IV
Those were the days when gentlemen (at any rate, Bavarians) did not necessarily prefer blondes. Lola's raven locks were much more to their taste. If she were not a success in the ballet, she was certainly one in the boudoir. Of a hospitable and gregarious disposition, she kept what amounted to open house in her Barerstrasse villa. Every morning she held an informal levée there, at which any stranger who sent in his card was welcome to call and pay his respects; and in the evenings, when she was not dancing attendance on Ludwig at the Palace, the Barerstrasse reception would be followed by a soirée. These gatherings attracted—in addition to a throng of artists and authors and musicians—professors and scholars from all over Europe; and, as Gertrude Aretz remarks, in her admirable study, The Elegant Woman (with considerable reference to this one): "the best intellects of her century helped to draw her victorious chariot." The uncultured mob, however, dubbed her a "Fair Impire" and a "Light o' Love," and flung even stronger and still more uncomplimentary epithets. Their subject, however, received them with a laugh. The shopkeepers, with an eye to business, embellished their wares with her portrait; and the University students, headed by Fritz Peissner, serenaded her in front of her windows.
Lolita schön, wie Salamoni's Weiber.
Welch 'suszer Reis flog über dich dahin!
they sang in rousing chorus.
Among the students engaged in amassing light and learning at the University of Munich, there were a number of foreigners. One of them was a young American, Charles Godfrey Leland ("Hans Breitmann"), who had gone there, he says, to "study æsthetics." But this did not take up all his time, for, during the intervals of attending classes, he managed to see something of Lola Montez. "I must," he says, "have had a great moral influence on her, for, so far as I am aware, I am the only friend she ever had at whom she never threw a plate or a book, or attacked with a dagger, poker, broom, or other deadly weapon.... I always had a strange and great respect for her singular talents. There were few, indeed, if any there, were, who really knew the depths of that wild Irish soul."
In another passage Leland offers further details: "The great, the tremendous, celebrity at that time in Munich was also an opera dancer, though not on the stage. This was Lola Montez, the King's last favourite.... She wished to run the whole kingdom and government, kick out the Jesuits, and kick up the devil, generally speaking.
"One of her most intimate friends was wont to tell her that she and I had many very strange characteristics in common, which we shared with no one else, while we differed utterly in other respects. It was very like both of us, for Lola, when defending the existence of the soul against an atheist, to tumble over a great trunk of books of the most varied kind, till she came to an old vellum-bound copy of Apuleius, and proceed to establish her views according to his subtle neo-Platonism. But she romanced and embroidered so much in conversation that she did not get credit for what she really knew."
Well, if it comes to that, Leland for his part was not above "romancing" and "embroidering." His books are full of these qualities. "Marvels," says a biographer, "fill his descriptions of student life at Munich. Interesting people figure in his reminiscences.... Prominent among them was Lola Montez, the King's favourite of the day, cordially hated by all Munich for an interference in public affairs, hardly to be expected from the 'very small, pale, and thin or frèle little person with beautiful blue eyes and curly black hair' who flits across the pages of the Memoirs."
If this were Leland's real opinion of Lola's appearance, he must have formed it after drinking too much of the Munich beer of which he was so fond. He seems to have drunk a good deal at times, as he admits in one passage: "after the dinner and wine, I drank twelve schoppens." A dozen imperial pints would take some swallowing, and not leave the memory unclouded as to subsequent events.