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.
But Lola appears to have avoided any such rigid censorship. At any rate, a certain Auguste Papon (a mixture of pimp and souteneur), whom she had met in Paris, happened to be in Munich at the same time as herself. The intimacy was revived; and, as he did not possess the entrée to the Court, for some weeks they lived together at the Hotel Maulich. In the spring of 1847 a young Guardsman found himself in the town, on his way back to England from Kissengen. He records that, not knowing who she was, he sat next Lola Montez at dinner one evening, and gives an instance of her quick temper. "On the floor between us," he says, "was an ice-pail, with a bottle of champagne. A sudden quarrel occurred with her neighbour, a Bavarian lieutenant; and, applying her foot to the bucket, she sent it flying the length of the room."
IV
Lola certainly made the running. Five days after she first met him, Ludwig summoned all the officials of the Court, and astonished (and shocked) them by introducing her with the remark: "Gentlemen, I have the honour to present to you my best friend. See to it that you accord her every possible respect." He also compelled his long suffering spouse to admit her to the Order of the Chanoines of St. Thérèse, a distinction for which--considering her somewhat lurid "past"--this new recipient was scarcely eligible.
When he heard that instructions had been issued for paying special compliments to her, Mr. Punch registered severe disapproval.
"It is a good joke," he remarked, "to call upon others to uphold the dignity of one who is always at some freak or other to lower herself."
When she first sailed in dramatic fashion into the orbit of Bavaria's sovereign, Lola Montez was just twenty-seven. In the full noontide of her beauty and allurement, she was well equipped with what the modern jargon calls sex-appeal. Big-bosomed and with generously swelling curves, "her form," says Eduard Fuchs, "was provocation incarnate." Fuchs, who was an expert on the subject of feminine attractions, knew what he was talking about. "Shameless and impudent," adds Heinrich von Treitschke, "and as insatiable in her voluptuous desires as Sempronia, she could converse with charm among friends; manage mettlesome horses; sing in thrilling fashion; and recite amorous poems in Spanish. The King, an admirer of feminine beauty, yielded to her magic. It was as if she had given him a love philtre. For her he forgot himself; he forgot the world; and he even forgot his royal dignity."