Happy movements, clear and near,
Are in thy living grace.
Supple and tender, as a deer
Art thou, of Andalusian race!
"Wunderschön!" declared an admiring aide-de-camp to whom he showed it.
"Kolossal!" echoed a second, not to be outdone in recognising laureateship.
As, however, the cheers were mingled with a few hisses ("due to the report that the newcomer was an English Freemason, and wanted to destroy the Catholic religion"), the next evening the management took the precaution of filling the pit with a leather-lunged and horny-handed claque. This time the bill consisted of a comedy, Der Weiberseind von Benedix, followed by a cachucha and a fandango with Herr Opsermann for a dancing-partner.
Lola's success was assured; and Herr Frays, who had started by refusing to let her appear, was now full of grovelling apologies. He offered her a contract. But Lola, having other ideas as to how her time should be employed in Munich, would not accept it.
"Thank you for nothing," she said. "When I asked you for an engagement, you told me I was not good enough to dance in your theatre. Well, I have now proved to both Fräulein Frenzal and yourself that I am. That is all I care about, and I shall not dance again, either for you or for anybody else."
If she had known enough German, she would probably have added: "Put that in your pipe and smoke it!"
Munich in those days must have proved attractive to people with small incomes. Thus, Edward Wilberforce, who spent some years there, says that meat was fivepence a pound, beer twopence-halfpenny a quart, and servants' wages eight shillings a month. But there were drawbacks.
"The city," says an English guide-book of this period, "has the reputation of being a very dissolute capital." Yet it swarmed with churches. The police, too, exercised a strict watch upon the hotel registers; and, as a result of their activities, a "French visitor was separated from his feminine companion on grounds of public morality."
"None of your Parisian looseness for us!" said the City Fathers.