The artist at least owed Lola a service, since she had been the unwitting instrument of a rupture so long desired by him. But he valued his newly-recovered freedom too highly to jeopardise it by linking his life again with a woman’s. His love affair with Lola may have been simply an infatuation. Lucio would soon have tired of Gioconda had he lived with her. We hardly know how this brief love story began; we are quite in the dark as to how it ended. A report was current that the two travelled together from Dresden to Paris, where both appeared in the spring of ’44. We do not hear that they were seen together in the French capital, so the adieux may already have been exchanged. Liszt stayed there but a few weeks, and then started on a tour through the French departments. Then he crossed the Pyrenees, and pushed as far south as Gibraltar. Less than three years later he was in the toils of a third woman—the Princess Zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, with whom his relations endured twelve years. It is noteworthy that he and Lola turned their thoughts from love to religion almost at the same time, though half a world lay between them.
Of the third actor in this little drama it is hardly within my province to speak. The Comtesse d’Agoult found consolation in the care of her children and in those wider interests of which she never tired. She ardently espoused the cause of the Revolution in 1848. More fortunate than her old lover, she never lost the sane and generous sympathies of her youth. You may read her Souvenirs, published at Paris the year after her death (1877). Liszt long survived the women who had loved him—not a fate that either of them would have envied him.
IX
AT THE BANQUET OF THE IMMORTALS
Lola’s first appearance in Paris was, like her début at Her Majesty’s, a fiasco. Thanks, no doubt, to her reputation for beauty and audacity, she secured an engagement at the Opera, then under the management of Léon Pillet. The power behind the throne was the great Madame Stoltz, who some years later was to be hooted off the stage by a hostile clique just as Lola had been nine months before. At that time, however, no one dreamed of a revolt against the all-powerful cantatrice whose favour the danseuse was fortunate to procure. The great Stoltz looked best and was luckiest in men’s parts, and therefore saw no rival in the now famous “Andalouse.”
Lola, accordingly, made her bow to the Parisian public on Saturday, 30th March 1844, in Il Lazzarone, an opera in two acts by Halévy. Her audience was more fastidious than the playgoers of Dresden and Warsaw. Her beauty ravished them, but in her dancing they saw little merit. Seeing this, Lola made a characteristic bid for their favour. Her satin shoe had slipped off. Seizing it, she threw it with one of her superb gestures into the boxes, where it was pounced upon and brandished as a precious relic by a gentleman of fashion. The manœuvre seems to have succeeded in its object, for the Constitutionnel next morning found it necessary to warn young dancers against the danger of factitious applause, while “abstaining from criticising too severely a pretty woman who had not had time to study Parisian tastes.” Théophile Gautier was less gallant:—
“We are reluctant,” he writes, “to speak of Lola Montes, who reminds us by her Christian name of one of the prettiest women of Granada, and by her surname of the man who excited in us the most powerful dramatic emotions we have ever experienced—Montes, the most illustrious espada of Spain. The only thing Andalusian about Mlle. Lola Montes is a pair of magnificent black eyes. She gabbles Spanish very indifferently, French hardly at all, and English passably [sic]. Which is her country? That is the question. We may say that Mlle. Lola has a little foot and pretty legs. Her use of these is another matter. The curiosity excited by her adventures with the northern police, and her conversations, à coups de cravache, with the Prussian gens d’armes, has not been satisfied, it must be admitted. Mlle. Lola Montes is certainly inferior to Dolores Serrai, who has, at least, the advantage of being a real Spaniard, and redeems her imperfections as a dancer by a voluptuous abandon, and an admirable fire and precision of rhythm. We suspect, after the recital of her equestrian exploits, that Mlle. Lola is more at home in the saddle than on the boards.”