CHAPTER XVII. The Curtain Falls

THE CURTAIN FALLS

At the end of the year 1859, Lola, once more a bird of passage, was on the way back to America, taking with her some fresh material for another lecture campaign. This, entitled "John Bull at Home," fell very flat; and instead of, as hitherto, addressing crowded halls, she now found scanty gatherings wherever she was booked. Even when the charge of admission was reduced from the original figure of a dollar to one of 25 cents, "business" did not improve. Uncle Sam made it obvious that he took no sort of interest in John Bull, either at home or elsewhere.

America, however, was, as it happened, taking a very lively interest in something else just then that did happen to be connected with John Bull's country. This was the visit of the Prince of Wales. It had been announced by an imaginative journalist that H.R.H. was to be "piloted" during his tour by John Camel Heenan, otherwise the "Benicia Boy." It was, however, under the more rigid tutelage of General Bruce that the distinguished guest landed on American shores. Mere prose not being adequate to record the historic incident a laureate set to work:

He came! A slender youth and fair! A courtly, gentlemanly grace--the Grace of God! The tenure of his mother's Throne, and great men's fame Sat like a sparkling jewel on his brow. Ah, Albert Edward! When you homeward sail Take back with you, and treasure in your soul A wholesome lesson which you here may learn!

While he was in New York a ball in honour of the Prince was given at the Opera House by the "Committee of Welcome." This inspired a second laureate, Edmund Clarence Stedman:

But as ALBERT EDWARD, young and fair, Stood on the canopied dais-chair, And looked from the circle crowding there To the length and breadth of the outer scene, Perhaps he thought of his mother, the QUEEN: (Long may her empery be serene! Long may the Heir of England prove Loyal and tender; may he pay No less allegiance to her love Than to the sceptre of her sway!)

The visit of the Prince of Wales was not the only attraction challenging the popularity of Lola Montez at this period. There was another rival, and one in more direct competition with herself. This was Sam Cowell, a music-hall "star" from England. A comedian of genuine talent, he took America by storm with a couple of ballads, "The Rat-Catcher's Daughter" and "Villikins and his Dinah." The public flocked to hear him in their thousands. Lola's lectures fell very flat. Even fresh material and reduced prices failed to serve as a lure. The position was becoming serious.

But, while her manager looked glum when he examined the box-office figures, Lola was not upset, for she had suddenly developed another activity, and one to which she was giving all her attention. This was the occult. The "Voices" at whose bidding she had abandoned the stage a couple of years earlier were now insistent that she should drop the platform; and, casting in her lot with the "Spirits," get into touch with a mysterious region vaguely referred to as "the Beyond."

It was a time when spiritualism was flourishing like a green bay tree. Mrs. Hayden ("the wife of a respectable journalist") and the Fox Sisters had been playing their pranks for years and collecting dollars from dupes all over the country; and their rivals, the Davenport Brothers, with Daniel Dunglas Home (Browning's "Sludge, the Medium") were humbugging Harvard professors, financial magnates, and Supreme Court judges; and, not to be behindhand, other experts were (for a cash consideration) calling up Columbus and Shakespeare and Napoleon, who talked to them at seances as readily as if they were at the end of a telephone, but with pronounced American accents.

(Harvard Theatre Collection)]

Lola's first reaction was all that could be desired. There never was a more promising recruit or a more receptive one. Quite prepared to take the "Voices" on trust, and to contribute liberally to the "cause," she attended a number of psychic circles, arranged by Stephen Andrews and other charlatans; listened to mysterious rappings and tappings coming out of the darkness; felt inanimate objects being lifted across the room; heard tambourines rattled by invisible hands; and unquestionably swallowed all the traditional tomfoolery that appears to be part and parcel of such "phenomena."

This state of things might have continued indefinitely. By, however, an unfortunate mischance, a "medium," from whom much was expected, went, in his endeavour to give satisfaction, a little too far. Not keeping a vigilant eye on European happenings, he announced at one such gathering that the "spirit" addressing the assembly was that of Ludwig of Bavaria. As, however, Ludwig was still in the land of the living (where, by the way, he remained for several years to come) it was a bad slip. The result was, Lola felt her faith shaken, and, convinced that she was being exploited, shut up her purse, and withdrew from the promised "guidance."

Under stress of emotion, some women take to the bottle; others to the Bible. With Lola Montez, however, it was a case of from Bunkum to Boanerges, from the circle to the conventicle. Spiritualism had been tried and found wanting. Casting about for something with which to fill the empty niche and adjust her equilibrium, she turned to religion for consolation. The brand she selected was that favoured by the Methodists. One would scarcely imagine that Little Bethel would have had much appeal to her. But perhaps its very drabness and remoteness from the world of the footlights proved a welcome relief.

Having "got religion," Lola fastened upon it with characteristic fervour. It occupied all her thoughts; and in the process she soon developed what would now be dubbed a marked inferiority-complex.

"Lord," she wrote at this period, "Thy mercies are great to me. Oh! how little are they deserved, filthy worm that I am! Oh! that the Holy Spirit may fill my soul with prayer! Lord, have mercy on Thy weary wanderer, and grant me all I beseech of Thee! Oh! give me a meek and lowly heart. Amen."

A doctor, had she consulted one just then, would probably have prescribed a blue pill.

There is a theory that the "Light" had been vouchsafed as the result of a chance visit to Spurgeon's Tabernacle when she was last in England. Although Spurgeon himself never put forward any such claim, a diary that Lola kept at the time has a significant entry:

LONDON,

September 10, 1859.

How many, many years of my life have been sacrificed to Satan and my own love of sin! What have I not been guilty of in thought or deed during these years of wretchedness! Oh! I dare not think of the past. What have I not been! I only lived for my own passions; and what is there of good even in the best natural human being! What would I not give to have my terrible and fearful experience given as an awful warning to such natures as my own!

A week later, things not having improved during the interval, she took stock of her position in greater detail:

I am afraid sometimes that I think too well of myself. But let me only look back to the past. Oh! how I am humbled.... How manifold are my sins, and how long in years have I lived a life of evil passions without a check!

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.... This week I have principally sinned through hastiness of temper and uncharitableness of feeling towards my neighbour. Oh! that I could have only love for others and hatred of myself!

Another passage ran:

To-morrow is Sunday, and I shall go into 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 souls.

The "conversion" of Lola Montez was no flash in the pan, or the result of a sudden impulse. It was a real one, deep and sincere and lasting. Her former triumphs on the stage and in the boudoir had become as dust and ashes. Compared with her new-found joy in religion, all else was vanity and emptiness.

"I can forget my French and German, and everything else I have valued," she is declared to have said to a pressman, who, scenting a "news story," followed hot-foot on her track, "but I cannot forget my Christ."

She had been "Montez the Magnificent." Now she was "Montez the Magdalen." The woman whose voluptuous beauty and unbridled passion had upset thrones and fired the hearts of men was now concerned with the saving of souls. As such, she resolved to spread "the Word" among others less happily circumstanced. To this end, she preached in conventicles and visited hospitals, asylums, and prisons, offering a helping hand to all who would accept one, and especially to "unfortunates" of her own sex. She had her disappointments. But neither snubs nor setbacks, nor sneers nor jeers could turn her from the path she had elected to tread.

"In the course of a long experience as a Christian minister," says a clergyman whom she encountered at this period, "I do not think I ever saw deeper penitence and humility, more real contrition of soul, and more bitter self-reproach than in this poor woman."

"With," he adds, in an oleaginous little tract on the subject, "a heart full of generous sympathy for the poor outcasts of her own sex, she devoted the last few months of her life to visiting them at the Magdalen Asylum, near New York.... She strove to impress upon them not only the awful guilt of breaking the divine law, but the inevitable earthly sorrow which those who persisted with thoughtless desperation in sinful courses were assuredly treasuring up for themselves."

But, except those who encountered her charity and self-sacrifice, there were few who had a good word for Lola Montez in her character as a Magdalen. People who had fawned upon her in the days of her success now jeered and sneered and affected to doubt the reality of her penitence. "Once a sinner, always a sinner," they declared; and "Lola in the pulpit is rich!" was another barbed shaft.

In thus abandoning the buskin for the Bible, Lola Montez was following one example and setting another. The example she followed was that of Mlle Gautier, of the Comedie Francaise, who, after flashing across the horizon of Maurice de Saxe (and several others), left the footlights and retired to a convent. "It is true," she says in her memoirs, "that I have encountered during my theatrical career a number of people whose morals have been as irreproachable as their talents, but I myself was not among them." This was putting it--well--mildly, for, according to Le d'Hoefer, "her stage career was marked by a freedom of manner pushed to the extremity of licence."

In the sisterhood that she joined the new name of Mlle Gautier was Sister Augustine. As such, she lived a Carmelite nun for thirty-two years. But time did not hang heavy on her hands, for, in addition to religious exercises and domestic tasks, she occupied herself with painting miniatures and composing verses. "I am so happy here," she wrote from her cell, "that I much regret having delayed too long entering this holy place. The real calm and peace I have now discovered have made me imagine all my previous life an evil dream."

The example that Lola Montez was setting was to be followed, fifty years later, by another member of her calling. This was Eve Lavalliere, who, after a distinctly hectic career, cut herself adrift from the footlights of Paris and entered the mission-field of North Africa. "Here at your feet," she says in one of her letters, "lies the vilest, lowest, and most contemptible object on earth, a worm from the dung-heap, the most infamous, the most soiled of all creatures. Lord, I am but a poor sheep in your flock!"

There is also something of a parallel between the career of Lola Montez and that of Theodora, who, once in the circus ring, and, at the start, a lady of decidedly easy virtue, afterwards became the consort of the Emperor Justinian and shared his throne. Like Lola, too, Theodora endeavoured to make amends for her early slips by voluntarily abandoning the pomp and power she had once enjoyed and giving herself up to the redemption of "fallen women."

III

Perhaps the "Spirits" resented being abandoned by her in summary fashion; perhaps she had overtaxed her energies addressing outdoor meetings in all weathers. At any rate, and whatever the cause, while she was travelling in the country during the winter of 1860, Lola Montez was suddenly stricken down by a mysterious illness. As it baffled the hospital doctors, she had to be taken back to New York. There, instead of getting better, she gradually got worse, developing consumption, followed by partial paralysis.

"What a study for the thoughtless; what a sermon on the inevitable result of human vanity!" was the ghoulish comment of a scribbler.

Rufus Blake, an entrepreneur, under whose banner she had once starred, has some reminiscences of her at this period. "She lived," he says, "in strict retirement, reading religious books, and steadily, calmly, hopefully preparing for death, fully convinced that consumption had snapped the pillars of her life and that she was soon to make her final exit."

After an interval, word of Lola's collapse reached England by means of a cutting in a theatrical paper. There it appears to have touched a long slumbering maternal chord. "Mrs. Craigie," says a paragraphist, "suddenly arrived in America, anxious, as next of kin, to secure her daughter's property. On discovering, however, that none existed, she hurried back again, leaving behind her a sum of three pounds for medicine and other necessities."

Cast off by her fair-weather friends, bereft of her looks, poverty-stricken, and ravaged by an insidious illness, the situation of Lola Montez was, during that winter of 1860, one to excite pity among the most severe of judges. Under duress, even her new found trust in Providence began to falter. Was prayer, she wondered forlornly, to fail her like everything else? Suddenly, however, and when things were at their darkest, a helping hand was offered. One bitter evening, as she sat brooding in the miserable lodging where she had secured temporary shelter, she was visited by a Mrs. Buchanan, claiming her as a friend of the long distant past. The years fell back; and, with an effort, Lola recognised in the visitor a girl, now a mature matron, whom she had last met in Montrose.

The sympathy of Mrs. Buchanan, shared to the full by her husband, a prosperous merchant, was of a practical description. Although familiar with the many lapses in Lola's career, they counted for nothing beside the fact that she was in sore need. Bygones were bygones. Insisting that the stricken woman should leave her wretched surroundings, Mrs. Buchanan took her into her own well-appointed house, provided doctors and nurses, and did all that was possible to smooth her path. Deeply religious herself, she soon won back her faltering faith, and summoned a clergyman, the Rev. Dr. Hawks, to prepare her for the inevitable and rapidly approaching end.

A smug little booklet, The Story of a Penitent: Lola Montez, published under the auspices of the "Protestant Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge," was afterwards written by this shepherd. Since his name did not appear on the title page, he was able to make several unctuous references to himself.

"Most acceptable," he says in one characteristic passage, "were his ministrations. Refreshing, too, to his own spirit were his interviews with her."

"It was," he continues, "in the latter part of 1860 that I received a message from the unhappy woman so well known to the public under the name of Lola Montez, earnestly requesting me to visit her and minister to her spiritual wants. She had been stricken down by a paralysis of her left side. For some days she was unconscious, and her death seemed to be at hand. She had, however, rallied, and a most benevolent Christian female, who had been her schoolmate in Scotland in the days of her girlhood, and knew her well, had stepped forward and provided for the temporal comfort of the afflicted companion of her childhood. The real name of Lola Montez was Eliza G., and she was of respectable family in Ireland, where she was born."

But neither the Rev. Mr. Hawks, with his oiliness and smug piety, nor Mrs. Buchanan, with her true womanly sympathy and understanding, could bring Lola Montez back to health, any more than--for all their pills and purges--could the doctors and nurses round her bed. She lay there, day after day, aware of their presence, but unable to move or speak. Yet, able to think. Thoughts crowded upon her in a series of flashing pictures; a bewildering phantasmagoria, coming out of the shadows, and beckoning to her. Childhood's memories of India; hot suns, marching men, palanquins and elephants; Montrose and a dour Calvinism; Bath and Sir Jasper Nicolls; love's young dream; Lieutenant James and the runaway marriage in Dublin; another experience of India's coral strand; kind-hearted Captain Craigie and hard-hearted George Lennox; the Consistory Court proceedings; fiasco at Her Majesty's Theatre; Ranelagh and Lumley; wanderjahre and odyssey; Paris and Dujarier; Ludwig and the steps of a throne; passion and poetry; intrigues and liaisons; Cornet Heald and Patrick Hull; voyages from the old world to the new; mining camps and backwoods; palaces and conventicles; glittering triumphs and abject failures. And now, gasping and struggling for breath, the end.

The sands were running out. The days slipped away, and, with them, the last vitality of the woman who had once been so full of life and the joy of living.

The doctors did what they could. But it was very little, for Lola Montez was beyond their help. The end was fast at hand. It came with merciful swiftness. On January 17, 1861, she turned her face to the wall and drew a last shuddering breath.

"I am very tired," she whispered.

The funeral took place two days later. "Accompanied by some of our most respected citizens and their families," says an eye-witness, "the cortege left the house of Mrs. Buchanan for Green-Wood cemetery."

"The Rev. Dr. Hawks," adds a second account, "was constantly at the bedside of Lola Montez, and gave her the benefit of his pastoral care as freely as if she had been a member of his own flock. He conducted her obsequies in an impressive fashion; and Mr. Brown, his assistant, who had himself attended so many funerals and weddings in his day, was seen to wipe the tears from his eyes, as he heard the reverend gentleman remark to Mrs. Buchanan that he had never met with an example of more genuine penitence."

"Is not this a brand plucked from the burning?" enquired the Rev. Mr. Hawks, as he stood addressing the company assembled round the grave. He himself was assured that the description was thoroughly applicable to the woman lying there.

"I never saw," he declared, "a more humble penitent. When I prayed with her, nothing could exceed the fervour of her devotion; and never have I had a more watchful and attentive hearer when I read the Scriptures.... If ever a repentant soul loathed past sin, I believe hers did."

Possibly, since it could scarcely have been Mrs. Buchanan, it was this clerical busybody who was responsible for the inscription on Lola's headstone:

MRS. ELIZA GILBERT

DIED

JANUARY 17, 1861.

An odd mask under which to shelter the identity of the gifted woman who, given in baptism the names Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna, had flashed across three continents as Lola Montez, Countess of Landsfeld.

(Photo by Miss Ida U. Mellen, New York)]

Misrepresented as she had been in her life, Lola Montez was even more misrepresented after her death. The breath was scarcely out of her body, when a flood of cowardly scurrilities was poured from the gutter press. Her good deeds were forgotten; only her derelictions were remembered.

One such obituary notice began:

"A woman who, in the full light of the nineteenth century, renewed all the scandals that disgraced the Middle Ages, and, with an audacity that is almost unparalleled, seated herself upon the steps of a throne, is worthy of mention; if only to show to what extent vice can sometimes triumph, and to what a fall it can eventually come."

An editorial, which was published in one of the New York papers, contained some odd passages:

"Among the most ardent admirers of Lola Montez was a young Scotsman, a member of the illustrious house of Lennox, who was with difficulty restrained by his family from offering her his hand. In London the deceased led a gay life, being courted by the Earl of Malmesbury and other distinguished noblemen. Wherever she went, she was the observed of all observers, conquering the hearts of men of all countries by her beauty and blandishments, and their admiration by her unflinching independence of character and superior intellectual endowments."

The death of Lola Montez did not pass without comment in England. The Athenaeum necrologist accorded her half a column of obituary, in which she was described as "this pretty, picaroon woman, whose name can never be omitted from any chronicle of Bavaria."

A Grub Street hack, employed by the curiously named Gentleman's Magazine, slung together a column of abuse and lies, founded on tap-room gossip:

"When not yet sixteen, she ran away from a school near Cork with a young officer of the Bengal Army, Lieutenant Gilbert (sic), who married her and took her to India. In consequence of her bad conduct there, he was soon obliged to send her back to Europe. She first tried the stage as a profession, but, failing at it, she eventually adopted a career of infamy."

A writer in Temple Bar has endeavoured, and, on the whole, with fair measure of success, to preserve the balance:

"With more of the good and more of the evil in her composition than in that of most of her sisters, Lola Montez made a wreck of her life by giving reins to the latter; and she stands out as a prominent example of the impossibility of a woman breaking away from the responsibilities of her sex with any permanent gain, either to herself or to society. Her passionate, enthusiastic and loving nature was her strength which, by fascinating all who came into contact with her, was also her weakness."

Cameron Rogers, writing on "Gay and Gallant Ladies," sums up the career of Lola Montez in deft fashion:

"Thus passed one who has been called the Cleopatra and the Aspasia of the nineteenth century. A very gallant and courageous lady, certainly; and, though she used her beauty and her mind not in accordance with the Decalogue, yet worthy to be remembered as much for the excellent vigour of the latter as for the perfection of the former. Individual damnation or salvation in such a case as hers are matters of strict opinion; but for Lola's brief to the last judgment there is an ancient tag that might never be more aptly appended. Like the moral of her life, it is exceedingly trite--Quia multum amavit."

This is well put.

Even after she was in it, and might, one would think, have been left there in peace, the dead woman was not allowed to rest quietly in her grave. Some years later her mantle was impudently assumed by an alleged actress, who, dubbing herself "Countess of Landsfeld," undertook a lecture tour in America. If she had no other gift, this one certainly had that of imagination. "I was born," she said to a reporter, "in Florence, and my mother, Lola Montez, was really married to the King Ludwig of Bavaria. This marriage was strictly valid, and my mother's title of countess was afterwards conferred on myself. The earliest recollections I have are of being brought up by some nuns in a convent in the Black Forest. But for the help of the good Dr. Doellinger, who assisted me to escape, I should still have been kept there, a victim of political interests."

This nonsense was eagerly swallowed; and for some time the pseudo-"Countess" attracted a following and reaped a rich harvest. It was not until diplomatic representations were made that her career was checked.

On Christmas Day, 1898, a New York obituary announced the death of a woman, Alice Devereux, the wife of a carpenter in poor circumstances. It further declared that she was the "daughter of the notorious Lola Montez, and may well have been the grand-daughter of Lord Byron." To this it added: "Society has maintained a studious and charitable reserve as to the parentage of Lola Montez. All that is definitely known on the subject is that a fox-hunting Irish squire, Sir Edward Gilbert, was the husband of her mother." Thus is "history" written.

Nor would the "Spirits" leave poor Lola in peace. In the year 1888 a woman "medium," calling herself Madam Anna O'Delia Diss DeBar (but, under pressure, admitting to several aliases) claimed to be a daughter of Lola Montez. As such, she conducted a number of seances, and, in return for cash down, evoked the spirit of her alleged mother. Some of the cash was extracted from the pocket of a credulous lawyer, one Luther Marsh. Thinking he had not had fair value for his dollars, he eventually prosecuted Madam for fraud, and had her sent to prison.

She was not disturbed again until the winter of 1929, when an Austrian "medium," Rudi Schneider, with, to adopt the jargon of his craft, a "trance-personality" called Olga (who professed to be an incarnation of Lola Montez), gave some seances in London. The extinguishing of the lights and the wheezing of a gramophone were followed by the usual "manifestations." Thus, curtains flapped, books fell off chairs, tambourines rattled in locked cupboards, and bells jangled, etc. But Lola Montez herself was too bashful to appear. None the less, a number of "scientists" (all un-named) afterwards announced that "everything was very satisfactory."

Thinking that these claims to get into touch with the dead should be subjected to a more adequate test, Mr. Harry Price, director of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, arranged for Rudi Schneider to give a sample of his powers to a committee of experts. As a convincing test, Major Hervey de Montmorency (a nephew of the Mr. Francis Leigh with whom Lola had once lived in Paris) suggested that the accomplished "Olga" should be asked the name of his uncle (which was different from his own) and the circumstances under which they had parted. This was done, and "Olga" promised to give full details at the next sitting. But the promise was not kept. "She conveniently shelved every question," says the official report. Altogether, Rudi Schneider's stock fell.

The body of Lola Montez, Countess of Landsfeld, and Canoness of the Order of St. Therese, has now been crumbling in the dust of a distant grave, far from her own kith and kindred, for upwards of seventy years. Her name, however, will still be remembered when that of other women who have filled a niche in history will have been forgotten.

Lola Montez was no common adventuress. By her beauty and intelligence and magnetism she weaved a spell on well nigh all who came within her radius. Never any member of her sex quite like this one. Had she been born in the Middle Ages, superstition would have had it that Venus herself was revisiting the haunts of men in fresh guise. But she would then probably have perished at the stake, accused of witchcraft by her political opponents. As it was, even in the year 1848 a sovereign demanded that a professional exorcist should "drive the devil out of her."

To present Lola Montez at her true worth, to adjust the balance between her merits and her demerits, is a difficult task. A woman of a hundred opposing facets; of rare culture and charm, and of whims and fancies and strange enthusiasms each battling with the other. Thus, by turns tender and callous, hot-tempered and soft-hearted; childishly simple in some things, and amazingly shrewd in others; trusting and suspicious; arrogant and humble, yet supremely indifferent to public opinion; grateful for kindness and loyal to her friends, but neither forgetting nor forgiving an injury. Men had treated her worse than she had treated them.

For the rest, a flashing, vivid personality, full of resource and high courage, and always meeting hard knocks and buffets with equanimity. Lola Montez had lived every moment of her life. In the course of their career, few women could have cut a wider swath, or one more colourful and glamorous. She had beauty and intelligence much above the average. All the world had been her stage; and she had played many parts on it. Some of them she had played better than others; but all of them she had played with distinction. She had boxed the compass as no woman had ever yet boxed it. From adventuress to evangelist; coryphee, courtesan, and convert, each in turn. At the start a mixture of Cleopatra and Aspasia; and at the finish a feminine Pelagian. Equally at home in the company of princes and poets and diplomats and demireps, during the twenty years she was before the public she had scaled heights and sunk to depths. Thus, she had queened it in palaces and in camps; danced in opera houses and acted in booths; she had bent monarchs and politicians to her will; she had stood on the steps of a throne, and in the curb of a gutter; she had known pomp and power, riches and poverty, dazzling successes and abject failures; she had conducted amours and liaisons and intrigues by the dozen; she had made history in two hemispheres; a king had given up his crown for her; men had lived for her; and men had died for her.

As with the rest of us, Lola Montez had her faults. Full measure of them. But she also had her virtues. She was gallant and generous and charitable. At the worst, her heart ruled her head; and if she did many a foolish thing, she never did a mean one.

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In the final analysis, when the last balance is struck, this will surely be placed to her credit.

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