As at Her Majesty’s, so at the Opera. Lola’s first appearance was her last. For the rest of the year, as far as I can learn, she was out of an engagement. She had, no doubt, made some money during her German and Russian tour, and Liszt would not have forgotten her when he started on his southern tour at the end of April.
If her association with him had begotten in Lola Montez a thirst for wit and genius, she had every chance of slaking it in Paris. There were giants on the earth in those days, and they were all gathered together on the banks of the Seine. It is not too much to say that since the Medici ruled in Florence, no capital has boasted so brilliant an assemblage of men of genius as did Paris under the paternal government of July. In the year ’44, Victor Hugo, attended by a score of minor poets, daily appeared on his balcony to acknowledge the homage of the public; Lamartine was dividing his attention between politics and literature. Alfred de Musset was wrecking his constitution by spasms of debauchery. Balzac was dodging his creditors, playing truant from the National Guard, and finding time to write his “Comédie Humaine”; Théophile Gautier, a man of thirty-three, if he had not yet received the full meed of his genius, was already well known and widely appreciated. Alexandre Dumas had long since become a national institution, and his son was looking out for copy among the ladies of the demi-monde. Delphine Gay was writing her brilliant “Lettres Parisiennes” for her husband’s newspaper. The Salon was still rejecting the masterpieces of Delacroix, but Vernet was painting the ceiling of the Palais Bourbon. Auber, though past the prime of life, had not yet scored his greatest success. Paris was like Athens in the age of Pericles.
Life was really worth living then, when Louis Phillippe was king. He was an honest, kindly-natured man, this pear-headed potentate, who reigned, “comme la corniche règne autour d’un plafond.” He was the king of the bourgeois, and he looked it every inch, with his white felt hat and respectable umbrella; but in the calm sunshine of his reign the arts flourished and the world was gay. Those days before the Revolution remind us of that strange picture in our National Gallery, “The Eve of the Deluge.” Paris, as the old stagers regretfully assure us, was Paris then, and not the caravanserai of all the nations of the world. The good Americans who died then, had they gone to Paris, would have thought they had reached the wrong destination. Men of Pontus and Asia had not then made the French capital their own. The invasion of the Barbarians, says Gustave Claudin, took place in 1848. They came, not conducted by Attila, but by the newly-constructed railways. As these strangers had plenty of money to spend, they naturally sought the most fashionable quarters.
“The true Parisians disappeared in the crowd, and knew not where to find themselves. In the evening, the restaurants where they used to dine, the stalls and boxes where they used to assist at the opera and the play, were taken by assault by cohorts of sightseers wishing to steep themselves up to the neck in la vie Parisienne.”
The tide of the invasion has never diminished in volume, and the true Parisian has become extinct.
In the year 1844 the fine flower of Parisian society was in undisputed possession of the Boulevard—the quarter between the Opera and the Rue Drouot.
“By virtue of a selection which no one contested,” says the author just quoted, “nobody was tolerated there who could not lay claim to some sort of distinction or originality. There seemed to exist a kind of invisible moral barrier, closing this area against the mediocre, the insipid, and the insignificant, who passed by, but did not linger, knowing that their place was not there.”
The headquarters of the noble company of the Boulevard was the famous Café de Paris, at the corner of the Rue Taitbout. Dumas, Balzac, and Alfred de Musset were to be seen there twice or thrice a week; the eccentric Lord Seymour, founder of the French Jockey Club, had his own table there. Lola, doubtless, often tasted the unsurpassed cuisine of this celebrated restaurant, for she soon penetrated into the circle of the Olympians, and was presented with the freedom of the Boulevard.
She met Claudin (who indeed knew everybody).
“Lola Montez,” he says, “was an enchantress. There was about her something provoking and voluptuous which drew you. Her skin was white, her wavy hair like the tendrils of the woodbine, her eyes tameless and wild, her mouth like a budding pomegranate. Add to that a dashing figure, charming feet, and perfect grace. Unluckily,” the notice concludes, “as a dancer she had no talent.”