XIX The Enthralment of the King
The Court Theatre of Munich, thanks to the King’s critical faculty and liberal patronage, had a very high reputation throughout Europe, and seemed to Lola a very proper place for the display of her charms and accomplishments. She applied accordingly to the Director, who upon an exhibition of her powers, announced that they did not come up to his standard. This was probably true; but had Lola danced like Taglioni, she would no doubt have been rejected all the same by an official of this strictly clerical Government. Full of wit and resource, she saw in her rebuff the very opportunity she sought of bringing herself to the notice of a sovereign. She had made a few friends among the jeunesse dorée of the Bavarian capital, and through one of these, Count Rechberg, a royal aide-de-camp, she craved an audience of His Majesty. Louis was indisposed to grant it, despite his usually gracious bearing towards foreign artistes. “Am I expected to see every strolling dancer?” he asked pettishly. “Your pardon, sire,” said Rechberg, “but this one is well worth seeing.” The King hesitated. While he did so Lola Montez stood before him. Tired of waiting in the antechamber, and anticipating a refusal, she had coolly followed an aide-de-camp into the royal presence. Now she stood before the astonished King, dazzlingly beautiful, with downcast eyes, a suppliant mien, and a smile of triumph at the corners of her mouth.
To a passionate admirer of beauty like Louis her loveliness was an all-sufficient excuse for her amazing audacity. His aide-de-camp was right. The woman was well worth seeing. As he gazed upon her youth glowed anew in his sixty-year-old frame, the blood coursed as fiercely as in the time long gone by. Those who saw Lola knew a second spring. Collecting his faculties, the King granted the dancer’s prayer—she received his command to appear at the Court Theatre; but he was in no haste to dismiss the suppliant. Lola, says one writer, came, saw, and conquered. The King yielded to her at the first shot. Lola’s detractors relate that, glancing at her magnificent bust, he asked in wonder if such charms could be of nature’s making, whereupon the lady, there and then ripping up her corsage, dispelled his doubts. They can believe the story who like to; it sounds in the highest degree improbable. But from this first interview dated the enthralment of the King.
Not only grey-headed rulers but tiny school-girls felt the power of the enchantress. Louise von Kobell tells us how, when a child, she saw Lola Montez.12
“On the 9th October, 1846, as I was going down Briennerstrasse, near the Bayersdorf Palace, I saw coming my way a lady, gowned in black, with a veil thrown over her head, and a fan in her hand. Suddenly something seemed to flash across my vision, and I stood stock still, gazing into the eyes that had dazzled me. They shone upon me from a pale countenance, which assumed a laughing expression before my bewildered stare. Then she went, or rather swept on, past me. I forgot all my governess’s injunctions against looking round, and stood staring after her, till she disappeared from view. Like her, I told myself, must have been the fairies in the nursery tales. I returned home breathless, and told them of my adventure. ‘That,’ said my father, grimly, ‘must have been the Spanish dancer, Lola Montez.’
“I went to the Court Theatre on Saturday, the 10th October; I came much too early to my seat, and read full of eagerness the announcement: ‘Der verwunschene Prinz, a play in three acts, by J. von Plötz. During the two entr’actes, Mademoiselle Lola Montez of Madrid will appear in her Spanish national dances.’ Full of impatience I saw the curtain rise, sat through the first act, and saw the curtain fall again. Now it rose once more, and I saw my fairy of yesterday—Lola Montez.
“In the pit they clapped and hissed; the last, explained my neighbour, because of the rumours abroad that Lola was an emissary of the English Freemasons, an enemy of the Jesuits—a coquette, too, who had had amorous adventures in all parts of the world, according to the newspapers.
“Lola Montez took the centre of the stage, clothed not in the usual tights and short skirts of the ballet girl, but in a Spanish costume of silk and lace, with here and there a glittering diamond. Fire seemed to shoot from her wonderful blue eyes, and she bowed like one of the Graces before the King, who occupied the royal box. Then she danced after the fashion of her country, swaying on her hips, and changing from one posture to another, each excelling the former in beauty.
“While she danced she riveted the attention of all the spectators, their gaze followed the sinuous swayings of her body, in their expression now of glowing passion, now of lightsome playfulness. Not till she ceased her rhythmic movements was the spell broken....
“On 14th October, 1846, Lola Montez appeared for the second and last time at the Court Theatre. She danced the ‘Cachucha’ in the comedy, Der Weiberfeind von Benedix, and danced the ‘Fandango’ with Herr Opfermann in the entr’acte of the play Müller und Miller. In order to drown any manifestations of displeasure, the pit was occupied by an organised claque of policemen in plain clothes and theatre attendants. The precaution was unnecessary, as Lola Montez exercised a universal charm. The King had received her in audience, as he was accustomed to receive foreign artistes; her beauty and her stimulating conversation captivated Louis I.”
“I know not how—I am bewitched,” His Majesty said frankly to one of his ministers two days after his first interview with Lola. He had worshipped at the altar of Venus all his life, and might reasonably have believed himself immune against passion, now he had entered his seventh decade. The vision of the radiant stranger haunted him. He sought for some excuse to have her about his person. He had long meditated and spoken of a journey to Spain. He would learn Spanish, and Lola should be his teacher. He discussed the idea with some of his more intimate advisers, who said nothing to dissuade him. Other hearts than his beat more rapidly at the dancer’s approach. Dr. Curtius, the royal physician, was of opinion that Señora Montez would be an admirable person to teach the King the Castilian tongue; the aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Nüssbaum, was eager to convey the royal summons to the lady. Lola did not refuse the office of instructress, though the situation was not without its irony, seeing that her knowledge of Spanish was but slight. The reading of Calderon and Cervantes was enlivened and interrupted by her humorous sallies, her unexpected jeux d’esprit, by the thousand and one delightful turns and mannerisms by which as much as by her beauty Lola intoxicated men. She was full of the elusive quality that her pseudo-countrymen call sal. Her intense vitality effervesced, fizzed, and sparkled like champagne, and every bubble that reached the surface caught a different tint. Taking lessons from a charming woman is one of the shortest ways I know to falling in love with her. Louis’s was a very bad case. His emotional capacity by an unusual coincidence, had developed in proportion to his intellect. “His soul is always fresh and young,” Lola declared, no doubt quite sincerely. He had not retained a very large measure of the good looks that distinguished him when a young man, but his bearing was dignified, courtly, gracious—in a word, kingly—and his frank, grey-blue all-embracing eyes had in them something appealing. His personality, in short, is summed up by Frau von Kobell as “interesting.” His manner was as animated as Lola’s, and corresponded to every movement of his mind. I do not see why such a man, even if he be sixty-one years old, should not win a woman’s love. Moreover, the staunchest Republican must admit that if there is no divinity, there is a glamour or fascination about a king. He is, at least, uncommon—even in Germany; he holds aloof, his inner life is to some extent veiled in mystery; his setting is spectacular, and he rarely appears at a disadvantage. He is never seen rolling in the mire in the football field, affording sport to counsel and reporters in the witness-box, or in any of those undignified situations in which we so often meet our fellows. Above all, he represents power, a faculty more attractive even to women than to men. Ambition prompted Lola to hook a prince, but she found it quite easy to like one for his own sake.
The exact nature of the relations between individual men and women is not in general a legitimate matter for curiosity or speculation. It is a question which concerns the parties only. In this instance, however, it may be in the interests of Louis and Lola to observe that their relations were in all probability what is called platonic. The King’s nature was æsthetic, poetical, sentimental; he was eminently capable of that unsensual affection that seems to have animated Dante and Michelangelo. It must not be forgotten, too, that he was sixty years of age. “The sins of youth,” he said “are the virtues of age.” He affirmed publicly and solemnly that Lola had been his friend, never his mistress; and the word of Louis of Bavaria is not to be lightly disregarded. Lola repeatedly said the same thing. Nothing to the contrary was ever alleged by the King’s immediate entourage; and—most significant fact of all—the Queen, Therese of Sachsen-Hildburghausen, never manifested the slightest jealousy of her husband’s friend, but, on the contrary, more than once expressed her sympathy with her policy and actions.
It was not, of course, to be expected that the public would take this view of Louis’s relations with the famous adventuress. Least of all would it find acceptance with the Roman Catholic clergy, whose tendency it has ever been to exaggerate the sensual instincts in man’s nature and to ignore the subtler, finer phases of passion. Puritan and prurient are generally synonymous terms. Nor were the King’s ministers and clerical advisers at all anxious to place a favourable construction on Lola’s presence at the court.
The Jesuits’ agents in different capitals reported unfavourably on the dancer. They professed to believe, as we have seen—perhaps, they did believe—that she was an emissary of the Freemasons, a body which in England is regarded as a gigantic goose club, but by the Catholic world as the most dangerous of secret anti-clerical societies. Now from what Frau von Kobell tells us, it is plain that the Jesuits looked on Lola as a foe from the moment she set foot in Munich. We must seek for some antecedent cause. The lady’s own explanation is improbable, but worth repeating. She alleges that while in Paris she was approached by the agents of the Society, and invited to assist in the conversion of Count Medem, a Russian nobleman. This proposal, possibly because of her inherited dislike of the Roman Church, she declined; and communicated the matter to Monsieur Guizot, then Prime Minister, who had long been puzzled by the ever-increasing numbers in which the Russian nobility in Paris were going over to Rome. Their conversion is attributed by Catholics to the apostolic zeal of Madame Swetchine, a Russian lady of some literary attainments, whose salon was the rendezvous of the clerical party in Paris. Vandam’s informant (if he ever existed in the flesh) and one or two writers with an Ultramontane bias suggest that the feud between Lola and the Jesuits arose simply because it was impossible for the latter to give any countenance to a King’s mistress. But we know that they recognised her as their enemy before she became the royal favourite; moreover, German writers say that the clericals had never made any remonstrances or raised any difficulties respecting her predecessors in His Majesty’s affections. I see no reason to doubt that Lola’s anti-clerical or anti-Catholic sentiments were genuine and frankly expressed; we find similar instances of the odium theologicum in Nell Gwynne and Louis de Kèroual. Intercourse with Liszt and Dujarier would have strengthened such a prejudice. In Lola’s haughty disregard, too, of the etiquette of courts and fearlessness in the presence of the great, we may detect the temperament, which would find its political expression in advanced Liberalism.
The rumour that she was an agent of “the English Freemasons,” if by that term we may understand the English Liberals, is not to be dismissed as altogether preposterous. Our Government at that time was more or less actively hostile to the ultra-legitimist and clerical tendencies paramount in Central Europe: we backed the Swiss Confederation against the Sonderbund; we sympathised with the Italians in their struggles for freedom; English volunteers fought for the Liberal Christinos against the Ultramontane Carlists. Lola’s well-known sympathies, her knowledge of continental courts, above all, her personality, would have recommended her as a most valuable agent to our Foreign Office. We shall see presently that she became the honoured guest of an English ambassador, and how legal proceedings afterwards instituted against her in this country were mysteriously suffered to collapse, as if in obedience to orders from above. Lola never describes herself, it is true, as a secret agent of our Government, but she would naturally have preferred to appear as the independent, irresponsible dictatrix of a nation’s policy.
Whatever the cause may have been, antagonism manifested itself between Lola Montez and the King’s advisers, official and clerical, within a very few days of her arrival at his court. Louis is said to have introduced her to his ministers as his best friend. The Jesuits immediately circulated the report that she was his mistress, and endeavoured to inflame the Bavarian people against her. In obedience to their principle of the Church first and political consistency a long way after, they instigated a general attack upon King and favourite through the clerical press of Germany. It was truly remarked in one of the independent organs of opinion that the most extreme radical could not have shown less regard for the person of the sovereign than these champions of legitimacy. Caricature, that pitiable prostitution of a divine art, was assiduously employed. Louis was represented as a crowned satyr, a pug-dog, an ass with a crown tied to his tail; Lola was treated with even less regard for decency. The ape that lurks in every man gibbered in every clerical rag. The curious may inspect some choice examples of this simian humour in Herr Fuchs’s interesting work.13
Ridicule, so far from killing, as is so often said, can be proved by history to be the least potent instrument of attack and persecution wielded by man. Skits break neither bones nor thrones. Ridicule is generally on the side of authority and reaction, and as such, in the long run, on the losing side. Puritanism survived the raillery of seventeenth-century wags; the North triumphed, despite the loathsome scurrilities of Punch; “Napoleon the Little,” succumbed to German strategy, not to Victor Hugo’s satiric force; Teetotalism, Socialism, and the Cause of Woman wax stronger daily, in spite of the humorists of the music halls and the racing rags. The King of Bavaria was not to be shamed or affrighted by all the gutter journalists of Germany. But his smile became a little grim. Archbishop Diepenbrock remonstrated with him as to his assumed relations with the dancer. “Stick to your stola, bishop,” was the Plantagenet-like answer, “and leave me my Lola.” He claimed for his domestic affairs the privacy enjoyed by the meanest of his subjects. His regard for Lola and respect for her opinion grew stronger daily. Dismay spread through the clerical camp. As vilification failed to produce any sensible effect, bribery was attempted. At the instance, no doubt, of Metternich, Louis’s sister, the Dowager Empress Karoline Augusta, offered the favourite two thousand pounds if she would quit Bavaria. The offer was rejected, in what terms our knowledge of Lola’s character enables us to imagine. She did not lack money, nor did she crave for it. She loved power for its own sake, and power she now possessed. Under her influence Louis recovered his sanity. The liberal instincts of his youth and prime revived. He became once more the Grecian, and the mediæval fever left him. His impatience of clerical control grew more evident daily.
“And lo, a blade for a knight’s emprise
Filled the fine empty sheath of a man.—
The Duke grew straightway brave and wise.”