Lola Montez Part 13

We have no knowledge of the business that took Lola once more to France on this occasion. She probably went there to spend, in the most agreeable way possible, the considerable sums she had ama.s.sed in her Australian tour. It may be supposed that she spent some time at Paris, renewing the acquaintance of her old friends. Dumas, Mery, De Beauvoir, were all living, and death had made few gaps in her circle of friends during the past ten years. In August, Lola followed the fas.h.i.+onable crowd to the southern watering-places, and stayed at St. Jean de Luz, within easy reach of the imperial court at Biarritz. Hence she addressed this extraordinary letter to the _Estafette_:--

"ST. JEAN DE LUZ, HoTEL DU CYGNE, "_2nd September, 1856_.

"The Belgian newspapers, and some French ones, have a.s.serted that the suicide of the actor, Mauclerc, who, it is reported, has thrown himself from the summits of the Pic du Midi, was caused by domestic troubles for which I was responsible. This is a calumny which M.

Mauclerc himself will be ready to refute. We separated amicably, it is true, after eight days of married life, but urged only by our common and imperious need of personal liberty. It is probable that the tragedy of the Pic du Midi exists only in the imagination of some journalist on the look-out for sensational news. Trusting to your sense of fairness to insert this explanation in your excellent journal, I remain, yours, etc.,

LOLA MONTEZ."

This letter was copied by _La Presse_, which De Girardin still edited, and was presently noticed by the person most interested. His reply was duly published:--

"BAYONNE, _9th September, 1856_.

"SIR,--I read in your issue of the 7th. inst. a letter from Lola Montez, wherein there is talk of a suicide of which I have been the victim, and a marriage in which I have been princ.i.p.al actor. I am a complete stranger to such catastrophes. I have never had the least intention of throwing myself from the Pic du Midi, or from any other peak, and I do not recollect having had the advantage of marrying--even for eight days--the celebrated Countess of Landsfeld,--Yours, etc.,

MAUCLERC."[29]

The simplest and most probable explanation of this affair is to set it down as a hoax. Bayonne and St. Jean de Luz are neighbouring towns, and it is possible that the actor had (perhaps unwittingly) incurred the anger of the Countess, who devised this rather elaborate means of revenge.

Soon after, Lola returned to the United States, a country for which she had conceived a strong liking. She considered it her home, says the Rev.

F. L. Hawks, and had a sincere admiration for its inst.i.tutions. Lola was by nature a republican, and intimacy with sovereigns had not much awakened her distaste for them.

"To Freedom ever true, true, true, All his long life was Harlequin!"

On 2nd February 1857 we find her fulfilling a week's engagement at the Green Street Theatre at Albany, acting in _The Eton Boy_, _The Follies of a Night_, and _Lola in Bavaria_. She was not unknown at the state capital, having appeared there, with a _troupe_ of twelve dancers, at the Museum, in May 1852. On the present occasion she gave another proof of her dare-devil courage, by crossing the Hudson River in an open skiff among the floating ice.

"She got over in safety, but part of her wardrobe was carried down stream. By going to Troy she could have avoided all danger, but her love of notoriety led her to offer a hundred dollars to be carried across here."[30]

This recklessness may have proceeded from that want of interest in life, that utter sense of desolation, which a.s.sailed her whenever she was not distracted by travel and adventure. A lonely, disenchanted woman, without any ties or hold on life, she found herself now on the verge of forty. Her days for adventure had pa.s.sed. At times she must have sighed for her home among the Californian foothills. Surely it was wise and dignified, for one who had exhausted her strength and vitality in the struggles of an artificial society, to throw herself on the placid bosom of our common mother? There, in time, she would have awakened to fuller comprehension of man's place in the universe, and have learned at once the true value of all her past actions, and the futility of remorse. But in New York no one listened for the whisperings of Nature; instead, they fancied they heard voices from some other world. Women who have lost their hold on life readily give ear to visionaries: having exhausted the joys of this world, they wish to test those of another. Lola became a believer in spiritualism. The imagined touch of some fatuous phantom would thrill her as no man's had power to do. One day she announced that the spirits had directed her to abandon the stage, and to become a lecturer. Apparently, however, she had no confidence in their ability to inspire her on the platform, for she caused her lectures to be written by the Rev. C. Chauncy Burr. At the _seances_ she seems to have been brought into touch (in two senses) with several of the clergy of various Protestant denominations.

Her first lecture was delivered at a place of wors.h.i.+p called the Hope Chapel, 720 Broadway, New York, on 3rd February 1858.

"Lola Montez at Hope Chapel is good," chuckles a reporter. "It is plain that the scent of the roses hangs round her still. We have heard some queer things in that conventicle in our time, and have now and then a.s.sisted at an entertainment there twice as funny, but not half so intellectual nor half so wholesome, as the lecture our desperado in dimity gave us last night."

The New York pressman was more easily pleased than is the modern reader.

Lola's lectures were published that same year in book form, together with her autobiography, and they may be p.r.o.nounced very poor stuff. They are respectively headed, "Beautiful Women," "Gallantry," "Heroines of History," "The Comic Aspect of Love," "Wits and Women of Paris," and "Romanism." Here and there their dullness is enlivened by a flash of Lola's own native wit, or a shrewd observation that only her experience could have supplied. Sometimes she begins by what is evidently an exposition of her own views, winding up with some trite moralisings calculated to appease her audience. Speaking, for instance, of the heroines of history, she dwells with enthusiasm on the valour of Margaret of Anjou, the sagacity of Isabel the Catholic, the administrative ability of Elizabeth, the diplomatic skill of Catharine II., and recollects herself in time to impress on her hearers that one

"who is qualified to be a happy wife and a good mother, need never look with envy upon the woman of genius, whose mental powers, by fitting her for the stormy arena of politics, may have unfitted her for the quiet walks of domestic life."

As might have been expected, Lola spoke somewhat disdainfully of women who preferred to vote rather than to cajole the men who voted. The lecturer forgot, perhaps, that all her sisters were not as well equipped as she for the business of fascination, and that to some of them the personal exercise of the franchise might seem less unwomanly and objectionable than the arts of blandishment and intimidation.

Lola was bold enough to tell her American audience that the palm of beauty must be awarded to Englishwomen, and that the Yankees were too mercantile and practical to entertain the old spirit of gallantry. She mollified her hearers by adding that, after all, in America, "love dived the deepest and came out dryest"--a dark saying, from which she derived the conclusion that love in the United States was as brave, honest, and sincere a pa.s.sion as elsewhere. The lecture on Romanism will not be regarded as a very formidable instrument of attack upon the Catholic Church. It concludes: "America does not yet recognise how much she owes to the Protestant principle. It has given the world the four greatest facts of modern times--steam-boats, railroads, telegraphs, and the American Republic!"

We can imagine with what enthusiasm this sentiment was received in Hope Chapel, where the lecture was delivered in October 1858, in aid of a fund for a church which should be open free to the poor and unfortunate (as, by the way, all Roman Catholic churches are). By this time Lola appears to have been weaned of her spiritualistic heresies, and had become interested in Methodism. In her new zeal for her own soul's welfare she did not, however, forget the corporal needs of her fellows, and with native generosity, stimulated by religious considerations, she showered the money earned at her lectures upon the poor and afflicted. To replenish her store, and encouraged by the success of her new enterprize in New York, she resolved to try her luck once more on the other side of the Atlantic.

x.x.xII

A LAST VISIT TO ENGLAND

Lola landed from the American steam-s.h.i.+p, _Pacific_, at Galway on 23rd November 1858. She had not set foot in her native land since she left it, the bride of Thomas James, more than twenty years before. In Dublin she had last appeared as a _debutante_ at the viceregal court; now, on 10th December, she appeared there, on the boards of the Round Room, as a public curiosity, as a woman whose fame not one among her auditors would have envied. But they flocked to see her in hundreds, and the opening promised a highly profitable tour. In her regenerate frame of mind the lecturer was distressed by the publication in the _Freeman_ of a long article referring to her connection with Dujarier and the King of Bavaria. Being the daughter of an Anglo-Indian officer, Lola had inherited a tendency to write to the papers on every possible occasion, and she at once sent a letter to the journal, defending her character. Her relations with Dujarier and Louis were, she insisted, absolutely proper and regular: to the former she was engaged; of the latter she was merely the friend and the adviser. The aspersions of her fair fame she attributed to the intrigues of Austria. She was in Ireland, and it was as well not to refer to the Jesuits.

At the new year she crossed over to England, beginning her tour at Manchester. We hear of her at Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Leamington, Worcester, Bristol, and Bath. She drew crowded houses, though everywhere she went she had to contend with a strong counter-attraction in the person of Phineas T. Barnum, the celebrated showman, who was also touring England. Of course, she disappointed expectation. The public wanted to see the das.h.i.+ng, dazzling dare-devil of other days, not a rather sad woman, slightly tinged with Yankee religiosity. She arrived at last in London, where she lectured at St. James's Hall. Two or three of the writer's friends faintly recollect having seen her on this occasion. For the impression she produced on her audience, I prefer, however, to rely on the notice in the _Era_, under date 10th April 1859.

"Following closely upon the heels of Mr. Barnum, Madame Lola Montez, parenthetically putting forth her more aristocratic t.i.tle of Countess of Landsfeld, commenced on Thursday evening [7th April 1859] the first of a series of lectures at the St. James's Hall. Revisiting this country, she has first felt her footing as a lecturer in the provinces, and now venturing upon the ordeal of a London audience, she has boldly added her name to the list of those who have sought, single-handed, to engage their attention. If any amongst the full and fas.h.i.+onable auditory that attended her first appearance fancied, with a lively recollection of certain scandalous chronicles, that they were about to behold a formidable-looking woman of Amazonian audacity, and palpably strong-wristed, as well as strong-minded, their disappointment must have been grievous; greater if they antic.i.p.ated the legendary bull-dog at her side and the traditionary pistols in her girdle and the horsewhip in her hand. The Lola Montez who made a graceful and impressive obeisance to those who gave her on Thursday night so cordial and encouraging a reception, appeared simply as a good-looking lady in the bloom of womanhood, attired in a plain black dress, with easy, unrestrained manners, and speaking earnestly and distinctly, with the slightest touch of a foreign accent that might belong to any language from Irish to Bavarian. The subject selected by the fair lecturer was the distinction between the English and the American character, which she proceeded to demonstrate by a discourse that must be p.r.o.nounced decidedly didactic rather than diverting. With most of the characteristics mentioned as ill.u.s.trative of each country, we presume the majority of her hearers had, in the course of their reading or experience, become already acquainted. That America looked to the future for her greatness, England to the past; that Americans believed in the spittoon as a valuable inst.i.tution, and speed as the great condition of success in all things--it hardly needed a Lola Montez to come from the West to inform us. The excitable temperament of our transatlantic brethren, their readiness to raise idols and to demolish them, the great liberty of opinion that there prevails, and the little toleration of its expression, were the leading points of a lecture lasting an hour and a quarter, blended with a compliment to the American ladies, a tributary acknowledgment of the virtues of our own, and a digression into American politics as connected with everything. There was no attempt to weave into the subject a few threads of personal interest, no mention of any incident that had happened to her, and no anecdote that might have enlivened the dissertation in any way. The lecture might have been a newspaper article, the first chapter of a book of travels, or the speech of a long-winded American amba.s.sador at a Mansion House dinner. All was exceedingly decorous and diplomatic, slightly gilded here and there with those commonplace laudations that stir a British public into the utterance of patriotic plaudits. A more inoffensive entertainment could hardly be imagined; and when the six sections into which the lady had divided her discourse were exhausted, and her final bow elicited a renewal of the applause that had accompanied her entrance, the impression on the departing visitors must have been that of having spent an hour in company with a well-informed lady who had gone to America, had seen much to admire there, and, coming back, had had over the tea-table the talk of the evening to herself. Whatever the future disquisitions of the Countess of Landsfeld may be, there is little doubt that many will go to hear them for the sake of the peculiar celebrity of the lecturer."

x.x.xIII

THE MAGDALEN

That celebrity was very far from corresponding to the present dispositions and aspirations of the ex-adventuress. While travelling from town to town the trans.m.u.tation of her emotions into religious fervour had gone on unchecked. The love she had once borne to men found an object in the unseen G.o.d; the wondering disgust excited by the memory of her relations with men she had learned to dislike became translated into repentance for sin; latent ambition now leaped up at the thought of a crown to be won beyond the tomb. Christianity offers us new worlds for old, promises new joys to those who have lost all zest for the old, proposes an objective which may be pursued to the brink of the grave, and a.s.sures every human being of the tremendous importance of his own destiny. For these reasons religion has always appealed with especial force to women in Lola's situation, who, moreover, being usually deficient in the logical and critical faculties, are the less able to resist its appeal to their emotions.

During her stay in England Lola kept a spiritual diary, some fragments of which have been preserved to us. It is certainly ill.u.s.trative of the depth and earnestness of her religious convictions, and it would be a cold-blooded act to a.n.a.lyse and to dissect the state of mind it portrays.

The sentiments are often morbid in the extreme, as might be expected from one whose ideas of religion were derived from teachers of the extreme evangelical school. She writes:--

"Oh, I dare not think of the past! What have I not been? I lived only for my own pa.s.sions; and what is there of good even in the best natural human being? What would I not give to have my terrible and fearful experiences given as an awful warning to such natures as my own! And yet when people generally, even my mother, turned their backs upon me and knew me not, Jesus knocked at my heart's door. What has the world ever given to me? (And I have known _all_ that the world has to give--_all_!) Nothing but shadows, leaving a wound on the heart hard to heal--a dark discontent.

"Now I can more calmly look back on the stormy pa.s.sages of my life--an eventful life indeed--and see onward and upward a haven of rest to the soul. I used once to think that heaven was a place somewhere beyond the clouds, and that those who got there were as if they had not been themselves on the earth. But life has been given to me to know that heaven begins in the human soul, through the grace of G.o.d and His holy word. Those who cannot feel somewhat of heaven here will never find it hereafter."

On another page we find:--

"To-morrow (the Lord's day) is the day of peace and happiness. Once it seemed to me anything but a happy day, but now all is wonderfully changed in my heart.... What I loved before now I hate. Oh! that in this coming week, I may, through Thee, overcome all sinful thoughts, and love every one.

"Thankful I am that I have been permitted to pray this day. Three years ago I cried aloud in agony to be taken; and yet the great, All-Wise Creator has spared me, in His mercy, to repent. All that has pa.s.sed in New York has not been mere illusion. I feel it is true. The Lord heard my feeble cry to Him, and I felt what no human tongue can describe. The world cast me out, and He, the pure, the loving, took me in.

"To-morrow is Sunday, and I shall go to the poor little humble chapel, and there will I mingle my prayers with the fervent pastor, and with the good and true. There is no pomp or ceremony among these. All is simple. No fine dresses, no worldly display, but the honest Methodist breathes forth a sincere prayer, and I feel much unity of soul. What would I give to have daily fellows.h.i.+p with these good people! to teach in the school, to visit the old, the sick, the poor. But that will be in the Lord's good time, when self is burned out of me completely."

The following entry is dated Sat.u.r.day, in London:--

"Since last week my existence is entirely changed. When last I wrote I was calm and peaceful--away from the world. Now, I must again go forth. It was cruel, indeed, of Mr. E. to have said what he did; but I am afraid I was too hasty also. Ought I to have resented what was said? No, I ought to have said not a word. The world would applaud me; but, oh! my heart tells me that for His sake I ought to bear the vilest reproaches, even unmerited.

"Good-bye, all the calm hours of reflection and repose I enjoyed at Derby! My calm days at the cottage are gone--gone. But I will not look back. Onward! must be the cry of my heart.

"Lord, have mercy on the weary wanderer, and grant me all I beseech of Thee! Oh, give me a meek and lowly heart!"

It seems from this final extract that some painful circ.u.mstance compelled the writer against her will to go on her travels again. The diary affords proof that she was in England as late as September 1859; and the following year, she was again at New York.

x.x.xIV