XXXI Lola as a Lecturer
We have no knowledge of the business that took Lola once more to France on this occasion. She probably went there to spend, in the most agreeable way possible, the considerable sums she had amassed in her Australian tour. It may be supposed that she spent some time at Paris, renewing the acquaintance of her old friends. Dumas, Méry, De Beauvoir, were all living, and death had made few gaps in her circle of friends during the past ten years. In August, Lola followed the fashionable crowd to the southern watering-places, and stayed at St. Jean de Luz, within easy reach of the imperial court at Biarritz. Hence she addressed this extraordinary letter to the Estafette:—
“St. Jean de Luz, Hôtel du Cygne,
“2nd September, 1856.
“The Belgian newspapers, and some French ones, have asserted that the suicide of the actor, Mauclerc, who, it is reported, has thrown himself from the summits of the Pic du Midi, was caused by domestic troubles for which I was responsible. This is a calumny which M. Mauclerc himself will be ready to refute. We separated amicably, it is true, after eight days of married life, but urged only by our common and imperious need of personal liberty. It is probable that the tragedy of the Pic du Midi exists only in the imagination of some journalist on the look-out for sensational news. Trusting to your sense of fairness to insert this explanation in your excellent journal, I remain, yours, etc.,
Lola Montez.”
This letter was copied by La Presse, which De Girardin still edited, and was presently noticed by the person most interested. His reply was duly published:—
“Bayonne, 9th September, 1856.
“Sir,—I read in your issue of the 7th. inst. a letter from Lola Montez, wherein there is talk of a suicide of which I have been the victim, and a marriage in which I have been principal actor. I am a complete stranger to such catastrophes. I have never had the least intention of throwing myself from the Pic du Midi, or from any other peak, and I do not recollect having had the advantage of marrying—even for eight days—the celebrated Countess of Landsfeld,—Yours, etc.,
Mauclerc.”29
The simplest and most probable explanation of this affair is to set it down as a hoax. Bayonne and St. Jean de Luz are neighbouring towns, and it is possible that the actor had (perhaps unwittingly) incurred the anger of the Countess, who devised this rather elaborate means of revenge.
Soon after, Lola returned to the United States, a country for which she had conceived a strong liking. She considered it her home, says the Rev. F. L. Hawks, and had a sincere admiration for its institutions. Lola was by nature a republican, and intimacy with sovereigns had not much awakened her distaste for them.
“To Freedom ever true, true, true,
All his long life was Harlequin!”
On 2nd February 1857 we find her fulfilling a week’s engagement at the Green Street Theatre at Albany, acting in The Eton Boy, The Follies of a Night, and Lola in Bavaria. She was not unknown at the state capital, having appeared there, with a troupe of twelve dancers, at the Museum, in May 1852. On the present occasion she gave another proof of her dare-devil courage, by crossing the Hudson River in an open skiff among the floating ice.
“She got over in safety, but part of her wardrobe was carried down stream. By going to Troy she could have avoided all danger, but her love of notoriety led her to offer a hundred dollars to be carried across here.”30
This recklessness may have proceeded from that want of interest in life, that utter sense of desolation, which assailed her whenever she was not distracted by travel and adventure. A lonely, disenchanted woman, without any ties or hold on life, she found herself now on the verge of forty. Her days for adventure had passed. At times she must have sighed for her home among the Californian foothills. Surely it was wise and dignified, for one who had exhausted her strength and vitality in the struggles of an artificial society, to throw herself on the placid bosom of our common mother? There, in time, she would have awakened to fuller comprehension of man’s place in the universe, and have learned at once the true value of all her past actions, and the futility of remorse. But in New York no one listened for the whisperings of Nature; instead, they fancied they heard voices from some other world. Women who have lost their hold on life readily give ear to visionaries: having exhausted the joys of this world, they wish to test those of another. Lola became a believer in spiritualism. The imagined touch of some fatuous phantom would thrill her as no man’s had power to do. One day she announced that the spirits had directed her to abandon the stage, and to become a lecturer. Apparently, however, she had no confidence in their ability to inspire her on the platform, for she caused her lectures to be written by the Rev. C. Chauncy Burr. At the séances she seems to have been brought into touch (in two senses) with several of the clergy of various Protestant denominations. Her first lecture was delivered at a place of worship called the Hope Chapel, 720 Broadway, New York, on 3rd February 1858.
“Lola Montez at Hope Chapel is good,” chuckles a reporter. “It is plain that the scent of the roses hangs round her still. We have heard some queer things in that conventicle in our time, and have now and then assisted at an entertainment there twice as funny, but not half so intellectual nor half so wholesome, as the lecture our desperado in dimity gave us last night.”
The New York pressman was more easily pleased than is the modern reader. Lola’s lectures were published that same year in book form, together with her autobiography, and they may be pronounced very poor stuff. They are respectively headed, “Beautiful Women,” “Gallantry,” “Heroines of History,” “The Comic Aspect of Love,” “Wits and Women of Paris,” and “Romanism.” Here and there their dullness is enlivened by a flash of Lola’s own native wit, or a shrewd observation that only her experience could have supplied. Sometimes she begins by what is evidently an exposition of her own views, winding up with some trite moralisings calculated to appease her audience. Speaking, for instance, of the heroines of history, she dwells with enthusiasm on the valour of Margaret of Anjou, the sagacity of Isabel the Catholic, the administrative ability of Elizabeth, the diplomatic skill of Catharine II., and recollects herself in time to impress on her hearers that one
“who is qualified to be a happy wife and a good mother, need never look with envy upon the woman of genius, whose mental powers, by fitting her for the stormy arena of politics, may have unfitted her for the quiet walks of domestic life.”
As might have been expected, Lola spoke somewhat disdainfully of women who preferred to vote rather than to cajole the men who voted. The lecturer forgot, perhaps, that all her sisters were not as well equipped as she for the business of fascination, and that to some of them the personal exercise of the franchise might seem less unwomanly and objectionable than the arts of blandishment and intimidation.
Lola was bold enough to tell her American audience that the palm of beauty must be awarded to Englishwomen, and that the Yankees were too mercantile and practical to entertain the old spirit of gallantry. She mollified her hearers by adding that, after all, in America, “love dived the deepest and came out dryest”—a dark saying, from which she derived the conclusion that love in the United States was as brave, honest, and sincere a passion as elsewhere. The lecture on Romanism will not be regarded as a very formidable instrument of attack upon the Catholic Church. It concludes: “America does not yet recognise how much she owes to the Protestant principle. It has given the world the four greatest facts of modern times—steam-boats, railroads, telegraphs, and the American Republic!”
We can imagine with what enthusiasm this sentiment was received in Hope Chapel, where the lecture was delivered in October 1858, in aid of a fund for a church which should be open free to the poor and unfortunate (as, by the way, all Roman Catholic churches are). By this time Lola appears to have been weaned of her spiritualistic heresies, and had become interested in Methodism. In her new zeal for her own soul’s welfare she did not, however, forget the corporal needs of her fellows, and with native generosity, stimulated by religious considerations, she showered the money earned at her lectures upon the poor and afflicted. To replenish her store, and encouraged by the success of her new enterprize in New York, she resolved to try her luck once more on the other side of the Atlantic.