"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[Pg 44] 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, protest-ing 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[Pg 45] 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
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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.
[Pg 46]
[Pg 47] 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.[Pg 48] 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[Pg 49] 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 schoolgirls 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[Pg 50] 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 Andalu-
sian dancer. Her beauty enraptured the Poles, and drew from one of their dramatic critics the following elaborate panegyric:--
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"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