And at the first hiss, her Irish spirit blazed into a crazy rage; a rage that was the turning point of her career.
Glaring first at the spectators like an angry cat, Lola next glared around the stage for a weapon wherewith to wreak her fury upon them. But the stage was bare.
Frantic, she kicked off her slippers, and then tore loose her heavy-buckled garters. With these intimate missiles she proceeded to pelt the grinning occupants of the front row, accompanying the volley with a high-pitched, venomous Billingsgate tirade in three languages.
That was enough. On the instant the hisses were drowned in a salvo of applause that shook the rafters, Lola Montez had "arrived." Paris grabbed her to its big, childish, fickle heart.
She was a spitfire and she couldn't dance. But she had given the Parisians a genuine thrill. She was a success. Two slippers and two garters, hurled with feminine rage and feminine inaccuracy into the faces of a line of bored theatergoers, had achieved more for the fair artillerist than the most exquisite dancing could have hoped to.
Lola was the talk of the hour. An army of babbling Ranelaghs could not now have dimmed her fame.
Dujarrier, all-powerful editor of "La Presse," laid his somewhat shopworn heart at her feet. Dumas, Balzac, and many another celebrity sued for her favor. Her reign over the hearts of men had recommenced.
But Lola Montez never rode long on prosperity's wave-crest. A French adorer, jealous of Dujarrier's prestige with the lovely dancer, challenged the great editor to a duel. Dujarrier, for love of Lola, accepted the challenge—and was borne off the field of honor with a bullet through his brain.
Lola sought to improve the occasion by swathing herself somberly and right becomingly in crape, and by vowing a vendetta against the slayer. But before she could profit by the excellent advertisement, Dumas chanced to say something to a friend—who repeated it to another friend, who repeated it to all Paris—that set the superstitious, mid-century Frenchmen to looking askance at Lola and to avoiding her gaze. Said Monte Cristo's creator:
"She has the evil eye. She will bring a curse upon any man who loves her."