At sight of her the crowd roared in fury and made a dash for the steps. Lola retaliated by emptying her revolver into the advancing mob. Events had moved rapidly since the primitive days when she was content to bombard her detractors with slippers and garter buckles.
The rioters halted, before the fusillade. Before they could combine for another rush, and while Lola from the topmost step was reviling them in her best and fiercest German, a company of the royal bodyguard, headed by the old king himself, charged through the crowd and rescued the angry woman.
But, though Ludwig had just saved her from a sudden and extremely unpleasant form of death, he was not strong enough to stem the avalanche of public opinion that crashed down upon her. This same avalanche proceeded to brush Lola out of her big and hideous house, to knock away from her her titles of baroness and countess and her twenty-thousand-florin annuity, and to whirl her across the Bavarian frontier with stern instructions never to return.
Incidentally, poor old King Ludwig came in for so much unpopularity on her account that he was forced to abdicate. Thus, in her own fall from power, Lola had also dragged a once-popular king off his throne a noteworthy achievement, in that pre-Gaby-Deslys period, for an Irish girl with a variegated past.
The Ludwig scandal preceded Lola wherever she tried to go. The divinity that hedges a king was everywhere on guard against her. The gate to practically every country in Europe was slammed in her face. Folk fell to repeating Dumas' "evil-eye" words, and to applying them to discrowned old Ludwig. Lola Montez was not wanted anywhere; certainly nowhere east of the Atlantic.
So she came to New York. Here there were no kings, to bar her out lest they share Ludwig's fate. And Americans knew little and cared less about the evil eye. If Lola Montez could make good on the stage, America was willing to welcome her: If not, it had no further general interest in her.
Moreover, she was well past thirty; at an age when the first glory of a woman's siren charms may reasonably be supposed to be slightly blurred. New Yorkers were curious to see her, on account of her history; but that was their only interest in her.
She danced at the old Broadway Theater. People thronged the theater for the first few performances. Then, having gazed their fill on the Bavarian throne's wrecker and finding she could not dance, they stayed away; and Lola ended her engagement at the Broadway to the hackneyed "beggarly array of empty benches."
An enterprising manager—P. T. Barnum, if I remember aright—raked up the Byron story and starred Lola in a dramatization of Lord Byron's poem "Mazeppa." But people here had already looked at her, and the production was a failure. Next she appeared in one or two miserably written plays, based on her own European adventures. These, too, failed. She then wrote a beauty book that had a small sale, and wrote also a drearily stupid volume of humor, designed as a mock "Guide to Courtship."
On her way to America, Lola had stopped in England long enough to captivate and marry a British army officer, Heald by name. But she soon left him, and arrived in this country without visible matrimonial ties.