Petersburg, now at New York, now at San Francisco, now at Sydney. She crammed enough experience into a career of forty-two years to have surfeited a centenarian. She had her moments of supreme exaltation, of exquisite felicity. Her vicissitudes were glorious and sordid. She was presented by a king to his whole court as his best friend; she was dragged to a London police-station on a charge of felony. But in prosperity she never lost her head, and in adversity she never lost her courage.
A splendid animal, always doing what she wished to do; a natural pagan in her delight in life and love and danger—she cherished all her life an unaccountable fondness for the most conventional puritanical forms of Christianity, dying at last in the bosom of the Protestant Church, with sentiments of self-abasement and contrition that would have done credit to a Magdalen or Pelagia.
In my sympathy with this fascinating woman, it is possible that I have exaggerated the importance of her rôle; probable, also, that I have digressed too freely into reflections on her motives and on the forces with which she had to contend. Those who prefer a bare recital of the facts of her career, I refer at once to the admirable epitome to be found in the “Dictionary of National Biography.” Here I have not hesitated to include all that seemed to me to throw light on the subject of my sketch, on the people around her, and on the influences that shaped her destiny.
Edmund B. d’Auvergne.
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 |
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. For the best part of his life he might expect to have as contemporaries, men who had seen Napoleon with their own eyes, and shaken Nelson by his one hand—men who had seen thrones that seemed as stable as the everlasting hills come crashing down, to be pieced together with a cement of blood and gunpowder. How often the boy, or, as in this particular case, the girl, must have longed for a recurrence of those brave days, and deprecated the peaceful present. But for him (or her) far more amazing things were in store. His it was to see society emerge from its worn-out feudal chrysalis, and to take the path which may yet lead to civilisation. Those born in 1818 could have the delightful distinction of being carried in the first railway train, of sending the first “wire,” of boarding the first “penny ’bus.” Born in the age of the coach and the hoy, they would die in the era of the locomotive and mail steamer. Theirs was an age of transition indeed, most curious to watch, most thrilling to traverse. And—most valuable privilege of all to those that loved to play a part in great affairs—they would be in good time to assist at the widest spread and most terrific upheaval Europe had known since the downfall of the Roman Empire. To have been thirty years of age in that year of years, 1848! Those who witnessed the great drama must have felt that to have come into the world more than three decades before would have been a mistake the most grievous.
Among the children fortunate enough, then, to be born when the nineteenth century was in its eighteenth year was the heroine of our history. Limerick, the city of the broken treaty, was her birthplace, Maria Dolores Eliza Rosanna the names bestowed upon her in baptism. Only a year before (on 3rd July 1817) her father, Edward Gilbert, had been gazetted an ensign in the old 25th regiment of the line, now the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. He may have been, as his daughter and only child afterwards claimed, the scion of a knightly house, but he could boast a far more honourable distinction—that he rose from the ranks and earned his commission by valour and good conduct in the long Napoleonic wars.[1] Promotion it was, perhaps, that emboldened him to marry in the same year. His wife was a girl of surpassing beauty, a Miss Oliver, of Castle Oliver, wherever that may be, and a descendant of the Count de Montalvo, a Spanish grandee, who had lost his immense estates in the wars. The ancestors of this unfortunate noble (we are told) were Moors, and came into Spain in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, which was certainly the worst possible moment they could have chosen for so doing. For this account of Mrs. Gilbert’s ancestry we are indebted to her daughter, whose names certainly suggest a Spanish origin. It was by her mournful second name, or rather by its lightsome diminutive, Lola, that she was ever afterwards known. Perhaps she was so called in remembrance of one of the proud Montalvos. At all events, she never ceased to cherish the belief in her half-Spanish blood. When she was a romantic young girl—for young girls were romantic seventy years ago—Spain obsessed the Byronic caste of mind. It was regarded as the home of chivalry, romance, love, poetry, and adventure. To be ever so little Spanish was accounted a most enviable distinction. So it would be ungenerous of us to impugn Lola’s claim to what she and her contemporaries considered an inestimable privilege. True or false, the idea was one she imbibed with her mother’s milk—though I forgot to say that, according to her own statement, she was nourished at
