Lola Montez: An Adventuress of the 'Forties

by Edmund B. D'Auvergne

I will let Lola tell the story in her own words.

“While Lola Montez was on a visit to Madame Steinkiller the wife of the principal banker of Poland, the old viceroy sent to ask her presence at the palace one morning at eleven o’clock. She was assured by several ladies that it would be neither politic nor safe to refuse to go; and she did go in Madame Steinkiller’s carriage, and heard from the viceroy a most extraordinary proposition. He offered her the gift of a splendid country estate, and would load her with diamonds besides. The poor old man was a comic sight to look upon—unusually short in stature, and every time he spoke, he threw back his head and opened his mouth so wide as to expose the artificial gold roof of his palate. A death’s-head making love to a lady could not have been a more disgusting or horrible sight. These generous gifts were most respectfully and very decidedly declined. But her refusal to make a bigger fool of one who was already fool enough was not well received.

[This, I take it, is the only instance of the word fool being applied to one of the ablest, if most ruthless, men Russia has ever produced.]

“In those countries where political tyranny is unrestrained, the social and domestic tyranny is scarcely less absolute.

“The next day His Majesty’s tool, the colonel of the gendarmes and director of the theatre, called at her hotel to urge the suit of his master.

“He began by being persuasive and argumentative, and when that availed nothing, he insinuated threats, when a grand row broke out, and the madcap ordered him out of her room.

“Now when Lola Montez appeared that night at the theatre, she was hissed by two or three parties who had evidently been instructed to do so by the director himself. The same thing occurred the next night; and when it came again on the third night, Lola Montez, in a rage, rushed down to the footlights, and declared that those hisses had been set at her by the director, because she had refused certain gifts from the old prince, his master. Then came a tremendous shower of applause from the audience; and the old princess, who was present, both nodded her head and clapped her hands to the enraged and fiery Lola.

“Here, then, was a pretty muss. An immense crowd of Poles, who hated both the prince and the director, escorted her to her lodgings. She found herself a heroine without expecting it, and indeed without intending it. In a moment of rage she had told the whole truth, without stopping to count the cost, and she had unintentionally set the whole of Warsaw by the ears.

“The hatred which the Poles intensely felt towards the government and its agents found a convenient opportunity of demonstrating itself, and in less than twenty-four hours Warsaw was bubbling and raging with the signs of an incipient revolution. When Lola Montez was apprised of the fact that her arrest was ordered, she barricaded her door; and when the police arrived she sat behind it with a pistol in her hand, declaring that she would certainly shoot the first man dead who should break in. The police were frightened, or at least they could not agree among themselves who should be the martyr, and they went off to inform their masters what a tigress they had to confront, and to consult as to what should be done. In the meantime, the French Consul gallantly came forward and claimed Lola Montez as a French subject, which saved her from immediate arrest; but the order was peremptory that she must quit Warsaw.”

I have no means of verifying this account. Riots were of frequent occurrence in Warsaw during the ’forties, but, thanks to a rigid censorship of the Press, the particulars concerning them have failed to reach us. That the citizens would at once side with any one who for any reason whatsoever was “agin the Government” is not to be doubted, and Lola was quite clever enough to make a slight to her appear as an insult to the Warsaw public. In defending herself with the pistol, she only gave proof of the manlike courage and resolution conspicuous throughout her whole career. As to the cause of the row, one of Lola’s recent biographers remarks that if Prince Paskievich had made the offer alleged, it is quite certain that she would have closed with it. It is far from being certain. The Russian Viceroy was definitely repugnant to her, and her subsequent experiences show that she never bestowed herself upon a man whom she could not, or did not, love. She was new, too, to her rôle of adventuress. Altogether, there is no good reason for doubting that Lola’s relation of her experiences in the Polish capital is substantially true.