Lola Montez: An Adventuress of the 'Forties. Edmund B. D'Auvergne

men whom they have since learned to hate. Even by her own account, those months in Ireland were not altogether unrelieved by the glitter for which her soul craved. Her husband took her to Dublin, she informs us, and presented her to the Lord-Lieutenant. His Excellency Lord Normanby was one of the few good rulers England has placed over Ireland, and like most clever men, he was an admirer of pretty women. Lola seems to have been made much of by him. He paid her many compliments, among others this, “Women of your age are the queens of society”—a remark which may be addressed with equally good effect to ladies anywhere between seventeen and seventy. Mr. James began to grow restive under the fire of admiration directed by great personages upon his young wife. It is not impossible to believe that she flirted. Her husband decided to withdraw her from the seductions of the viceregal court, and retired with her to some spot in the interior, the name of which has not been transmitted to us. Lola, in memoirs she contributed years after to a Parisian newspaper, describes her life in this retreat as unutterably tedious. The day was passed in hunting and eating, these exercises succeeding each other with the utmost regularity. Meanwhile, the system was sustained by innumerable cups of tea, taken at stated intervals, and with much deliberateness.

      Ireland had changed since the emancipation of the Catholics. It was not with tea that the heroes of Charles Lever’s time beguiled the tedium of existence.

      “This dismal life,” continues our heroine, “weighed on me to such an extent that I should assuredly have done something desperate if my husband had not just then been ordered to return to India.” Lola, it will have been seen, entertained little affection for her native land. She had no recollection of her childhood there, and she never afterwards thought of the country except in connection with the detested husband of her youth.

      In the second year of the Queen’s reign she left Ireland, to return years after in very different circumstances. Her fondest memories were of the East, towards which she now gladly turned her face for the second time. “On the old trail, on the out trail,” she sailed aboard the East Indiaman, Blunt, her husband at her side. There is a curious parallelism between her mother’s life and her own up till now, which she could not have failed to notice. Her memories of the voyage strike me rather as having been specially spiced for the consumption of Parisian readers, than as an authentic relation. James, we are told, neglected his young wife, and exhibited an amazing capacity for absorbing porter. Finding the time heavy on her hands, Lola resorted to the commonest of all distractions on passenger ships—flirting. While her consort lay sleeping “like a boa-constrictor” in his bunk, his wife’s admirers used to slip notes under the door, these serving her as spills for Mr. James’s pipe. The gentlemen who fell under the spell of Lola’s fascinations at this stage of her career were three in number—a Spaniard called Enriquez, an Englishman, simply described as John, and the skipper himself. This “colossal sailor” seems to have been somewhat of a philosopher. One of his profound reflections has been handed down to us, and is worth recording: “Love is a pipe we fill at eighteen, and smoke till forty; and we rake the ashes till our exit.”

      Lola thus pictures as a man-enslaving Circe the girl who was described by a contemporary as a good little thing, merry and unaffected. I doubt if the flirtations here magnified into intrigues were very serious affairs, after all. It is rather pathetic, the woman’s shame for the simplicity of the girl, and her evident desire to paint her redder than she was. It is probable that the girl would have been quite as much ashamed if she could have seen herself at thirty.

IV

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      INDIA SEVENTY YEARS AGO

      The land to which little Mrs. James was eager to return seems to us now to have been a poor exchange for the rollicking Ireland of Lever’s day. India in 1838, as for a score of years after, was under the rule of John Company. Collectors and writers of the Jos. Sedley type were still able to shake the pagoda tree, and Englishmen in outlying provinces often became suddenly rich, how or why nobody asked, and only the natives cared. Indigo planters beat their half-caste wives to death, and English magistrates looked the other way. Our people died, like flies in autumn, of cholera, snakebites, and the thousand and one fevers to which India was subject. We were still shut in by powerful native states. Ranjit Singh ruled in the Punjaub, the Baluchis in Scinde; there was yet a king in Oude and a rajah at Nagpûr. Slavery was only abolished in the British dominions that very year, and Hindoo widows had but lately lost the privilege of burning themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres. The chronic famine had assumed slightly more serious proportions.

      It was a land of loneliness, remote and isolated. A postal service had been introduced only the year before, and letters took at least three months to come from England. This was by the overland route, which was liable at any moment to interruption by the caprice of the Pasha of Egypt or the enterprise of Bedouins. There were, of course, no railways and no telegraphs. You travelled wherever possible by river, in boats called budgerows, which had not increased in speed since Ensign Gilbert’s day. Going up the Ganges you might have seen the Danish flag waving over Serampore. If you were in a hurry and could afford it, you travelled dâk—that is, in a palanquin, carried by four bearers, who were changed at each stage like posting-horses. This method of travel—about the most uncomfortable, I conceive, ever devised by man—greatly impressed and interested Lola. She thought it repugnant to one’s sense of humanity, but could not help observing the lightheartedness of the bearers. They jogged briskly along to the accompaniment of improvised songs, which were not always flattering to their human load.