PEOPLES

173 XXVI. LOLA IN SEARCH OF A HOME 177 XXVII. A SECOND EXPERIMENT IN MATRIMONY 181 XXVIII. WESTWARD HO! 193 XXIX. IN THE TRAIL OF THE ARGONAUTS 199 XXX. IN AUSTRALIA 205 XXXI. LOLA AS A LECTURER 213 XXXII. A LAST VISIT TO ENGLAND 219 XXXIII. THE MAGDALEN 223 XXXIV. LAST SCENE OF ALL 227   SOURCES OF INFORMATION 234

 

 

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ILLUSTRATIONS

LOLA MONTEZ, COUNTESS OF LANDSFELD	Frontispiece
NICHOLAS I.	To face page	54
FRANZ LISZT	"	60
ALEXANDRE DUMAS, SENIOR	"	70
LOUIS OF BAVARIA, WHEN ELECTORAL PRINCE	"	112
LOUIS I, KING OF BAVARIA	"	144
LOLA MONTEZ (AFTER JULES LAURE)	"	194

 

 

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LOLA MONTEZ
AN ADVENTURESS OF THE ’FORTIES

 

I

CHILDHOOD

The year 1818 was, on the whole, a good starting-point in life for people with a taste and capacity for adventure. This was not suspected by those already born. They looked forward, after the tempest that had so lately ravaged Europe, to a golden age of slippered ease and general stagnation. The volcanoes, they hoped, were all spent. “We have slumbered seven years, let us forget this ugly dream,” complacently observed a German prince on resuming possession of his dominions; and “the old, blind, mad, despised, and dying king’s” worthy regent expressed the same confidence when he gave the motto, “A sign of better times,” to an order founded in this particular year. Yet the child that thus with royal encouragement began life in England at that time learned before he could toddle to tremble at the mysterious name of “Boney,” and later on would thrill with fear, delight, and horror at his nurse’s recital of the atrocities and final glorious undoing of that terrific ogre. Presently he would meet in his walks abroad, red-coated, bewhiskered veterans who had met the monster face to face (or said they had); who would recount stories of decapitated kings, dreadful uprisings, and threatened invasions; who had lost a leg or an arm or an eye at Waterloo or Salamanca; which victories (they assured him) were mainly due to their individual valour and generalship. As the child grew older he would begin to make a coherent story out of these strange happenings: he would realise through what a period of storm and stress the world had passed immediately before his advent. He would listen eagerly at his father’s table to more trustworthy relations of the great battles by men whose share in them his country was proud to acknowledge. Waterloo, Trafalgar, the Nile, would be fought over again in the school playground.