IN QUEST OF A PRINCE
“The moment I get a nice, round, lump sum of money, I am going to try to hook a prince.” In these words Lola is said to have announced her ambition to “the Englishman in Paris.” That gossipy exile, whoever he was in this particular instance, was no friend of hers, and took care, no doubt, to render her expressions as brutally as possible. I do not doubt that he has interpreted her meaning truthfully enough. It is clear that Lola was an inordinately ambitious woman, eager to play a leading part in great affairs. Her association with Dujarier and other active politicians, the glimpses she had so often obtained of courts and thrones, stimulated this longing for power. She felt within her the capacity to rule men, and the ability to surmount great obstacles. A personal courage was hers, such as would have earned its possessor, if a man, the cross of honour. She feared not the bright face of danger, dreading only that circumstance might put the things she coveted beyond her reach. Valour alone, she knew, is seldom rewarded in a woman. It is considered by the women, and more particularly the men, who do not possess it, unwomanly. Intellect, again, she had; but its development had been checked, its faculties neglected, under the Early Victorian system of women’s education. Besides, the most superficial observer could not have failed to see, that while learning in a man was accounted a qualification for responsibilities and honours, in a woman it was regarded as a not altogether enviable peculiarity—like an aquiline nose, or the gift of sword-swallowing. In the five years Lola had passed in the various capitals of Europe, it had become very plain to her that what men supremely prize in women is physical beauty. The governing sex attached no rewards (or, at any rate, the meagrest) to courage and wisdom. They asked woman only to be beautiful. Some insisted that she should also be virtuous, by which they meant she should bestow herself upon one of them exclusively. In other words, they allowed women to influence them only through the senses; and by the means they had themselves selected, the ambitious woman had no choice but to attack them.
Over the grave of Dujarier Lola may well have exclaimed, “Farewell, love!” Every one of her attachments had ended unhappily—the first ingloriously, the last tragically. Under such blows, her nature hardened. Ambition revived as sentiment waned. There was something worth living for still. At Rouen she heard the murderer of her lover acquitted. Bitter and disillusioned, she turned her steps towards Germany. Thanks to Dujarier, she had now “the round, lump sum of money” necessary to the execution of her project; and in Germany, with its thirty-six sovereigns, she could hardly fail to encounter a prince. She travelled about from watering-place to watering-place, from Wiesbaden to Homburg, from Homburg to Baden-Baden, “punting in a small way, not settling down anywhere, and almost deliberately avoiding both Frenchmen and Englishmen.” At Baden it was rumoured that the Prince of Orange (probably an old friend of her Simla days) was among her admirers. There also she met that puissant prince, Henry LXXII. of Reuss, who straightway fell in love with her. He invited her to pay a visit to his exiguous dominions, and she went, probably feeling that she was playing the part of sparrow-hawk. At the Court of Reuss she suffered agonies of boredom. The etiquette was as strict as in the palace of the Most Catholic King, and the deference exacted by Henry LXXII. as profound as though he had been Czar of all the Russias. True, in his territory, only half as large again as the county of Middlesex, he wielded a power as absolute as that autocrat’s. Of this pettiness the beautiful stranger soon showed her impatience. Her infirmity of temper betrayed itself. She infringed His Highness’s prerogative by chastising his subjects—still, this could be overlooked by an indulgent prince. But when Henry one morning beheld Lola walking straight across his flower-beds, he felt that it was time to vindicate the outraged majesty of the throne. With his own august hands he wrote and signed an order, expelling Mademoiselle Montez from the principality. To this decree effect was only given when His Highness had satisfied to the last pfennig a tremendously long bill for expenses, presented to him by the audacious offender.
As it is hardly possible to take a long walk without overstepping the limits of the principality, not many hours elapsed before Lola was beyond the reach of Henry’s wrath. She had the choice of various retreats. The neighbouring duchy of Saxe-Altenburg she, no doubt, contemptuously dismissed. To the north lay Prussia; but she could expect no welcome there. Frederick William, after her memorable adventure at the review, had given her to understand that his police could be better employed than in teaching her manners. She avoided Weimar, where her old lover, Liszt, had established himself in company with the Princess Zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. She may have lingered awhile in these pretty, petty Thuringian states, with their charming capitals set in the forest glades; and perhaps have made a pilgrimage to the Venusberg, near Eisenach, where her prototype ensnared Tannhäuser. The spirit of that old minnesänger was not altogether dead. Something of it glowed in the heart of the grey-haired man who reigned over Bavaria. Deliberately or aimlessly, Lola Montez, the Venus of her generation, journeyed south towards Munich.
XVII
THE KING OF BAVARIA
At that time Louis I., who wore the Bavarian crown, was a man sixty-one years old. He, “the most German of the Germans,” as he had been styled, was by an odd freak of fortune born in France. His father, Max Joseph, though brother of the Duke of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, commanded a regiment in the French service, and it was at Strasbourg that the child was born in 1786. His father’s grenadiers shaved off their moustaches to stuff his pillow with. The name bestowed on him in baptism was that of his godfather, the ill-fated King of France. But the Revolution soon drove him with his family across the Rhine, to Mannheim and to Rohrbach. Death quickly cleared the boy a path to the throne. His father presently succeeded his brother as Duke, and a few years later upon the extinction of the elder line of the Wittelsbachs, became Elector of Bavaria.
Even in the stormy first decade of the nineteenth century princes had to be educated, and in the year 1803 we find Louis at Göttingen, sitting at the feet of Johannes Müller, who infused him with a lively sense of nationality and a reverence for all things German. This was to stand the Prince in good stead in the dark days that followed. Those were years of profound humiliation for Germany, of poignant suffering for her people. Even in the ’forties few Germans took pride in the name, some of them settled in London and Paris, deeming it almost a reproach. In his country’s blackest night the Bavarian prince loudly proclaimed his faith in a glorious dawn. He exulted in the name of German. He was “teutsch” (as he always wrote the word) to the very core.