Love affairs of the Courts of Europe by Thornton Hall

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Her first ambition was to be a great actress; and when she found that
acting was not her forte she determined to dance her way to fame and
fortune, and after a year's training in London and Spain she was ready
to conquer the world with her twinkling feet and supple body.

Of her first appearance as a danseuse, before a private gathering of
Pressmen, we have the following account by one who was there: "Her
figure was even more attractive than her face, lovely as the latter was.
Lithe and graceful as a young fawn, every movement that she made seemed
instinct with melody. Her dark eyes were blazing and flashing with
excitement. In her pose grace seemed involuntarily to preside over her
limbs and dispose their attitude. Her foot and ankle were almost
faultless."

Such was the enthusiastic description of Lola Montez (as she now chose
to call herself) on the eve of her bid for fame as a dancer who should
perhaps rival the glories of a Taglioni. A few days later the world of
rank and fashion flocked to see the debut of the danseuse whose fame had
been trumpeted abroad; and as Lola pirouetted on to the stage--the focus
of a thousand pairs of eyes--she felt that the crowning moment of her
life had come.

Almost before her twinkling feet had carried her to the centre of the
stage an ominous sound broke the silence of expectation. A hiss came
from one of the boxes; it was repeated from another, and another. The
sibilant sound spread round the house; it swelled into a sinister storm
of hisses and boos. The light faded out of the dancer's eyes, the smile
from her lips; and as the tumult of disapprobation rose to a deafening
climax the curtain was rung down, and Lola rushed weeping from the
stage. Her career as a dancer, in England, had ended at its birth.

But Lola Montez was not the woman to sit down calmly under defeat. A few
weeks later we find her tripping it on the stage at Dresden, and at
Berlin, where the King of Prussia himself was among her applauders. But
such success as the Continent brought her was too small to keep her now
deplenished purse supplied. She fell on evil days, and for two years led
a precarious life--now, we are told, singing in Brussels streets to keep
starvation from her side, now playing the political spy in Russia, and
again, by a capricious turn of fortune's wheel, being feted and courted
in the exalted circles of Vienna and Paris.

From the French capital she made her way to Warsaw, where stirring
adventures awaited her, for before she had been there many days the
Polish Viceroy, General Paskevitch, cast his aged but lascivious eyes on
her young beauty and sent an equerry to desire her presence at the
palace. "He offered her" (so runs the story as told by her own lips)
"the gift of a splendid country estate, and would load her with diamonds
besides. The poor old man was a comic sight to look upon--unusually
short in stature; and every time he spoke he threw his head back and
opened his mouth so wide as to expose the artificial gold roof of his
palate. A death's head making love to a lady could not have been a more
horrible or disgusting sight. These generous gifts were most
respectfully and very decidedly declined."

But General Paskevitch was not disposed to be spurned with impunity. The
contemptuous beauty must be punished for her scorn of his wooing; and,
when she made her appearance on the stage the same night it was to a
greeting of hisses by the Viceroy's hirelings. The next night brought
the same experience; but when on the third night the storm arose, "Lola,
in a rage, rushed down to the footlights and declared that those hisses
had been set at her by the director, because she had refused certain
gifts from the old Prince, his master. Then came a tremendous shower of
applause from the audience, and the old Princess, who was present, both
nodded her head and clapped her hands to the enraged and fiery little
Lola."

A tumultuous crowd of Poles escorted her to her lodgings that night. She
was the heroine of the hour, who had dared to give open defiance to the
hated Viceroy. The next morning Warsaw was "bubbling and raging with the
signs of an incipient revolution. When Lola Montez was apprised of the
fact that her arrest was ordered she barricaded her door; and when the
police arrived she sat behind it with a pistol in her hand, declaring
that she would certainly shoot the first man who should dare to break
in." Fortunately for Lola, her pistol was not used. The French Consul
came to her rescue, claiming her as a subject of France, and thus
protecting her from arrest. But the order that she should quit Warsaw
was peremptory, and Warsaw saw her no more.

Back again in Paris, Lola found that even her new halo of romance was
powerless to win favour for her dancing. Again she was to hear the storm
of hisses; and this time in her rage "she retaliated by making faces at
her audience," and flinging parts of her clothing in their faces. But if
Paris was not to be charmed by her dainty feet it was ready to yield an
unstinted homage to her rare beauty and charm. She found a flattering
welcome in the most exclusive of _salons_; the cleverest men in the
capital confessed the charm of her wit and surrounded her with their
flatteries.

M. Dujarrier, the most brilliant of them all, young, rich, and handsome,
fell head over ears in love with her and asked her to be his wife. But
the cup of happiness was scarcely at her lips before it was dashed away.
Dujarrier was challenged to a duel by Beauvallon, a political enemy; and
when Lola was on her way to stop the meeting she met a mournful
procession bringing back her dead lover's body, on which she flung
herself in an agony of grief and covered it with kisses. At the
subsequent trial of Beauvallon she electrified the Court by declaring
with streaming eyes, "If Beauvallon wanted satisfaction I would have
fought him myself, for I am a better shot than poor Dujarrier ever was."
And she was probably only speaking the truth, for her courage was as
great as the love she bore for the victim of the duel.

As a child Lola had shocked her puritanical Scottish hosts by declaring
that "she meant to marry a Prince," and unkindly as fate had treated
her, she had by no means relinquished this childish ambition. It may be
that it was in her mind when, a year and a half after the tragedy that
had so clouded her life in Paris, she drifted to Munich in search of
more conquests.

Now in the full bloom of her radiant loveliness--"the most beautiful
woman in Europe" many declared--mingling the vivacity of an Irish beauty
with the voluptuous charms of a Spaniard--she was splendidly equipped
for the conquest of any man, be he King or subject; and Ludwig I., King
of Bavaria, had as keen an eye for female beauty as for the objects of
art on which he squandered his millions.

It was this Ludwig who made Munich the fairest city in all Germany, and
who enriched his palace with the finest private collection of pictures
and statues that Europe can boast. But among all his treasures of art he
valued none more than his gallery of portraits of fair women, each of
whom had, at one time or another, visited his capital.

Such was Ludwig, Bavaria's King, to whom Lola Montez now brought a new
revelation of female loveliness, to which his gallery could furnish no
rival. At first sight of her, as she danced in the opera ballet, he was
undone. The next day and the next his eyes were feasting on her charms
and her supple grace; and within a week she was installed at the Court
and was being introduced by His Majesty as "my best friend."

And not only the King, but all Munich was at the feet of the lovely
"Spaniard"; her drives through the streets were Royal progresses; her
receptions in the palace which Ludwig presented to her were thronged by
all the greatest in Bavaria; on Prince and peasant alike she cast the
spell of her witchery. As for Ludwig, connoisseur of the beautiful, he
was her shadow and her slave, showering on her gifts an Empress might
well have envied. Fortune had relented at last and was now smiling her
sweetest on the adventuress; and if Lola had been content with such
triumphs as these the story of her later life might have been very
different. But she craved power to add to her trophies, and aspired to
take the sceptre from the weak hand of her Royal lover.

Never did woman make a more fatal mistake. On the one hand was arrayed
the might of Austria and of Rome, whose puppet Ludwig was; on the other
hand was a nation clamouring for reforms. Revolution was already in the
air, and it was reserved to this too daring woman to precipitate the
storm.

Her first ambition was to persuade Ludwig to dismiss his Ministry, to
shake himself free from foreign influence, and to inaugurate the era of
reform for which his subjects were clamouring. In vain did Austria try
to win her to its side by bribes of gold (no less than a million
florins) and the offer of a noble husband. To all its seductions Lola
turned as deaf an ear as to the offers of Poland's Viceroy. And so
strenuous was her championship of the people that the Cabinet was
compelled to resign in favour of the "Lola Ministry" of reformers.

So far she had succeeded, but the price was still to pay. The
reactionaries, supported by Austria and the Romish Church, were quick
to retaliate by waging remorseless war against the King's mistress; and,
among their most powerful weapons, used the students' clubs of Munich,
who, from being Lola's most enthusiastic admirers, became her bitterest
enemies.

To counteract this move Lola enrolled a students' corps of her own--a
small army of young stalwarts, whose cry was "Lola and Liberty," and who
were sworn to fight her battles, if need be, to the death. Thus was the
fire of revolution kindled by a woman's vanity and lust of power.
Students' fights became everyday incidents in the streets of Munich, and
on one occasion when Lola, pistol in hand, intervened to prevent
bloodshed, she was rescued with difficulty by Ludwig himself and a
detachment of soldiers.

The climax came when she induced the King to close the University for a
year--an autocratic step which aroused the anger not only of every
student but of the whole country. The streets were paraded by mobs
crying, "Down with the concubine!" and "Long live the Republic!"
Barricades were erected and an influential deputation waited on the King
to demand the expulsion of the worker of so much mischief.

In vain did Ludwig declare that he would part with his crown rather than
with the Countess of Landsfeld--for this was one of the titles he had
conferred on his favourite. The forces arrayed against him were too
strong, and the order of expulsion was at last conceded. It was only,
however, when her palace was in flames and surrounded by a howling mob
that the dauntless woman deigned to seek refuge in flight, and,
disguised as a boy, suffered herself to be escorted to the frontier. Two
weeks later Ludwig lost his crown.

The remainder of this strange story may be told in a few words. Thrown
once more on the world, with a few hastily rescued jewels for all her
fortune, Lola Montez resumed her stage life, appearing in London in a
drama entitled "Lola Montez: or a Countess for an Hour." Here she made a
conquest of a young Life Guardsman, called Heald, who had recently
succeeded to an estate worth L5000 a year; and with him she spent a few
years, made wretched by continual quarrels, in one of which she stabbed
him. When he was "found drowned" at Lisbon she drifted to Paris, and
later to the United States, which she toured with a drama entitled "Lola
Montez in Bavaria." There she made her third appearance at the altar,
with a bridegroom named Hull, whom she divorced as soon as the honeymoon
had waned.

Thus she carried her restless spirit through a few more years of
wandering and growing poverty, until a chance visit to Spurgeon's
Tabernacle revolutionised her life. She decided to abandon the stage and
to devote the remainder of her days to penitence and good works. But the
end was already near. In New York, where she had gone to lecture, she
was struck down by paralysis, and a few weeks before she had seen her
forty-second birthday she died in a charitable institution, joining
fervently in the prayers of the clergyman who was summoned to her
death-bed.

"When she was near the end, and could not speak," the clergyman says,
"I asked her to let me know by a sign whether she was at peace. She
fixed her eyes on mine and nodded affirmatively. I do not think I ever
saw deeper penitence and humility than in this poor woman."

CHAPTER XIV

AN EMPRESS AND HER FAVOURITES

When Sophie Augusta Frederica of Anhalt-Zerbst was romping on the
ramparts or in the streets of Stettin with burghers' children for
playmates, he would have been a bold prophet who would have predicted
that one day she would be the most splendid figure among Europe's
sovereigns, "the only great man in Europe," according to Voltaire, "an
angel before whom all men should be silent"; and that, while dazzling
Europe by her statesmanship and learning, she would afford more material
for scandal than any woman, except perhaps Christina of Sweden, who ever
wore a crown.

There is much, it is true, to be said in extenuation of the weakness
that has left such a stain on the memory of Catherine II. of Russia.
Equipped far beyond most women with the beauty and charms that fascinate
men, and craving more than most of her sex the love of man, she was
mated when little more than a child to the most degenerate Prince in all
Europe.

The Grand Duke Peter, heir to the Russian throne, who at sixteen took to
wife the girl-Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, was already an expert in
almost every vice. Imbecile in mind, he found his chief pleasure in the
company of the most degraded. He rarely went to bed sober--in fact, his
bride's first sight of him was when he was drunk, at the age of ten. He
was, too, "a liar and a coward, vicious and violent; pale, sickly, and
uncomely--a crooked soul in a prematurely ravaged body."

Such was the Grand Duke Peter, to whom the high-spirited, beautiful
Princess Sophie (thenceforth to be known as "Catherine") was tied for
life one day in the year 1744--a youth the very sight of whom repelled
her, while his vices filled her with loathing. Add to this revolting
union the fact that she found herself under the despotic rule of the
Empress Elizabeth, who made no concealment of her hatred and jealousy of
the fair young Princess, surrounded her with spies, and treated her as a
rebellious child, to be checked and bullied at every turn--and it is not
difficult to understand the spirit of recklessness and defiance that was
soon roused in Catherine's breast.

There was at the Russian Court no lack of temptation to indulge this
spirit of revolt to the full. The young German beauty, mated to worse
than a clown, soon had her Court of admirers to pour flatteries into her
dainty ears, and she would perhaps have been less than a woman if she
had not eagerly drunk them in. She had no need of anyone to tell her
that she was fair. "I know I am beautiful as the day," she once
exclaimed, as she looked at her mirrored reflection in her first ball
finery at St Petersburg, with a red rose in her glorious hair; and the
mirror told no flattering tale.

See the picture Poniatowski, one of her earliest and most ardent slaves,
paints of the young Grand Duchess. "With her black hair she had a
dazzling whiteness of skin, a vivid colour, large blue eyes prominent
and eloquent, black and long eyebrows, a Greek nose, a mouth that looked
made for kissing, a slight, rather tall figure, a carriage that was
lively, yet full of nobility, a pleasing voice, and a laugh as merry as
the humour through which she could pass with ease from the most playful
and childish amusements to the most fatiguing mathematical
calculations."

With the brain, even in those early years, of a clever man, she was
essentially a woman, with all a woman's passion for the admiration and
love of men; and one cannot wonder, however much one may deplore, that
while her imbecile husband was guzzling with common soldiers, or playing
with his toys and tin cannon in bed, vacuous smiles on his face, his
beautiful bride should find her own pleasures in the homage of a
Soltykoff, a Poniatowski, an Orloff, or any other of the legion of
lovers who in quick succession took her fancy.

The first among her admirers to capture her fancy was Sergius Soltykoff,
her chamberlain, high-born, "beautiful as the day," polished courtier,
supple-tongued wooer, to whom the Grand Duchess gave the heart her
husband spurned. But Soltykoff's reign was short; the fickle Princess,
ever seeking fresh conquests, wearied of him as of all her lovers in
turn, and his place was taken within a year by Stanislas Poniatowski, a
fascinating young Pole, who returned to St Petersburg with a reputation
of gallantry won in almost every Court of Europe.

Poniatowski had not perhaps the physical perfections of his dethroned
predecessor, but he had the well-stored brain that made an even more
potent appeal to Catherine. He could talk "like an angel" on every
subject that appealed to her, from art to philosophy; and he had,
moreover, a magnetic charm of manner which few women could resist.

Such a lover was, indeed, after her heart, for he brought romance and
adventure to his wooing; and whether he found his way to her boudoir
disguised as a ladies' tailor or as one of the Grand Duke's musicians,
or made open love to her under the very nose of her courtiers, he played
his role of lover to admiration. Once Peter, in jealous mood, threatened
to run his rival through with his sword, and, in his rage, "went into
his wife's bedroom and pulled her out of bed without leaving her time to
dress." An hour later his anger had changed to an amused complaisance,
and he was supping with the culprits, and with boisterous laughter was
drinking their healths.

When at last a political storm drove Poniatowski from Russia, Catherine,
who never forgot a banished lover, secured for him the crown of Poland.

Thus the favourites come and go, each supreme for a time, each
inevitably packed off to give place to a successor. With Poniatowski
away in Poland, Catherine cast her eyes round her Court to find a third
favourite, and her choice was soon made, for of all her army of admirers
there was one who fully satisfied her ideal of handsome manhood.

Of the five Orloff brothers, each a Goliath in stature and a Hercules in
strength, the handsomest was Gregory, "the giant with the face of an
angel." Towering head and shoulders over most of his fellow-courtiers,
with knotted muscles which could fell an ox or crush a horse-shoe with
the closing of a hand, Gregory Orloff was reputed the bravest man in
Russia, as he was the idol of his soldiers. He was also a notorious
gambler and drinker and the hero of countless love adventures.

No greater contrast could be possible than between this dare-devil son
of Anak and the cultured, almost feminine Poniatowski; but Catherine
loved, above all things, variety, and here it was in startling
abundance. Nor was her new lover any the less desirable because he was
some years younger than herself, or that his grandfather had been a
common soldier in the army of Peter the Great.

And Gregory Orloff proved himself as bold in wooing as he was brave in
war. For him there was no stealing up back stairs, no masquerading in
disguises. He was the elect favourite of the future Empress of Russia,
and all the world should know it. He was inseparable from his mistress,
and paid his court to her under the eyes of her husband; while
Catherine, thus emboldened, made as little concealment of her
partiality.

But troublous days were coming to break the idyll of their love. The
Empress Elizabeth, as was inevitable, at last drank herself to death,
and her nephew Peter, now a besotted imbecile of thirty-four, put on the
Imperial robes, and was free to indulge his madness without restraint.
The first use he made of his freedom was to subject his wife to every
insult and humiliation his debased brain could suggest. He flaunted his
amours and vices before her, taunted her in public with her own
indiscretions, and shouted in his cups that he would divorce her.

Not content with these outrages on his Empress, he lost no opportunity
of disgusting his subjects and driving his soldiers to the verge of
mutiny. Such an intolerable state of things could only have one issue.
The Emperor was undoubtedly mad; the Emperor must go.

Over the _coup d'etat_ which followed we must pass hurriedly--the
conspiracy of Catherine and the Orloffs, the eager response of the army
which flocked to the Empress, "kissing me, embracing my hands, my feet,
my dress, and calling me their saviour"; the marching of the insurgent
troops to Oranienbaum, with Catherine, astride on horseback, at their
head; and Peter's craven submission, when he crawled on his knees to his
wife, with whimpering and tears, begging her to allow him to keep "his
mistress, his dog, his negro, and his violin."

The Emperor was safe behind barred doors at Mopsa; Catherine was now
Empress in fact as well as name. Three weeks later Peter was dead; was
he done to death by Catherine's orders? To this day none can say with
certainty. The story of this tragedy as told by Castera makes gruesome
reading.

One day Alexis Orloff and Teplof appeared at Mopsa to announce to the
deposed sovereign his approaching deliverance and to ask a dinner of
him. Glasses and brandy were ordered, and while Teplof was amusing the
Tsar, Orloff filled the glasses, adding poison to one of them.

"The Tsar, suspecting no harm, took the poison and swallowed it. He was
soon seized with agonising pains. He screamed aloud for milk, but the
two monsters again presented poison to him and forced him to take it.
When the Tsar's valet bravely interposed he was hurled from the room. In
the midst of the tumult there entered Prince Baratinski, who commanded
the Guard. Orloff, who had already thrown down the Tsar, pressed upon
his chest with his own knees, holding him fast at the same time by the
throat. Baratinski and Teplof then passed a table-napkin with a sliding
knot round his neck, and the murderers accomplished the work of death by
strangling him."

Such is the story as it has come down to us, and as it was believed in
Russia at the time. That Gregory Orloff was innocent of a crime in which
his own brother played a leading part is as little to be credited as
that Catherine herself was in ignorance of the design on her husband's
life. But, however this may be, we are told that when the news of her
husband's death was brought to the Empress at a banquet, she was to all
appearance overcome with horror and grief. She left the table with
streaming eyes and spent the next few days in unapproachable solitude
in her rooms.

Thus at last Catherine was free both from the tyranny of Elizabeth and
from the brutality of her bestial husband. She was sole sovereign of all
the Russias, at liberty to indulge any caprice that entered her
versatile brain. That her subjects, almost to a man, regarded her with
horror as her husband's murderer, that this detestation was shared by
the army that had put her on the throne, and by the nobles who had been
her slaves, troubled her little. She was mistress of her fate, and
strong enough (as indeed she proved) to hold, with a firm grasp, the
sceptre she had won.

High as Gregory Orloff had stood in her favour before she came to her
crown, his position was now more splendid and secure. She showered her
favours on him with prodigal hand. Lands and jewels and gold were
squandered on her "First Favourite"--the official designation she
invented for him; and he wore on his broad chest her miniature in a
blazing oval of diamonds, the crowning mark of her approval. And to his
brothers she was almost equally generous, for in a few years of her
ascendancy the Orloffs were enriched by vast estates on which forty-five
thousand serfs toiled, by palaces, and by gold to the amount of
seventeen million roubles. Such it was to be in the good books of
Catherine II., Empress of Russia.

With riches and power, Gregory's ambition grew until he dreamt of
sitting on the throne itself by Catherine's side; and in her foolish
infatuation even this prize might have been his, had not wiser counsels
come to her rescue. "The Empress," said Panine to her, "can do what she
likes; but Madame Orloff can never be Empress of Russia." And thus
Gregory's greatest ambition was happily nipped in the bud.

The man who had played his cards with such skill and discretion in the
early days of his love-making had now, his head swollen by pride and
power, grown reckless. If he could not be Emperor in name, he would at
least wield the sceptre. The woman to whom he owed all was, he thought,
but a puppet in his hands, as ready to do his bidding as any of his
minions. But through all her dallying Catherine's smiles masked an iron
will. In heart she was a woman; in brain and will-power, a man. And
Orloff, like many another favourite, was to learn the lesson to his
cost.

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