The Magnificent Montez Part 11

"Sire," returned Rechberg, greatly daring, but with Lola's magnetism still upon him, "you will not regret it. I a.s.sure you this one is an exception. She is delightful. That is the only word for it. Never have I seen anybody to equal her. Such grace, such charm, such ----"

"Pooh!" interrupted Ludwig, cutting short the threatened rhapsodies, "your swan is probably a goose. Most of them are. Still, now that she's here, let her come in. If she isn't any good, I'll soon send her about her business."

Brave words, but they availed him nothing. Ludwig shot one glance at the woman who stood before him, and capitulated utterly.

A sudden thrill pa.s.sed through him. His sixty years fell away in a flash. A river of blood surged through his s.e.xagenarian arteries. His boast recoiled upon himself. Rechberg had not deceived him.

"What has happened to me?" he muttered feebly. "I am bewitched." Then, as the newcomer stood smiling at him in all her warm loveliness, he found his tongue.

"Mademoiselle, you say you can dance. Well, let me see what you can do. Count Rechberg, you may leave us."

"Do I dance here, in this room, Your Majesty?"

"Certainly."

Lola wanted nothing better. The opportunity for which she had been planning and scheming ever since she left Paris had come at last.

Well, she would make the most of it. Not in the least perturbed that there was no accompaniment, and no audience but His Majesty, she executed a _pas seul_ there and then. It was a "royal performance,"

and eminently successful. Her feet tripped lightly across the polished floor, and danced their way straight into Ludwig's heart.

"You shall dance before the public," he announced. "I will myself give orders to the director of the Hof Theatre."

Luise von Kobell, when a schoolgirl, encountered her by chance just after her arrival, and thus records the impression she received:

As I was walking in the Briennerstra.s.se, not far from the Bayersdorf Palace, I saw a veiled lady, wearing a black gown and carrying a fan, coming towards me. Something flashed across my vision, and I suddenly stood still, completely dazzled by the eyes into which I stared, and which shone from a pale countenance that lit up with a laughing expression at my bewilderment. Then she swept past me; and I, forgetting what my governess had said about looking round, stared after her until she disappeared.... "That,"

said my father, when I reached home and recounted my adventure, "must have been Lola Montez, the Spanish dancer."

The next evening little Fraulein von Kobell saw her again at the Hof Theatre, where her first appearance before the Munich public was made on October 10, 1846.

Lola Montez a.s.sumed the centre of the stage. She was not dressed in the customary tights and short skirts of a ballerina, but in a Spanish costume of silk and lace, in which shone at intervals a diamond. It seemed as if fire darted from her wonderful blue eyes, and she bowed like one of the Graces at the King in the royal box. She danced after the manner of her country, bending on her hips and alternating one posture with another, each rivalling the former one in beauty.

While she was dancing she held the attention of all; everybody's eyes followed her sinuous movements, now indicative of glowing pa.s.sion, now of frolicsomeness. Not until she ceased her rhythmic swayings was the spell interrupted. The audience went mad with rapture, and the entire dance had to be repeated over and over again.

Ludwig, ensconced in the royal box, could not take his eyes off her.

During an _entr'acte_ he scribbled a verse:

Happy movements, clear and near, Are in thy living grace.

Supple and tender, as a deer Art thou, of Andalusian race!

"_Wunderschon!_" declared an admiring aide-de-camp to whom he showed it.

"_Kolossal!_" echoed a second, not to be outdone in recognising laureates.h.i.+p.

As, however, the cheers were mingled with a few hisses ("due to the report that the newcomer was an English Freemason, and wanted to destroy the Catholic religion"), the next evening the management took the precaution of filling the pit with a leather-lunged and h.o.r.n.y-handed _claque_. This time the bill consisted of a comedy, _Der Weiberseind von Benedix_, followed by a cachucha and a fandango with Herr Opsermann for a dancing-partner.

Lola's success was a.s.sured; and Herr Frays, who had started by refusing to let her appear, was now full of grovelling apologies. He offered her a contract. But Lola, having other ideas as to how her time should be employed in Munich, would not accept it.

"Thank you for nothing," she said. "When I asked you for an engagement, you told me I was not good enough to dance in your theatre. Well, I have now proved to both Fraulein Frenzal and yourself that I am. That is all I care about, and I shall not dance again, either for you or for anybody else."

If she had known enough German, she would probably have added: "Put that in your pipe and smoke it!"

Munich in those days must have proved attractive to people with small incomes. Thus, Edward Wilberforce, who spent some years there, says that meat was fivepence a pound, beer twopence-halfpenny a quart, and servants' wages eight s.h.i.+llings a month. But there were drawbacks.

"The city," says an English guide-book of this period, "has the reputation of being a very dissolute capital." Yet it swarmed with churches. The police, too, exercised a strict watch upon the hotel registers; and, as a result of their activities, a "French visitor was separated from his feminine companion on grounds of public morality."

"None of your Parisian looseness for us!" said the City Fathers.

But Lola appears to have avoided any such rigid censors.h.i.+p. At any rate, a certain Auguste Papon (a mixture of pimp and _souteneur_), whom she had met in Paris, happened to be in Munich at the same time as herself. The intimacy was revived; and, as he did not possess the entree to the Court, for some weeks they lived together at the Hotel Maulich. In the spring of 1847 a young Guardsman found himself in the town, on his way back to England from Kissengen. He records that, not knowing who she was, he sat next Lola Montez at dinner one evening, and gives an instance of her quick temper. "On the floor between us,"

he says, "was an ice-pail, with a bottle of champagne. A sudden quarrel occurred with her neighbour, a Bavarian lieutenant; and, applying her foot to the bucket, she sent it flying the length of the room."

IV

Lola certainly made the running. Five days after she first met him, Ludwig summoned all the officials of the Court, and astonished (and shocked) them by introducing her with the remark: "Gentlemen, I have the honour to present to you my best friend. See to it that you accord her every possible respect." He also compelled his long suffering spouse to admit her to the Order of the Chanoines of St. Therese, a distinction for which--considering her somewhat lurid "past"--this new recipient was scarcely eligible.

When he heard that instructions had been issued for paying special compliments to her, Mr. _Punch_ registered severe disapproval.

"It is a good joke," he remarked, "to call upon others to uphold the dignity of one who is always at some freak or other to lower herself."

When she first sailed in dramatic fas.h.i.+on into the orbit of Bavaria's sovereign, Lola Montez was just twenty-seven. In the full noontide of her beauty and allurement, she was well equipped with what the modern jargon calls s.e.x-appeal. Big-bosomed and with generously swelling curves, "her form," says Eduard Fuchs, "was provocation incarnate."

Fuchs, who was an expert on the subject of feminine attractions, knew what he was talking about. "Shameless and impudent," adds Heinrich von Treitschke, "and as insatiable in her voluptuous desires as Semp.r.o.nia, she could converse with charm among friends; manage mettlesome horses; sing in thrilling fas.h.i.+on; and recite amorous poems in Spanish. The King, an admirer of feminine beauty, yielded to her magic. It was as if she had given him a love philtre. For her he forgot himself; he forgot the world; and he even forgot his royal dignity."

The fact that Lola always wore a Byronic collar helped the theory, held by many, that she was a daughter of the poet. But her real reason for adopting the style was that she had a lovely neck, and this set it off to the best advantage. She studied the art of dress and gave it an immense amount of care. Where this matter was concerned, no trouble or care was too much. Her favourite material was velvet, which she considered--and quite justifiably--to exercise an erotic effect on men of a certain age. She was insistent, too, that the contours of her figure ("her quivering thighs and all the demesnes adjacent thereto") should be clearly revealed, and in a distinctly provocative fas.h.i.+on.

This, of course, was not far removed from exhibitionism. As a result, bourgeois opinion was outraged. The wives of the petty officials shopping in the Marienplatz shuddered, and clutched their ample skirts when they saw her; anxious mothers instructed dumpy Frauleins "not to look like the foreign woman." There is no authoritative record that any of them did so.

CHAPTER VIII

LUDWIG THE LOVER

I

Lola Montez had done better than "hook a prince." A lot better. She had now "hooked" a sovereign. Her ripe warm beauty sent the thin blood coursing afresh through Ludwig's sluggish veins. There it wrought a miracle. He was turned sixty, but he felt sixteen.

The conversation of Robert Burns is said to have "swept a d.u.c.h.ess off her feet." Perhaps it did. But that of Lola Montez had a similar effect on a monarch. Under the magic of her spell, this one became rejuvenated. The years were stripped from him; he was once more a boy.

With his charmer beside him, he would wander through the Nymphenburg Woods and under the elms in the Englischer Garten, telling her of his dreams and fancies. His pa.s.sion for Greece was forgotten. Pericles was now Romeo.

_In dem Suden ist die Liebe, Da ist Licht und da ist Glut!_

that is,

In the south there is love, There is light and there is heat,

sang Ludwig.

Yet Lola Montez was not by any means the first who ever burst into the responsive heart of Ludwig I. She had many predecessors there. One of them was an Italian syren. But that Lola soon ousted her is clear from a poetical effort of which the royal troubadour was delivered. This begins: