The title-page of this effort ran as follows:
THE
ARTS OF BEAUTY
OR
SECRETS OF A LADY'S TOILET
WITH HINTS TO GENTLEMEN
ON THE
ART OF FASCINATION
BY MADAME LOLA MONTEZ
COUNTESS OF LANDSFELD
NEW YORK
DICK AND FITZGERALD, PUBLISHERS
18 ANN STREET
A Canadian publisher, John Lovell, on the look-out for a novelty, read this effort and suggested that a friend of his, Émile Chevalier, of Paris, should sponsor an edition of Lola's Arts of Beauty for consumption on the boulevards. "I am too much an admirer of the gifted author," was M. Chevalier's response, "to undertake the work without consulting her." Accordingly, he got into touch with Lola, offering to have a translation made. "Thank you," she replied, "but I wish to do it myself. You, however, can put in any corrections you think necessary. I have not written anything in French since the death of poor Bon-Bon [Dujarier], and I want to see if I still remember the language." Apparently she did so, for, shortly afterwards, the manuscript was sent across the Atlantic and delivered to M. Chevalier. Within another month it was on the bookstalls. "I have retouched it very little," says the editor in his preface, "as I was anxious to preserve Madame Lola's distinctly original style. Her pen is as mordant as her dog-whip."
M. Chevalier was charmed with the fashion in which Lola had acquitted herself, and wrote florid letters of thanks to her in New York. With a supplementary lecture on "Instructions for Gentlemen in the Art of Fascination," which was added to fill up the book, he declared himself much impressed. "This," he says, "exhibits a profound knowledge of the human heart, and is altogether one of the finest and most piquant criticisms on American manners with which I am familiar." "Who," he continues, warming to his work, "is more thoroughly qualified to discuss the development and preservation of natural beauty than the Countess of Landsfeld?"; and in an introductory puff he adds: "These observations are very judicious, and as applicable in Europe as in America. They should, I feel, be indelibly engraved on the minds of all sensible women."
Perhaps they were. At any rate, the result of M. Chevalier's enterprise was a distinct success, and the Paris bookshops soon got rid of 50,000 copies. In fact, Lola was very nearly a best-seller.
In addition to her expert views on "Beautiful Women," Lola had plenty of other subjects up her sleeve, to be incorporated in a series of lectures. The list covered a wide range, for it included such diverse headings as "Ladies with Pasts," "Heroines of History," "Romanism," "Wits and Women of Paris," "Comic Aspects of Love," and "Gallantry." On all of these matters she had plenty to say. On some of them quite a lot, for they ran to an average of a dozen closely printed pages, and, when delivered in public, took up three hours. In the one on "Beautiful Women" precise details were given as to the adventitious causes contributing to her own sylph-like figure, glossy hair and pearly teeth, etc., and a number of prescriptions were also offered. These, she recommended, should be manufactured at home. "For a few shillings and a little trouble," she pointed out, "any lady can secure an adequate supply of all such things, composed of materials far superior to the expensive compounds bought from druggists;" and the recipes, she insisted, "had been translated by herself from the original French, Spanish, German, and Italian." Among these were Beaume à l'Antique, Unction de Maintenon, and Pommade de Seville; and "a retired actress at Gibraltar" was responsible for a specific for "warding off baldness." Lola put it in two words—"avoid nightcaps." But she was sympathetic about scalp troubles. "Without a fine head of hair, no woman can be really beautiful.... The dogs would bark at and run away from her in the street." To be well covered on top was, she held, "quite as important for the opposite sex." "How like a fool or a ruffian," she remarked, "do the noblest masculine features appear if the hair of the head is bad. Many a dandy who has scarcely brains or courage enough to catch a sheep has enslaved the hearts of a hundred girls with his Hyperion locks!"
Although nominally the author of them, these lectures were, like her previous flight, really strung together by that clerical "ghost," the Rev. Chauncey Burr, with whom she had collaborated in her "memoirs." Wielding a ready pen, he gave good value, for the chapters were well sprinkled with choice classical quotations and elegant extracts from the poets, together with allusions to Aristotle and Theophrastus, to Madame de Staël and Washington Irving.
In the lecture on "Gallantry," Lola had a warm encomium for King Ludwig.