Читать книгу The Magnificent Montez: From Courtesan to Convert - Horace Wyndham - Страница 33

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Having had enough of Germany for the time being, Lola decided to see what France had to offer. "The only place for a woman of spirit," she once said, "is Paris." Accordingly she betook herself there. As soon as she arrived, she secured lodgings in a modest hotel near the Palais Royal; and, well aware of her limitations, took some dancing lessons from a ballet-master in the rue Lepelletier. When she had taken what she considered enough, she called on Léon Pillet, the director of the Académie.

"You have, of course, already heard of my immense success in London," she announced with an assured air.

M. Pillet had not heard of it. But this did not matter. As had been the case with Lumley before him, Lola's ravishing smile inflamed his susceptible heart; and he promptly engaged her to dance in the ballet that was to follow Halévy's Il Lazzarone, then in active rehearsal.

Lola's début as a première danseuse was made on March 30, 1844. It was not a successful one. Far from it. The fact was, the Parisians, accustomed to the dreamy and sylph-like pirouettings of Cerito and Elssler and Taglioni, and their own Adèle Dumilâtre, could not appreciate the vigorous cachuchas and boleros now offered them. When they voiced their disapproval, Lola lost the one thing she could never keep—her temper. She made a moue at the audience; and, if de Mirecourt is to be trusted, pulled off her garters (a second authority says a more intimate item of attire) and flung them with a gesture of contempt among the jeering crowd in the first row of stalls.

As may be imagined, the Press was unsympathetic towards this "demonstration."

"We will avoid damaging with our strictures," remarked Le Constitutionnel in its next issue, "a pretty young woman who, before making her début, has obviously not had time to study our preferences."

A much more devastating criticism was published in Le Journal des Débats by Jules Janin. He went out of his way, indeed, to be positively offensive. Nor did Théophile Gautier, who in his famous waistcoat of crimson velvet was present on this eventful evening, think very much of the would-be ballerina's efforts to win Paris.

Beyond, he wrote, a pair of magnificent dark eyes, Mademoiselle Lola Montez has nothing suggestively Andalusian in her appearance. She talks poor Spanish, scarcely any French, and only tolerable English. The question is, to what country does she really belong? We can affirm that she has small feet and shapely legs. The extent, however, to which these gifts serve her is quite another story.

It must be admitted that the public's curiosity aroused by her altercations with the police of the North and her whip-cracking exploits among the Prussian gendarmes has not been satisfied. We imagine that Mademoiselle Lola would do better on horseback than on the stage.

An odd account, headed: "Singular Début of Lola Montez in Paris," was sent to New York by an American journalist:

"When, a few days ago, it was announced that two foreign dancers, Mlle. Cerito and Mlle. Lola Montez, had just entered the walls of Paris, the triumphs achieved by the Italian ballerina could not eclipse the horse-whipping exploits of Mlle. Lola. 'Let us have Lola Montez!' exclaimed the stalls and pit. 'We want to see if her foot is as light as her hand!' Never did they witness a more astounding entrée. After her first leap, she stopped short on the tips of her toes, and, by a movement of prodigious rapidity, detached one of her garters from a lissome limb adjacent to her quivering thigh (innocent of lingerie) and flung it to the occupants of the front row of the orchestra. … Notwithstanding the effect produced by this piquant eccentricity, Mile Lola has not met with the reception she anticipated; and it has been deemed proper by the management to dispense with her reappearance."

But to give Lola her congé by word of mouth was a task which M. Pillet did not care to undertake. "So much was the haughty Amazon's riding-whip dreaded that a letter of dismissal was prudently delivered. As a result, bloodshed was avoided; and Mlle. Lola has solaced herself with the reflection that she has been the victim of the Machiavellian cabal of Russia, still angry at her routing of Muscovite gendarmes in Warsaw."

With reference to the Warsaw episode, the slipshod de Mirecourt says that she was dancing there in 1839. At that date, however, she was no nearer Warsaw than Calcutta. None the less, she did go there, but it was not until she had left Paris after her failure at the Académie Royale. According to herself, the Czar Nicholas, who remembered her in Berlin, invited her to visit St. Petersburg, and, having a month to spare, she accepted a preliminary engagement in the Polish capital.

This began well enough, for, if her terpsichorean abilities still left something to be desired, the Warsaw critics, ever susceptible to feminine charms, went into positive raptures about her personal attractions. One of them, indeed, became almost lyrical on the subject:

"Her soft silken hair," was this authority's opinion, "falls in luxuriant wealth down her back, its glistening hue rivalling that of the raven's wing; on a slender and delicate neck—the whiteness of which eclipses swansdown—is poised a lovely face. … Where the proportions are concerned, Lola's little feet are somewhere between those of a Chinese maiden and those of the daintiest Parisienne imaginable. As for her bewitching calves, they suggest the steps of a Jacob's ladder transporting one up to heaven; and her ravishing figure resembles the Venus of Cnidus, that immortal masterpiece sculptured by the chisel of Praxiteles in the 104th Olympiad. As for her eyes, her very soul is enshrined in their blue depths."

There was a lot more—several columns more—in a similar strain.

As was to be expected, such a tribute attracted the attention of Prince Ivan Paskievich, the Viceroy of Poland. He had a weakness for pretty women; and, after the long succession of lumpy and heavy-footed ballerinas occupying the Warsaw stage, this new arrival sounded promising. When a trusted emissary reported that the critics "had not said half what they might," he resolved to make her acquaintance. His first step was to send her, through Madam Steinkeller, the wife of a banker, an invitation to have supper with him at his private house.

Lola, flattered by the invitation, and less clear-headed than usual, was sufficiently trusting to accept. She soon, however, discovered that his Excellency's intentions were strictly dishonourable, for he made her, she afterwards said, "a most indelicate proposition." Her response was to laugh in his face, and to tell him that "she had no wish to become his toy." Thereupon, Paskievich, furious at such a repulse (and unaccustomed to being thwarted by anyone, must less by a ballet-dancer), dismissed her with threats of reprisals. The first of these took the form of a visit from Colonel Abrahamowicz, the official charged with "preserving morality in the Warsaw theatres." He apparently interpreted his responsible functions in a fashion that left something to be desired, for Lola complained that "his conduct was so free that I took serious exception to it."

Paskievich then dealt his next card. This was to instruct his understrapper to fill the theatre with a rabble and have her hissed off the stage. Lola, however, was equal to the occasion. Advancing to the footlights, before the terror-stricken manager could stop her, she pointed to Colonel Abrahamowicz, sitting in a box, and exclaimed: "Ladies and gentlemen, there is the dastard who attempts to revenge himself on a pure woman who has scorned his infamous suggestions! I ask your protection!"

Accompanied by M. Lesniowski, the editor of the Warsaw Gazette, she returned to her lodgings, wondering what would happen next. She was soon to discover, for the angry Colonel and a squad of police arrived with a warrant for her arrest as an "undesirable." When, however, they announced their purpose, she flourished a pistol in their faces and declared that she would put a bullet through the first of them who came near her. Realising that she meant what she said, and not anxious to qualify for cheap martyrdom, Colonel Abrahamowicz was tactician enough to withdraw. In the meantime, the public, learning what had happened, sided with Lola and raised lusty shouts of "Down with the Viceroy! Long live the Montez!"

Paskievich, who had crushed with an iron hand the rebellion of 1831, had a short and sharp way with incipient revolutionaries; and, calling out the troops, cleared the streets at the point of the bayonet. While they were thus occupied, Lola slipped off to the French consul and suggested that he should grant her his protection as a national. With characteristic gallantry, he met her wishes. None the less, she had to leave Warsaw the next morning, under escort to the frontier.

There were reprisals for a number of those who had taken her part. Thus the manager of the theatre and the editor of the Warsaw Gazette were dismissed; M. Steinkeller was imprisoned; and a dozen students were publicly flogged.

"Tranquillity has been restored," was the official view of the situation.

According to Lola herself (not, by the way, a very sound authority) she went straight from Warsaw and the clutches of the lustful Paskievich to St. Petersburg. Considering, however, that Poland was at that period under the domination of the Czar, it is highly improbable that, after her expulsion, she could have set foot in Russia without a passport. Had she been sufficiently daring to make the experiment, she would assuredly have been clapped into fetters and packed off to Siberia.