimonial causes at that time belonged. Lola, as he probably expected she would do, ignored the proceedings from first to last. The case was heard before Dr. Lushington on 15th December 1842. Mrs. James was accused of misconduct with Mr. Lennox on board the ship _Larkins_, and of subsequently cohabiting with him at the Imperial Hotel, Covent Garden, and in lodgings in St. James's. The court was satisfied with the proofs adduced, and pronounced a divorce _a mensa et toro_. In modern legal language this was a judicial separation. These two people, though they were to live apart, were sentenced never to marry again during the lifetime of each other. It is by such dispositions that the law of England proposes to promote morality and the interests of society.

Both lover and husband disappear from the scene. James rose to the rank of captain, retired from the Indian army in 1856, and died in 1871. He never crossed Lola's path again, and she ever afterwards referred to him with contempt and bitterness. If it was in any vindictive spirit that he divorced her, he would have done well to remember how in former years he had taken advantage of her youth and inexperience. It was a squalid ending to the romantic runaway match. It would be interesting to know with what emotions Captain James heard of his ex-wife's adventures in high places in the years that followed. It must have seemed odd that monarchs should risk their crowns for the charms that he so lightly prized. Perhaps his wonder was not untinged with regret. More likely it might have been written of him as of Lola:--

"Who have loved and ceased to love, forget
That ever they lived in their lives, they say--
Only remember the fever and fret,
And the pain of love that was all his pay."

Mrs. Craigie put on mourning as though her child was dead, and sent out to her friends the customary notifications. The good old Deputy-Adjutant-General alone thought kindly of Lola.

VI

LONDON IN THE 'FORTIES

To a woman in Lola's situation, London in the early 'forties offered every inducement to go to the devil. Between a roaring maelstrom of the coarsest libertinism, on the one hand, and an impregnable barrier of heartless puritanism on the other, her destruction was well-nigh inevitable. The hotchpotch of unorganised humanity that we call Society seldom presented an uglier appearance than it did in the first decade of Victoria's reign. Sir Mulberry Hawk and Pecksniff are types of the two contending forces. Blackguardism was matched against snivelling cant. Luckily, the victory fell to neither. Those were the days of Crockfords, of Vauxhall, of the spunging-house, of public executions turned into popular festivals; when gentlemen of fashion painted policemen pea-green, and beat them till they were senseless; when peers got drunk and the people starved. Opposed to this debauchery was a religion of convention and propriety, narrow, stupid, and un-Christlike--the cult of the correct and the respectable, the fetishes to which Lady Flora Hastings and many another woman were coldly sacrificed.

In spite of Sir Mulberry and Mr. Pecksniff, however, Lola, ex-Mrs. James, had no intention of going under. Her exclusion from society, after her wearisome experiences in India, she probably regarded as no great hardship. Her youth, her sprightliness, and her beauty made her many friends. Some of these as quickly became enemies, when they discovered that a divorced woman is not necessarily for sale. More than one _roue_ vowed vengeance against the girl who, with bursts of laughter and dangerous gusts of anger, rejected the offer of his protection. It was, perhaps, in this way she offended the elegant Lord Ranelagh, who was then swaggering about in the Spanish cloak he had worn in the Carlist Wars. Lola was strong enough to swim in the maelstrom. Independence and adversity brought out the latent force in the character of the "good little thing" of Simla. Instead of looking out for a refuge, she sought a career.

She turned, of course, towards the stage, the one profession in Early Victorian times that offered any promise to an ambitious woman. She took more pains to acquire a knowledge of her art than are deemed necessary by most beautiful aspirants nowadays. She studied under Miss Fanny Kelly, a gifted actress, who had distinguished herself by her efforts to improve the social status of her profession, and who had opened a dramatic school for women adjacent to what is now the Royalty Theatre. Lola describes Miss Kelly as a lady as worthy in the acts of her private life as she was gifted in genius. This opinion was shared by all the contemporaries of the venerable actress. In after years Mr. Gladstone thought fit to recognise her services to the theatre by a royal grant of one hundred and fifty pounds, but the money arrived in time only to be expended on a memorial over her grave in the dismal cemetery at Brompton. Since Lola was a friend of Miss Kelly, she must have been very far from being the depraved character she is represented by some.

With all the goodwill in the world, the experienced mistress could not make an actress of her beautiful pupil, who accordingly determined to approach the stage through a back-door. If talent of the intellectual order was denied her, she could fall back on her physical advantages. She determined to become a dancer. She was instructed for four months by a Spanish professor, and then (so she assures us) underwent a further training at Madrid. It was now that she assumed the name of Lola Montez--so soon to be known throughout Europe. She passed herself off as a Spaniard, partly, no doubt, for professional reasons, and partly to conceal her identity with the wife of Captain James. Society can hardly expect its quarry to step out into the open to be shot at. Her beauty and her dancing so impressed Benjamin Lumley, the experienced director of Her Majesty's Theatre, that it was on his stage that she actually made her first appearance.

The morning papers of Saturday, 3rd June 1843, announced accordingly that between the acts of the opera (_Il Barbiere di Seviglia_), Donna [_sic_] Lola Montez, of the Teatro Real, Seville, would make her first appearance in this country, in the original Spanish dance, "El Olano." Attracted by this advertisement, a critic, who afterwards wrote under the pseudonym of "Q.," called at the theatre, and was presented to the _debutante_. In her he recognised a lady living opposite his lodgings in Grafton Street, Mayfair, who had long been the object of his silent adoration. He dwells on her extreme vivacity, on her brilliancy of conversation, and on her foreign accent, which struck him as assumed. She was persuaded to give a rehearsal for his special benefit.

"At that period," he goes on to say, "her figure was even more
attractive than her face, lovely as the latter was. Lithe and graceful
as a young fawn, every movement that she made seemed instinct with
melody as she prepared to commence the dance. Her dark eyes were
blazing and flashing with excitement, for she felt that I was willing
to admire her. In her _pose_, grace seemed involuntarily to preside
over her limbs and dispose their attitude. Her foot and ankle were
almost faultless. Nadaud, the violinist, drew the bow across his
instrument, and she began to dance. No one who has seen her will
quarrel with me for saying that she was not, and is not, a finished
_danseuse_, but all who have will as certainly agree with me that she
possesses every element which could be required, with careful study in
her youth, to make her eminent in her then vocation. As she swept
round the stage, her slender waist swayed to the music, and her
graceful neck and head bent with it, like a flower that bends with the
impulse given to its stem by the changing and fitful temper of the
wind."[3]

On that eventful June evening, then, manager, critics, not least of all Lola herself, confidently looked forward to a striking success. The house was crowded, and many notabilities were present. There were the King of Hanover, the Queen-Dowager, the Duchess of Kent, and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. There was also Lola's old enemy, my Lord Ranelagh, who with a party of friends occupied one of the two omnibus-boxes--an admirable point from which to examine the ankles and calves of the long-skirted ballet-girls. When the curtain rose in the _entr'acte_, a Moorish chamber was revealed. On either side stood a damsel, gazing expectantly towards the draped entrance at the back of the stage. A moment later and there glided through this a figure enveloped in a mantilla. One of the handmaids snatched away this drapery, and the commanding form of Donna Lola Montez was revealed in all its glory.

"And a lovely picture it is to contemplate! There is before you the
perfection of Spanish beauty--the tall, handsome person, the full,
lustrous eye, the joyous, animated face, and the intensely raven hair.
She is dressed, too, in the brightest of colours: the petticoat is
dappled with flaunting tints of red, yellow, and violet, and its showy
diversities of hue are enforced by the black velvet bodice above,
which confines the bust with an unscrupulous pinch. Presently this
Andalusian _Papagena_ lifts her arms, and the sharp, merry crack of
the castanets is heard. She has commenced one of the merry dances of
her nation, and many a piquant grace does she unfold."[4]

The audience are bewitched, enraptured. The stage is strewn with bouquets. Suddenly from the right omnibus-box comes the surprised exclamation: "Why, it's Betty James!" Lord Ranelagh has recognised the woman who rebuffed him, and hurriedly whispers to his friends. Above the applause from stalls and gallery, there is heard on the stage, at least, a prolonged and ominous hiss. My lord's friends in the opposite box act upon the hint, and the hissing grows louder and more insistent. The body of the audience, knowing nothing about the matter, conclude that the dancer cannot know her business, and presently begin to hiss, too. In ten minutes more the curtain comes down upon her, and Lola's career as a dancer is terminated in England.

Lord Ranelagh had had his revenge. This species of blackguardism was only too common in those days. The notorious Duke of Brunswick that same year had gone with his attorney, Mr. Vallance, and a party of friends, to Covent Garden Theatre, for the express purpose of hooting down an actor, Gregory, who took the part of Faust. He succeeded in his design, and bragged about it afterwards. In Early Victorian times the theatre was completely under the thumb of certain aristocratic sets. The exasperated Lumley was powerless to resist the fiat of these gilded snobs. Lola Montez, they insisted, must never appear on his stage again. He obeyed. The Press was very far from imitating his subserviency. The _Era_ and _Morning Herald_ praised the new _danseuse_ in what seem to us extravagant terms, and deliberately ignored the inglorious _denouement_ of her performance. Indeed, but for the pen of "Q." we might be left to share the surprise expressed at her disappearance by the _Illustrated London News_, which, ironically perhaps, suggested that the votaries of what might be called the classical dance had set their faces against the national.

Lola herself was under no misapprehension as to the cause and authors of her defeat. She wrote to the _Era_ on 13th June, protesting passionately against a report that was being circulated to the effect that she had long been known in London as a disreputable character. She positively asserted that she was a native of Seville, and had never before been in London. She complains of the cruel calumnies that had got abroad concerning her, and says that she has instructed her lawyer to prosecute their utterers. Of course, the greater part of this statement was untrue, but she had her back against the wall, and with their reputation, social and professional, and means of livelihood at stake, few women would have acted otherwise. My own view is that after her affair with Lennox, Lola tried hard "to keep straight," and made powerful enemies in consequence. The alliance of Pecksniff and Sir Mulberry proved too strong for her.

VII

WANDERJAHRE

London, then, was closed to Lola. She was recognised, and for the divorced wife of Lieutenant James there were no prospects of a career. Her defeat determined her to aim higher, not lower, as most women would have done. In the English country towns she would have been quite unknown, and might have earned a modest competence. But her experience of Montrose and Meath did not predispose her towards the provincial atmosphere. Devoting England and its serpent seed to the infernal gods, she took wing to Brussels. So rapidly were her preparations made that when "Q." called the very morning after the "frost" at Her Majesty's at her apartments in Grafton Street, he found her gone--none knew whither. We must feel sorry for our anonymous friend, for it is evident from his confessions that Lola's blue eyes had bored a big hole in his heart. He consoled himself for her loss by writing (I suspect) some of the flattering notices on her performance to which reference has been made.

It is impossible to trace his enchantress's movements in their proper sequence during the next nine or ten months (June 1843 to March 1844). We find her at Brussels, Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw, and St. Petersburg. She reached the Belgian capital practically with an empty purse. She afterwards said[5] that she went there partly because she had not enough money wherewith to go to Paris, partly because she hoped to make her way on to The Hague. She proposed to lay siege to the heart of his Dutch Majesty William II., then a man fifty-one years of age. She had, quite probably, met his son, the Prince of Orange, who was visiting Lord Auckland about the time she was at Simla, and had heard tales in Calcutta about the Dutch Court. The House of Orange has not been fortunate in its domestic relations. It is said that during the last king's first experience of wedlock, the heads of chamberlains often intercepted the books aimed by the Royal spouses at each other, while the whole palace re-echoed with the slamming of doors and the crash of crockery. William II., though not possessed of the reputation of his son and grandson, the celebrated "_Citron_," was known to be on bad terms with his Russian wife, Anna Pavlovna. He seemed to Lola a promising subject for the exercise of her powers of fascination. The design, if she ever really entertained it, was not one that moralists could applaud, but in extenuation it must be urged that Lola's late defeat could not have encouraged her to persevere in the path of virtue. However, the Dutch project came to nothing, and the display of our heroine's statecraft was reserved for another capital and another day.

In Brussels she found herself friendless and penniless. She was reduced to singing in the streets to save herself from starvation--she who only four years before had been borne from the stately Indian Court enthroned on the Viceroy's elephant! Her distress is rather to the credit of her reputation, for it would have been easy enough for so beautiful a woman to have found a wealthy protector in the Belgian capital. She was noticed by a man, whom she believed to be a German, who took her with him to Warsaw. "He spoke many languages," says Lola, "but he was not very well off himself. However, he was very kind, and when we got to Warsaw, managed to get me an engagement at the Opera."[6] I cannot help wishing that Lola had given us some account of a journey that must have been performed in a carriage right across Central Europe from Belgium to Poland.

Warsaw in 1844 must have been as cheerless a spot as any in Europe. The great insurrection of 1831 had been suppressed with ruthless severity by the soldiers of the Tsar, and there was not a family of rank in the city that was not mourning for some one of its members who had passed beyond the ken of its living, into dread Siberia. Order reigned at Warsaw, indeed, in its conqueror's famous phrase, but it was order obtained only with the knout and the bayonet. The Polish language was barely tolerated, the Catholic religion proscribed. Women, half-naked, were publicly flogged for their attachment to their faith, school-boys and school-girls sent to perish beyond the Urals. The secret service ramified through every grade of society. Fathers distrusted their sons, husbands feared to discover in their own wives the tools of the Muscovite Government. To this day Poles are seldom free from the nightmare of the Russian spy. The present writer remembers how, some years ago, at Bern, in the capital of a free republic, a Polish medical man refused, with every symptom of apprehension, to discuss the condition of his country within the longest ear-shot of a third party.

Yet unhappy Warsaw, under the heel of the terrible Paskievich, could be coaxed into a smile by the flashing eyes of the new Andalusian dancer. Her beauty enraptured the Poles, and drew from one of their dramatic critics the following elaborate panegyric:--

"Lola possesses twenty-six of the twenty-seven points on which a
Spanish writer insists as essential to feminine beauty--and the real
connoisseurs among my readers will agree with me when I confess that
blue eyes and black hair appear to me more ravishing than black eyes
and black hair. The points enumerated by the Spanish writer are: three
white--the skin, the teeth, the hands; three black--the eyes,
eye-lashes, and eyebrows; three red--the lips, the cheeks, the nails;
three long--the body, the hair, the hands; three short--the ears, the
teeth, the legs; three broad--the bosom, the forehead, the space
between the eyebrows; three full--the lips, the arms, the calves;
three small--the waist, the hands, the feet; three thin--the fingers,
the hair, the lips. All these perfections are Lola's, except as
regards the colour of her eyes, which I for one, would not wish to
change. Silky hair, rivalling the gloss of the raven's wing, falls in
luxuriant folds down her back; on the slender, delicate neck, whose
whiteness shames the swan's down, rests the beautiful head. How, too,
shall I describe Lola's bosom, if words fail me to describe the
dazzling whiteness of her teeth? What the pencil could not portray,
certainly the pen cannot.

"'Vedeansi accesi entro le gianci belle
Dolci fiamme di rose e di rubini,
E nel ben sen per entro un mar di latte
Tremolando nutar due poma intatte.'

"Lola's little feet hold the just balance between the feet of the
Chinese and French ladies. Her fine, shapely calves are the lowest
rungs of a Jacob's ladder leading to Heaven. She reminds one of the
Venus of Knidos, carved by Praxiteles in the 104th Olympiad. To see
her eyes is to be satisfied that her soul is throned in them.... Her
eyes combine the varying shades of the sixteen varieties of
forget-me-not...."

And so forth, and so on.

It is indisputable that in this, her twenty-sixth year, Lola was extremely beautiful. Her bitterest detractors have never denied her the possession of almost magical loveliness. This was informed by sparkling vivacity, and a force of personality, without which we should never have heard the name of Lola Montez. A human masterpiece of this sort is as much a source of trouble in a community as a priceless diamond. Everyone's cupidity is excited, probity and honour melt away in the fierce heat of temptation. The upright think that here at last is a prize worth the sacrifice of all the standards that have hitherto guided them. St. Anthony, after forty years of sainthood, succumbs--and is glad that he does. Even miserable Poland for a moment forgot her woes when she looked on Lola; and her stern conqueror, the terrible Paskievich, felt a new spring pervading his grim, sixty-year-old frame. He, the master of many legions, he at whose frown a nation paled--why should he not grasp this treasure? Who should say him nay?

I will let Lola tell the story in her own words.

"While Lola Montez was on a visit to Madame Steinkiller the wife of
the principal banker of Poland, the old viceroy sent to ask her
presence at the palace one morning at eleven o'clock. She was assured
by several ladies that it would be neither politic nor safe to refuse
to go; and she did go in Madame Steinkiller's carriage, and heard from
the viceroy a most extraordinary proposition. He offered her the gift
of a splendid country estate, and would load her with diamonds
besides. The poor old man was a comic sight to look upon--unusually
short in stature, and every time he spoke, he threw back his head and
opened his mouth so wide as to expose the artificial gold roof of his
palate. A death's-head making love to a lady could not have been a
more disgusting or horrible sight. These generous gifts were most
respectfully and very decidedly declined. But her refusal to make a
bigger fool of one who was already fool enough was not well received.

[This, I take it, is the only instance of the word fool being applied to one of the ablest, if most ruthless, men Russia has ever produced.]

"In those countries where political tyranny is unrestrained, the
social and domestic tyranny is scarcely less absolute.

"The next day His Majesty's tool, the colonel of the _gendarmes_ and
director of the theatre, called at her hotel to urge the suit of his
master.

"He began by being persuasive and argumentative, and when that availed
nothing, he insinuated threats, when a grand row broke out, and the
madcap ordered him out of her room.

"Now when Lola Montez appeared that night at the theatre, she was
hissed by two or three parties who had evidently been instructed to do
so by the director himself. The same thing occurred the next night;
and when it came again on the third night, Lola Montez, in a rage,
rushed down to the footlights, and declared that those hisses had been
set at her by the director, because she had refused certain gifts
from the old prince, his master. Then came a tremendous shower of
applause from the audience; and the old princess, who was present,
both nodded her head and clapped her hands to the enraged and fiery
Lola.

"Here, then, was a pretty muss. An immense crowd of Poles, who hated
both the prince and the director, escorted her to her lodgings. She
found herself a heroine without expecting it, and indeed without
intending it. In a moment of rage she had told the whole truth,
without stopping to count the cost, and she had unintentionally set
the whole of Warsaw by the ears.

"The hatred which the Poles intensely felt towards the government and
its agents found a convenient opportunity of demonstrating itself, and
in less than twenty-four hours Warsaw was bubbling and raging with the
signs of an incipient revolution. When Lola Montez was apprised of the
fact that her arrest was ordered, she barricaded her door; and when
the police arrived she sat behind it with a pistol in her hand,
declaring that she would certainly shoot the first man dead who should
break in. The police were frightened, or at least they could not agree
among themselves who should be the martyr, and they went off to inform
their masters what a tigress they had to confront, and to consult as
to what should be done. In the meantime, the French Consul gallantly
came forward and claimed Lola Montez as a French subject, which saved
her from immediate arrest; but the order was peremptory that she must
quit Warsaw."

I have no means of verifying this account. Riots were of frequent occurrence in Warsaw during the 'forties, but, thanks to a rigid censorship of the Press, the particulars concerning them have failed to reach us. That the citizens would at once side with any one who for any reason whatsoever was "agin the Government" is not to be doubted, and Lola was quite clever enough to make a slight to her appear as an insult to the Warsaw public. In defending herself with the pistol, she only gave proof of the manlike courage and resolution conspicuous throughout her whole career. As to the cause of the row, one of Lola's recent biographers remarks that if Prince Paskievich had made the offer alleged, it is quite certain that she would have closed with it. It is far from being certain. The Russian Viceroy was definitely repugnant to her, and her subsequent experiences show that she never bestowed herself upon a man whom she could not, or did not, love. She was new, too, to her _role_ of adventuress. Altogether, there is no good reason for doubting that Lola's relation of her experiences in the Polish capital is substantially true.

On the other hand, vanity certainly betrayed her into several deviations from the truth in her reminiscences of St. Petersburg. She went thither, she informs us, upon her expulsion from Poland--an odd refuge! Of her journey in a _caleche_ across the wastes of Lithuania and through the dark forests of Muscovy; of St. Petersburg, still half an Oriental city, where all men below the rank of nobles wore the long beard and caftan of the Asiatic--our _raconteuse_ has nothing to say. She introduces us at once to the Tsar and the innermost arcanum of his Court.

"Nicholas was as amiable and accomplished in private life as he was
great, stern, and inflexible as a monarch. He was the strongest
pattern of a monarch of this age, and I see no promise of his equal,
either in the incumbents or the heirs-apparent of the other thrones of
Europe."

Lola, we see, speaks as an authority on crowned heads. In her estimate of Nicholas I. she seems to have forgotten the republican principles she generally professed. The Tsar was, no doubt, the most commanding figure of his time, and Russia's influence in the counsels of Europe has never since had as much weight as in the earlier part of his reign. His fine proportions, as much as his strength of character, probably excited Lola's admiration, and blinded her to defects, physical and temperamental, which did not escape the notice of more keen-eyed critics. She did not see that the autocrat's majestic demeanour was a pose, that his stern, hawk-like glance was deliberately cultivated, and that he had only three expressions of countenance, all put on at will. Horace Vernet, who knew Nicholas well, was firmly convinced that he was not wholly sane. As to his amiability in private life, he is said to have been, like many tyrants, a good husband, and he often condescended to take tea with his nurse, "a decent Scotch body." It was to this respectable exile that the members of the imperial family owed that fluent and colloquial English, which often as much astonished as gratified our countrymen. It is recorded that one of the Grand Dukes genially accosted the British chaplain at St. Petersburg with the enquiry: "God damn your eyes, and how the devil are you?"--language, very properly remarks an Early Victorian writer, which no man on earth had the right to address to a person in Holy Orders.

The Tsar himself was better bred. His relations with Mademoiselle Montez were characterized by politeness and liberality. Not only he, but his right-hand man, the astute Livonian, Benkendorf, held the lady's political acumen in high esteem. While she and the Emperor and the Minister of the Interior were in a somewhat private chat about vexatious matters connected with Caucasia, airily relates Lola, a humorous episode occurred.

"It was suddenly announced that the superior officers of the Caucasian
army were without, desiring audience. The very subject of the previous
conversation rendered it desirable that Lola Montez should not be seen
in conference with the Emperor and the Minister of the Interior; so
she was thrust into a closet, and the door locked. The conference
between the officers and the Emperor was short but stormy. Nicholas
got into a towering rage. It seemed to the imprisoned Lola that there
was a whirlwind outside; and womanly curiosity to hear what it was
about [did she then understand Russian?], joined with the great
difficulty of keeping from coughing, made her position a strangely
embarrassing one. But the worst of it was, in the midst of this grand
quarrel the parties all went out of the room, and forgot Lola Montez,
who was locked up in the closet. For a whole hour she was kept in this
durance vile, reflecting upon the somewhat confined and cramping
honours she was receiving from Royalty, when the Emperor, who seems to
have come to himself before Count Benkendorf did, came running back
out of breath, and unlocked the door, and not only begged pardon for
his forgetfulness, in a manner which only a man of his accomplished
address could do, but presented the victim with a thousand roubles,
saying laughingly: 'I have made up my mind whenever I imprison any of
my subjects unjustly, I will pay them for their time and suffering.'
And Lola Montez answered him: 'Ah, sire, I am afraid that rule will
make a poor man of you.' He laughed heartily, and replied: 'Well, I am
happy in being able to settle with you, anyhow.'"

Lola makes here a rather heavy draft on the reader's credulity. However, from the nice things she has to say about His Imperial Majesty, it is clear that she had been admitted at one time or another to his presence. Had not Nicholas I. been a pattern of the domestic virtues, we might have attributed his embarrassment at Lola's being discovered in his closet, and the donation of the thousand roubles, to reasons entirely unconnected with the Caucasus. After all, Lola may have argued, if she had been courted by a king, why should she not have been consulted by an emperor?

Before or after her visit to St. Petersburg the dancer saw the Tsar at Berlin. Mounted on a fiery Cordovan barb, she was among the spectators at a review given by King Frederick William in honour of his imperial guest. The horse was scared by the firing, and bolted, carrying its rider straight into the midst of the Royal party. Lola was not sorry to find herself in such company, but a _gendarme_ struck at her horse and endeavoured to drive it away. An insult of this sort Lola was the last woman to tolerate. Raising her whip, she slashed the policeman across the face. Out of respect for the Royal party, the incident was allowed to end there, for the moment; but the next day the dancer was waited upon with a summons. She instantly tore the document to pieces, and threw them into the face of the process-server. Such contempt for the law might have been attended with very serious consequences, but Lola went, as a matter of fact, scot-free. Perhaps her friends in high places interceded for her; but it is hard to believe, as she afterwards declared, that the _gendarme_ came to her lodgings to sue for her pardon.[7] In every capital of Europe it soon became known that the beautiful Spanish dancer was able and prepared to defend herself against the most determined antagonists of either sex.

But a nobler quarry than Tsar and Viceroy was now to fall before the shafts from Lola's eyes.

VIII

FRANZ LISZT

In the year 1844 Franz Liszt may be considered to have reached the zenith of his fame. In the two-and-twenty years that had elapsed since his first triumph, when a lad of eleven, at Vienna, the young Hungarian had taken pride of place before all the pianists of his day. The crown still rested securely on his brow, despite the formidable rivalry of Thalberg. Paris, London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Rome, and Milan had in turn felt his spell, and rapturously acclaimed him the king of melody. Honours and wealth poured in upon him. The magnates of his native land--the proudest of all aristocracies--presented him with a sword of honour. The monarchs of Europe publicly recognised the lofty genius of one whom they knew to be no friend of theirs. For Liszt, the devotee of later years, glowed then with generous enthusiasm for freedom, political and religious. Frederick William sent him diamonds, and he pitched them into the wings; the Tsar found him unabashed and contemptuous; the Kings of Bavaria and Hanover he scorned to invite to his concerts; before Isabel II. he refused to play at all, because Spanish Court etiquette forbade his personal introduction to her. The Catholic Church, he wrote, knew only curse and ban. He was the friend of Lamennais. The bourgeois--the Philistine, as we should call him now--he held in greater abhorrence even than the tyrant. In Louis Philippe he saw bourgeoisie enthroned. Yet the King of the French courted the man whose empire was more stable than his own. He reminded the pianist of a former meeting when the one was but a boy, and the other only Duke of Orleans. "Much has changed since then," said the Citizen-King. "Yes, sire, but not for the better!" bluntly replied the artist.

In 1844 Europe was more liberal in some respects than America is to-day. Honours and applause were not denied to Liszt because he openly transgressed the sex conventions. Since 1835 his life had been shared by the beautiful Comtesse d'Agoult, the would-be rival, under the name "Daniel Stern," of the more celebrated Georges Sand. Of this union were born three children, one of whom became the wife of Richard Wagner. Madame d'Agoult was a Romanticist, and a very typical figure of her time and circle. She was an interesting woman, and tried hard to be more interesting still. But it was no affectation of passion that led her to abandon home, husband, and position, to throw herself into the pianist's arms at Basle. She was deeply in love with him; but she wished to be more than a wife, more than a lover: she aspired to be his muse. Liszt, however, needed no inspiration from without. In an oft-quoted phrase, he said that the Dantes created the Beatrices; "the genuine die when they are eighteen years old." The man chafed more and more under the ties that bound him. He had no wish to abandon the mother of his children, but his genius demanded to be unfettered. He wandered over Europe, sad and bitter at heart, but heaping up his laurels. The Comtesse and the children stayed in Paris, or at the villa Liszt had rented on the beautiful islet of Nonnenwerth, in the shadow of "the castled crag of Drachenfels." There he joined them from time to time, while unable to resist the conclusion that he and she must part. The evolution of their temperaments and intellects was in rapidly diverging directions. He was no longer willing to throw himself out of the window at her bidding as he had publicly declared himself to be four years before. The cord that bound them was frayed and fretted to a thread.

At Dresden fate threw Liszt and Lola Montez across each other's path. The intense, artistic nature of the man cried out with joy at the glorious beauty of the woman. Her inextinguishable vivacity, her almost masculine boldness, her frank and splendid animalism enraptured the musician, now sick to death of soulful conversations and the sentimentalities of Romanticism. It was the old struggle for the possession of the artist, waged by Silvia and Gioconda. Lola was beautiful as a tigress. To Liszt she could surrender herself proudly. She was one of those erotic women, whose passion is excited rather by a man's mental attributes than by his physical advantages. Intellect she adored. Her own strong nature could yield only to a stronger. We have heard how she spoke of Nicholas I.; we shall find this almost sensuous craving for force of personality in her subsequent relations. To her, the pianist must have been a new revelation of manhood. Her life so far had brought her in contact with Indian officers and civilians, a few men about town, and (for a few hours) with one or more potentates. Now she met a great man with a beautiful soul. She had heard the stories current of Liszt's abnegation, his boundless generosity, his pride in his vocation. In her, too, he recognised a haughty intolerance of patronage, a contempt for those in high places, such as he had himself exhibited. Both could laugh over the slights to which they had subjected the King of Prussia, and their demeanour in presence of the mighty Tsar. It is likely enough that their conversation may have begun in some such fashion; how their love ripened we are left to guess. On this episode in her history Lola exhibits unwonted reserve. She mentions meeting Liszt at Dresden, and speaks of the furore he created. As to their love passages, she is silent. I like to think that this was a secret she held sacred, that her love for the great musician had in it something fresh and noble, which distinguished it from the emotions excited in her by all other men. Women of many attachments are prone to idealise one among them.

The world was bound by no such scruples. The rumour ran from capital to capital that Liszt was enthralled by the Andalusian. It reached the Comtesse d'Agoult in her retreat at Nonnenwerth. She penned a fierce, reproachful letter. Liszt, in Calypso's grotto at Dresden, answered proudly and coldly. The Comtesse wrote, announcing the end of their relations. Most men are frightened at the abrupt termination of a love affair of which they have long been heartily weary. Liszt gave the Comtesse time to think it over. She made no further overtures, expecting that he would come to kneel at her feet. He did not. The lady went to Paris, and they never met again.

The artist at least owed Lola a service, since she had been the unwitting instrument of a rupture so long desired by him. But he valued his newly-recovered freedom too highly to jeopardise it by linking his life again with a woman's. His love affair with Lola may have been simply an infatuation. Lucio would soon have tired of Gioconda had he lived with her. We hardly know how this brief love story began; we are quite in the dark as to how it ended. A report was current that the two travelled together from Dresden to Paris, where both appeared in the spring of '44. We do not hear that they were seen together in the French capital, so the adieux may already have been exchanged. Liszt stayed there but a few weeks, and then started on a tour through the French departments. Then he crossed the Pyrenees, and pushed as far south as Gibraltar. Less than three years later he was in the toils of a third woman--the Princess Zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, with whom his relations endured twelve years. It is noteworthy that he and Lola turned their thoughts from love to religion almost at the same time, though half a world lay between them.

Of the third actor in this little drama it is hardly within my province to speak. The Comtesse d'Agoult found consolation in the care of her children and in those wider interests of which she never tired. She ardently espoused the cause of the Revolution in 1848. More fortunate than her old lover, she never lost the sane and generous sympathies of her youth. You may read her _Souvenirs_, published at Paris the year after her death (1877). Liszt long survived the women who had loved him--not a fate that either of them would have envied him.

IX

AT THE BANQUET OF THE IMMORTALS

Lola's first appearance in Paris was, like her _debut_ at Her Majesty's, a fiasco. Thanks, no doubt, to her reputation for beauty and audacity, she secured an engagement at the Opera, then under the management of Leon Pillet. The power behind the throne was the great Madame Stoltz, who some years later was to be hooted off the stage by a hostile clique just as Lola had been nine months before. At that time, however, no one dreamed of a revolt against the all-powerful _cantatrice_ whose favour the _danseuse_ was fortunate to procure. The great Stoltz looked best and was luckiest in men's parts, and therefore saw no rival in the now famous "Andalouse."

Lola, accordingly, made her bow to the Parisian public on Saturday, 30th March 1844, in _Il Lazzarone_, an opera in two acts by Halevy. Her audience was more fastidious than the playgoers of Dresden and Warsaw. Her beauty ravished them, but in her dancing they saw little merit. Seeing this, Lola made a characteristic bid for their favour. Her satin shoe had slipped off. Seizing it, she threw it with one of her superb gestures into the boxes, where it was pounced upon and brandished as a precious relic by a gentleman of fashion. The manoeuvre seems to have succeeded in its object, for the _Constitutionnel_ next morning found it necessary to warn young dancers against the danger of factitious applause, while "abstaining from criticising too severely a pretty woman who had not had time to study Parisian tastes." Theophile Gautier was less gallant:--

"We are reluctant," he writes, "to speak of Lola Montes, who reminds
us by her Christian name of one of the prettiest women of Granada, and
by her surname of the man who excited in us the most powerful dramatic
emotions we have ever experienced--Montes, the most illustrious
_espada_ of Spain. The only thing Andalusian about Mlle. Lola Montes
is a pair of magnificent black eyes. She gabbles Spanish very
indifferently, French hardly at all, and English passably [_sic_].
Which is her country? That is the question. We may say that Mlle. Lola
has a little foot and pretty legs. Her use of these is another matter.
The curiosity excited by her adventures with the northern police, and
her conversations, _a coups de cravache_, with the Prussian _gens
d'armes_, has not been satisfied, it must be admitted. Mlle. Lola
Montes is certainly inferior to Dolores Serrai, who has, at least, the
advantage of being a real Spaniard, and redeems her imperfections as a
dancer by a voluptuous _abandon_, and an admirable fire and precision
of rhythm. We suspect, after the recital of her equestrian exploits,
that Mlle. Lola is more at home in the saddle than on the boards."

As at Her Majesty's, so at the Opera. Lola's first appearance was her last. For the rest of the year, as far as I can learn, she was out of an engagement. She had, no doubt, made some money during her German and Russian tour, and Liszt would not have forgotten her when he started on his southern tour at the end of April.

If her association with him had begotten in Lola Montez a thirst for wit and genius, she had every chance of slaking it in Paris. There were giants on the earth in those days, and they were all gathered together on the banks of the Seine. It is not too much to say that since the Medici ruled in Florence, no capital has boasted so brilliant an assemblage of men of genius as did Paris under the paternal government of July. In the year '44, Victor Hugo, attended by a score of minor poets, daily appeared on his balcony to acknowledge the homage of the public; Lamartine was dividing his attention between politics and literature. Alfred de Musset was wrecking his constitution by spasms of debauchery. Balzac was dodging his creditors, playing truant from the National Guard, and finding time to write his "Comedie Humaine"; Theophile Gautier, a man of thirty-three, if he had not yet received the full meed of his genius, was already well known and widely appreciated. Alexandre Dumas had long since become a national institution, and his son was looking out for copy among the ladies of the _demi-monde_. Delphine Gay was writing her brilliant "Lettres Parisiennes" for her husband's newspaper. The Salon was still rejecting the masterpieces of Delacroix, but Vernet was painting the ceiling of the Palais Bourbon. Auber, though past the prime of life, had not yet scored his greatest success. Paris was like Athens in the age of Pericles.

Life was really worth living then, when Louis Phillippe was king. He was an honest, kindly-natured man, this pear-headed potentate, who reigned, "comme la corniche regne autour d'un plafond." He was the king of the _bourgeois_, and he looked it every inch, with his white felt hat and respectable umbrella; but in the calm sunshine of his reign the arts flourished and the world was gay. Those days before the Revolution remind us of that strange picture in our National Gallery, "The Eve of the Deluge." Paris, as the old stagers regretfully assure us, was Paris then, and not the caravanserai of all the nations of the world. The good Americans who died then, had they gone to Paris, would have thought they had reached the wrong destination. Men of Pontus and Asia had not then made the French capital their own. The invasion of the Barbarians, says Gustave Claudin, took place in 1848. They came, not conducted by Attila, but by the newly-constructed railways. As these strangers had plenty of money to spend, they naturally sought the most fashionable quarters.

"The true Parisians disappeared in the crowd, and knew not where to
find themselves. In the evening, the restaurants where they used to
dine, the stalls and boxes where they used to assist at the opera and
the play, were taken by assault by cohorts of sightseers wishing to
steep themselves up to the neck in _la vie Parisienne_."

The tide of the invasion has never diminished in volume, and the true Parisian has become extinct.

In the year 1844 the fine flower of Parisian society was in undisputed possession of the Boulevard--the quarter between the Opera and the Rue Drouot.

"By virtue of a selection which no one contested," says the author
just quoted, "nobody was tolerated there who could not lay claim to
some sort of distinction or originality. There seemed to exist a kind
of invisible moral barrier, closing this area against the mediocre,
the insipid, and the insignificant, who passed by, but did not linger,
knowing that their place was not there."

The headquarters of the noble company of the Boulevard was the famous Cafe de Paris, at the corner of the Rue Taitbout. Dumas, Balzac, and Alfred de Musset were to be seen there twice or thrice a week; the eccentric Lord Seymour, founder of the French Jockey Club, had his own table there. Lola, doubtless, often tasted the unsurpassed _cuisine_ of this celebrated restaurant, for she soon penetrated into the circle of the Olympians, and was presented with the freedom of the Boulevard.

She met Claudin (who indeed knew everybody).

"Lola Montez," he says, "was an enchantress. There was about her
something provoking and voluptuous which drew you. Her skin was white,
her wavy hair like the tendrils of the woodbine, her eyes tameless and
wild, her mouth like a budding pomegranate. Add to that a dashing
figure, charming feet, and perfect grace. Unluckily," the notice
concludes, "as a dancer she had no talent."

That multiple personality whom Vandam embodies in "An Englishman in Paris" admits that Lola was naturally graceful, that her gait and carriage were those of a duchess. When he goes on to say that her wit was that of a pot-house, I seem to detect one of his not infrequent lapses from the truth. Only three years had elapsed since Lola had shone in Court circles in India, where the social atmosphere was not that of a bar-room; and since then she had been wandering about in countries where her ignorance of the language must have left her manner of speech and modes of thought almost unaffected. Pot-house wit would not have fascinated Liszt, nor the fastidious Louis of Bavaria. "Men of far higher intellectual attainments than mine, and familiar with very good society," admits our nebulous chronicler,[8] "raved and kept raving about her."

Dumas, he says in another place, was as much smitten with her as her other admirers. This, of course, is no guarantee of her refinement, for the genial Creole had the reputation of not being over nice in his attachments and amours. He was then in the prime of life, and may be considered to have just reached the zenith of his fame by the publication of "Les Trois Mousquetaires," "Monte Cristo," and "La Reine Margot" (1844-5). Two years before he had formally and legally married Mademoiselle Ida Ferrier--this step, so inconsistent with his temperament and mode of life, having resulted from his own reckless disregard of the conventions. The lady had fascinated him while she was interpreting a _role_ of his creation at the Porte-St.-Martin. It did not strike him that it would be irregular to take her with him to a ball given by his patron, the Duke of Orleans, and he straightway did so. "Of course, my dear Dumas," said His Highness affably, "it is only your _wife_ that you would think of presenting to me." Poor Alexandre, the lover of all women and none in particular, was hoisted with his own petard. A prince's hints, above all when he is your patron and publisher, are commands. Dumas was led to the altar, like a sheep to the slaughter, by the charming Ida. Chateaubriand supported the bridegroom through the ordeal. However the chains of matrimony sat lightly on the irrepressible _romancier_. Madame Dumas soon after departed for Florence, greatly to the relief of her spouse. He was living, at the time of Lola's visit to Paris, at the Villa Medicis at St. Germain. There he could superintend the building of his palace of Monte Cristo, on the road to Marly, a part of which, with imperturbable _sang-froid_, he actually raised on the land belonging to a neighbour, without so much as a "by your leave." This ambitious residence emptied Dumas's pockets of the little money that the ladies he loved had left in them.

Alexandre, of course, fell passionately in love with Lola Montez. We need no written assurance of that. We read that he told her that she had acted "like a gentleman" in her treatment of Frederick William's policemen, and with what far-fetched compliments he followed up this commendation it is easy to imagine. There were certain resemblances in their temperaments, though the woman was far the stronger. Posterity is never likely to agree on an estimate of Dumas's character. Theodore de Banville thought him a truly great man.