New York having tired of her, Lola went West. She created a brief, but lively, furore among the gold-boom towns along the Pacific coast; not so much by reason of her story as for the wondrous charm that was still hers. She gave lectures in California, and then made an Australian tour.
Coming back from the Antipodes, she settled for a time in San Francisco. There, in rather quick succession, she married twice. One of her two California spouses was Hull, the famous pioneer newspaper owner, of San Francisco.
But she quickly wearied of the West, and of her successive husbands. Back she came to New York. And—to the wonder of all, and the incredulity of most—she there announced that, though she had been a great sinner, she was now prepared to devote the rest of her life to penance.
Strangely enough, her new resolve was not a pose. Even in her heyday she had given lavishly to charity. Now she took up rescue work among women. She did much good in a quiet way, spending what money she had on the betterment of her sex's unfortunates, and toiling night and day in their behalf.
Under this unaccustomed mode of life, Lola's health went to pieces. She was sent to a sanitarium in Astoria, L.I. And there, in poverty and half forgotten, she died. Kindly neighbors scraped together enough money to bury her.
Thus ended in wretched anticlimax the meteor career of Lola Montez; Wonder Woman and wanderer; over-thrower of a dynasty and worse-than-mediocre dancer. Some one has called her "the last of the great adventuresses." And that is perhaps her best epitaph.
Her neglected grave—in Greenwood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, by the way—bears no epitaph at all. That last resting place of a very tired woman is marked merely by a plain headstone, whose dimmed lettering reads:
Mrs. Eliza Gilbert. Died June 16, 1861. Age 42.
One trembles to think of the near-royal Irish rage that would have possessed Lola if, at her baroness-countess-Bavarian zenith, she could have foreseen that dreary little postscript to her lurid life missive.