SYMHC Classics: Lola Montez

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Lola Montes is getting a quick name drop in an upcoming episode, so we're bringing our episode on her out for the folks who might say, wait, who is that? Though this episode originally came out June fourteenth, twenty twenty one, so enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm a Holly Frye listener. Rebecca sent us a note on Instagram recently suggesting an episode on Lola Montes and I thought, Hey, I remember her, because way back in twenty ten, previous hosts Katie and Sarah did a podcast on Ludwig the Second of Bavaria. We ran that as a Saturday classic in twenty nineteen, and in that episode, Katie and Sarah talk about Lude the Second's grandfather, Ludvig the First and his scandalous relationship with this Lola Montes. I even remembered that Katie described her as a trip and said they were going to need to cover her on the show at at some point. Now it's been more than a decade since prior hosts of the show, who do not even work here anymore. They were probably going to do an episode on this subject. We've had other requests for Lola Montes in addition to Rebecca's. I found some contradictory advice about whether people said Montes with the accent on the first syllable or the second. I don't know which is right. So we're just gonna say Lola Montes. There you go. And Lola Montes is one of those figures whose life is quite hard to pin down, not because of a lack of documentation, but because that documentation repeats the completely fictional backstory they made up for themselves. In the words of historian Ralph Friedman, quote, much of this confusion can be traced to Lola herself. She changed her background to suit the occasion, and there were many occasions to suit. In her adult life, Lola Montes presented herself as a Spanish dancer that was very exotic and enticing in the eyes of the audiences and a lot of the places she performed. In her autobiography, she said she was descended from Count de Montalvo of Spain and had Moorish ancestry, but had been born in Limerick. As Marie Delores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert. She said her family had always called her Dolores or Lola for short, and she told King Ludwig the First of Bavaria that she had been born on February fourteenth, eighteen twenty. None of that's true. According to her baptismal certificate, she was born in Grange, about one hundred and fifty five miles or two hundred fifty kilometers north of Limerick. That was on February seventeenth, eighteen twenty one. One. That to me is like the big thing of like what a weird shift of a few days one year, a few days off of the date and a year where it just is a strange thing. She was named Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert after her mother, who went by Eliza. That nickname, not Lola, is all over family and school records. So although both these Elizabeths went by Eliza in this first part of the episode, we're going to call her mother Elizabeth in the future Lola Montes Eliza for the sake of clarity. Elizabeth was the daughter of Charles Silver Oliver, who was a member of parliament. Charles had four children with Elizabeth's mother before marrying an heiress, and although he did not legally acknowledge these four children or marry their mother, he did provide them with some financial support set them up with jobs as they got older. Elizabeth trained as the assistant to a milliner, and then she married British Army officer Edward Gilbert. About ten months later, they had Eliza. In eighteen twenty three, when Eliza was about two, Gilbert took the family to British India with the hope of earning more money and climbing the military ranks, but not long after they arrived, he contracted cholera and died. Elizabeth was still in her late teens and at this point had a young daughter to support, so she got remarried pretty quickly to Lieutenant Patrick Craigie. Eliza didn't really have a lot of structure or supervision in India, and in eighteen twenty six, when she was about five, Elizabeth and Patrick sent her to live with his parents in Scotland with the hope that they could raise her into a proper young woman. Eventually, Eliza was enrolled at Aldridge Academy in Bath, where she stayed for about five years. She developed a reputation for being spirited and stubborn, and kind of different from her peers who were raised in Britain. She would later claim that the character of Becky Sharp and William Thackeray's Vanited was based on her and her time in Bath. She's made lots of claims. In eighteen thirty seven, when Eliza was sixteen, Elizabeth returned from India. Army officer Thomas James, who was on convalescent leave, had accompanied her during the sea voyage an Elizabeth's reunion with Eliza did not go particularly well. They hadn't seen each other in more than a decade at that point, and one of Elizabeth's objectives was to prepare Eliza to get married. Eliza claimed that her mother was planning to marry her off to a widowed army officer who was in his sixties. There's not really any documentation on who this might have been, but the most likely candidate would be Patrick Craigie's commanding officer, although he also had unmarried sons who were way closer to Eliza's age, so it's possible that she either misunderstood her mother's intent or deliberately misconstrued all this to make the story more shocking. There's several possible options there, all of which have a level of possibility and also a level of problems. Yeah, Eliza turned to her mother's escort, Thomas James, for help. He was in his early thirties, and in her account, she saw him as something of a father figure. On July twenty third, eighteen thirty seven, the two of them eloped, with James's brother, who was a vicar officiating the wedding. This was really not a happy marriage. Thomas was about twice Eliza's age, and she seemed to have believed that he had married her solely to protect her from being married off to somebody who was twice as old as that. But it quickly became clear that he was expecting her to fulfill all the duties of a wife, and he also may have been abusive to her. When Thomas returned to India, he took Eliza with him. He was stationed at a remote garrison, where she didn't have much opportunity for his social life, and where she probably also contracted malaye. She had recurring illness for the rest of her life. Her happiest moments in India were probably when she and her mother visited a resort town at the foot of the Himalayas. Eventually Eliza left Thomas. At first she tried to take refuge with her mother, but Elizabeth really gave her a choice of either going back to her husband or going back to Britain. Eliza chose the latter, with the understanding that she would once again live with the Craigies. Eliza was about twenty when she left India, and on the ship back to the UK, she struck up a relationship with Lieutenant Charles Lennox, nephew of the Duke of Richmond. It would have been hard to keep a romance secret on board a ship, but they didn't really try. They were not discreet about this at all, and once they got back to Britain, Eliza decided to stay in London rather than go live with the Craigies, and word about her infidelity quickly made its way back to India. Thomas sued Eliza for divorce on the grounds of adultery, and he also sued Charles Lenni ex for damages, and there was really no question about what had happened. Like the is, there are letters written by other passengers who describe like walking past her stateroom with the door open and clearly for everyone to see what was happening between the two of them. Divorces at this point were handled in ecclesiastical court, and while Thomas's divorce was ultimately granted, the judgment also specified that neither he nor Eliza could ever remarry while the other one was still alive. And at this point, the only way a divorce person in Britain could get the right to remarry while their former spouse was still living was through an Act of Parliament. So obviously that required a lot of political connections and a lot of money. So this was a huge scandal for Eliza and a gigantic blot on her reputation. Marriage was the expected life for a woman like her, but she was legally barred from remarrying that divorcement. She wasn't considered appropriate for any respectable work that might have been open to her. While the people around her probably would have preferred she find a sympathetic friend or a family member to stay with and live out her days in quiet shame, she refused to play by those rules. Eliza was pretty and vivacious and clever, and she used that to support herself through the generosity of interested men. It's likely that one of these men funded a trip to Spain for her. Some sources credit the Earl of Malmsbury, but in his account he says he did not meet her until afterward, so regardless of who paid for this trip, while she was in Spain, she learned some Spanish and some Spanish style dance, and a little bit about Spanish culture and customs. And when she returned to England it was not as Eliza. It was as Maria Dolores de Poris in Montez, better known as Lola, and we're going to talk more about that after we paused for a break. Lola Montes made her stage debut in London on June third, eighteen forty three. She performed a dance that was billed as El Olano during the act break of a sold out performance of The Barber of Seville, and reviewers described her as quote the perfection of Spanish beauty. She was in a brightly colored dress with a black bodice and doing a novel dance with castanettes that seemed like a panamime of quote some saucy fancy, including quote stamping pettishly with her foot. However, someone recognized Lola Montes as Eliza Gilbert. Words started to spread, and Montes claimed her mother heard about it and printed up death notices for her. On June twelfth, the London Morning Post printed an excerpt of a letter from Montes saying she had been born in Seville and had learned English from an Irish nurse. She said she had never been in England except for a few months spent living with a Catholic woman in Bath, and had never seen London before she arrived for her performance. Not long after that, though, Lola Montes left England for the continent, where she was less likely to be recognized. In Berlin, a critic described her performance this way, quote, her beauty of rare voluptuous fullness is beyond any criticism. Her dancing, however, was no dancing at all, but a physical invitation. If it is said of Taglioni that she writes world history with her feet, so it can be said of Donna Montes that she writes Casanova's memoirs with her whole body. In Berlin, Montes performed for King Frederick William of Prussia and his guest Zar Nicholas the first. She also had one of her first and most famous run ins with authority. While the monarch were reviewing the troops, Montes tried to ride her horse into an area that was reserved for military personnel. When an officer tried to stop her, she struck him with her horsewhip. A lot of the retellings of this whole incident really make Montes sound like a wacky little firebrand in this moment. But she was charged with assault, and then when she tore up her summons for that charge, she was charged with contempt. It does not seem like either of these charges ever went to trial. Though, please don't hit people with a horsewhip. There's gonna be a lot more of that in this episode, Please don't, Please don't. From there, Montes went to Dresden, where she met past podcast subject From's List. Her autobiography, which is written in the third person, describes it this way quote through the management of influential friends, an opening was made for her at the Royal Theater at Dresden in Saxony, where she first met the celebrated pianist frownz List, who was then creating such a furre in Dresden that when he dropped his pocket handkerchief. It was seized by the ladies and torn into rags, which they divided among themselves, each being but too happy to get so much as a rag which had belonged to the great artist. The furor created by Lola Montes's appearance at the theater in Dresden was quite as great among the gentlemen as was Lists among the ladies. As Montes traveled with Lists, she met other prominent people, including Rickard Wagner, who did not like her much at all. The tracks, Yeah, Wagner generally disliked all the sort of groupies who were always surrounding Fran's List. We talked about that whole phenomenon in the Liz Domania episode. He called Montes a quote heartless, demonic being, and Liszt is rumored to have gotten tired of her as well, locking her in a hotel room and paying the hotel staff to keep her there just so he could escape. There isn't any subtantiation for that story, though, and it seems a little far fetched considering that they met up later in Paris. He also gave her letters of introduction and arranged her debut at the Paris Opera in eighteen forty four, which was incredible considering that her entire stage career had involved twenty or so performances total at that point over the course of roughly a year. Yeah, the Paris Opera was like one of the most exclusive stages in Europe, and here comes Lola Montes who's been performing in act breaks of other shows for the course of like twenty performances. Audiences in Paris were skeptical of her. Reviewers noted that Lola Montes could not dance, did not speak Spanish very well, didn't look Spanish, and had a terrible reputation for violence. One French critic gave this backhanded praise to her quote, there is something lasciviously attractive, voluptuously enticing in the poses she takes, and then she a pretty, very pretty, extremely pretty person, and she throws you kisses so complete that you applaud at once, only to ask yourself afterwards if it was right or wrong to applaud. Is that not the most French criticism you can imagine it is. Yeah, she's very lovely in the moment, but then you second guess yourself. In Paris, Montes met another past podcast subject that was Alexandre Dumpire, but then she fell in love with Alexandra Andre Dujarier, who was part owner of the newspaper La Presse. They planned to marry, but Dujarier was killed in a duel in March of eighteen forty five. This duel, we should point out, had nothing to do with Lola. It was over a gambling debt that he owed to journalist Jean Baptiste Rosemond de Beauvallon, compounded by his perceived rudeness on the night that he racked up that debt. Montes had offered to teach Dujarier to shoot a pistol when she learned that there might be a duel, but he had turned her down. She was terrified over this whole prospect. She was like, you don't know how to use a gun and this man is going to duel you. Please let me help, and he was like, no, I got it. He didn't have it. Though Montes left Paris after Dejarier's death, she had to return to testify at Bouvillon's murder trial. Other witnesses at that trial included both Alexandre Duma p Pere and Feists French courts didn't typically convict people of murder if the killing had happened during a duel, as long as the rules of dueling had been followed, and Bouvillon was acquitted. In eighteen forty six, Montes moved to Munich, where she met Ludwig, King of Bavaria. She was twenty five at this point and he was sixty and deeply enamored with all things Spain, and in what's probably an apocryphal story, Ludwig's first words to her were to point at her chest and say nature or art, grabbed some scissors from his desk, cut open the bodice of her dress, and showed him. Although this story probably is not true, Lola Montes had an incredibly dramatic and often extremely scandalous relationship with the King of Bavaria for about eighteen months. He commissioned her portrait for his Gallery of Beauties, which, as its name suggests, was a gallery of portraits of the most beautiful women he had ever met. He called her Lolita and set her up in a luxurious home, buying the property in her name so that she could be eligible for Bavarian citizenship. He granted her an allowance of ten thousand florins a year at a time when his cabinet ministers are making more like six thousand florins. The king kept a lot of this secret, but there was really no way to disguise his total infatuation with her or her influence over him. She publicly boasted about how much sway she had, including bragging about convincing the king to raise teachers pay a week before he was going to announce it publicly. He was enamored with her feet, and she gave him an alabaster model of one of them. When he wrote to thank her for it, he said he had quote covered it with fervent kisses. He later gave her an alabaster model of his hand writing a poem that was carved by the same sculptor. Meanwhile, Montes was launching one scandal after another. Her behavior was just not appropriate for somebody considered to be the king's favorite. She entertained male visitors at all hours. Once, when a man stood her up, she went to his apartment building in the middle of the night to find him. She didn't know which unit that he lived in, so she rang the bell for everyone, waking up the entire building. And basically advertising that she was there for a late night rendezvous with a man. I want to say who among us, but most of us have not. I would hope uh. The Alamanan were a sort of fraternity at Ludwig maximil University of Munich, and they became her bodyguard. One night during a drunken party at her home, the Alimanin were parading around dressed only in their shirts, carrying Lola on their shoulders. When one of them ran her into a low hanging chandelier, she got a concussion. She also repeatedly got into physical confrontations with people, and this was something that carried additional risks for her since she wasn't a Bavarian citizen, like just go pick a bunch of fies of people, maybe get deported. To deflect criticism, she maintained that her enemies, especially Jesuits, were spreading lies about her, even though her Spanish persona included pretending to be Catholic. She frequently maintained that she was a victim of just a massive Jesuit conspiracy against her. The King's advisors tried to persuade him to distance himself from her. When that didn't work, and Lola's behavior seemed to just get even more over the top advisor and cabinet members started resigning in protest. Montes took particular delight when the people resigning were conservative Catholics. When Ludwig named Lola Countess of Landsfield, which came with citizenship and a permanent income, his entire cabinet resigned. Although Lola was extremely good at convincing Ludwig that these indiscretions were just rumors and that she loved only him, while also reminding him of how much he loved her, all of this made the king incredibly anxious. He was under so much stress that he broke out in what sounds like hives. And all of this happened alongside social and political unrest in Bavaria, including intense disputes between conservative Catholic and more liberal Republican factions at the university. This was compounded by Lola's scandalous association with the Alamanin. In the hope of getting things under control, Ludwig tried to shut the university down. This had worked to quell descent in the past, but in this case it just made everything worse. Public opinion about Lola Montes waxed and waned in Bavaria, but by early eighteen forty eight people were outraged that this notorious woman, who was not even from there and who got into fights and had indiscreet affairs with multiple men, had such a huge influence on the king. In February of eighteen forty eight, thousands of people took to the streets and Lola Montes was driven out of Munich by a mob. Ludwig considered sending in the army to restore order, but his minister of war said that if he was ordered to do so, he would excuse himself, go into the next room and take his own life. On March twentieth, eighteen forty eight, so not long after she was run out of town, Ludwig the First abdicated and was succeeded by his son Maximilian the Second, and sometimes Lola Montes as described as being the one who convinced him to step down, while she definitely encouraged him to abdicate. After her departure, Ludwig really started to question his own judgment and what his entanglement with her said about his abilities as king. He was also just under a huge amount of pressure from conservative Catholic elements of the nobility, the conservative faction at the university. There was a lot going on besides just her telling him that she thought he should step down. Lola surrendered her Bavarian naturalization certificate, saying that she never wanted to return. Then she went to London and tried to plan a trip to Spain. This was complicated by the fact that she was passing herself off as Spanish, but she had no Spanish passport. She refused to reveal who she really was in order to get a British one, and although Ludwig was sending her money, he refused to pull strings to get her a Bavarian passport. Then something happened that resolved all of this. She married twenty one year old Coronet George Trafford Healed, which made her eligible for a British passport without disclosing her real identity. Since she was pretending to be Catholic. They had both Catholic and Church of England ceremonies. Ludwig had granted Lola a pension under the condition that she never marry. She wrote to tell him that she was considering marriage, but that her husband to be had such a modest income that she should be allowed to keep her pension. This was not, in fact true. Healed was pretty comfortable, and when Ludwig realized Lola had already gotten married before he could even answer her letter, he was outraged. Another person who was outraged was George's aunt, who did not trust Lola at all and looked into her background, and it did not take long to figure out that she was really divorcee Eliza Gilbert, who could not marry while her ex husband was still living. So Lola was charged with bigamy and released on bail, and she and George went ahead with their trip to Spain. They came back to London just the head of her trial. Authorities had confirmed that James was still living as of June thirteenth, but that wedding had happened on July nineteenth, so Montez hoped to argue that it was possible that he had died within that few weeks, but while she was in Spain it had been confirmed that Thomas James was alive on her wedding day. A conviction for bigamy seemed inevitable, so she forfeited her bail and she and George fled to France. This whole scandal just added to Lola's infamy. This also wasn't really what George had signed up for, even by marrying someone as notorious as Lola Montes. He left Lola at a couple of different points, and then in eighteen fifty when he left her for good, he took a lot of her possessions along with his own, and this included her alabaster model of Ludwig's hand and her Bavarian certificate of nobility and Ludwig's letters to her. Lola's correspondence with Ludwig ended about a year later, which was also the life last year that he sent her money. At one point, either Lola or George, or maybe both, tried to extort money from him by threatening to publish his very explicit letters to her. In the end, those letters were returned to the former monarch. Lola needed money, though, and in eighteen fifty one she published an autobiography. She also met a promoter who suggested she'd take a US tour. She signed a contract with a manager for a series of appearances in Europe, the Americas, and Africa, although she dumped that manager and those plans before even finishing the European leg of what they had arranged, But she did plan to go to the US, and she set sale at the US in November of eighteen fifty one. And we'll talk about that after we have a sponsor break. By the time Lola Montes was preparing for her US tour, she was intern new nationally infamous. While reporting on rumors that P. T. Barnum had hired her, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described her as quote quite a celebrity among the profligates of Europe. On September twenty sixth, eighteen fifty one, The New York Times had this to say, quote, we shall be sadly disappointed if this creature has any degree of success in the United States. She has no special reputation as a dancer. She is known to the world only as a shameless and abandoned woman. If such a reputation shall prove attractive in this country, we have greatly mistaken its character. Oh whoever wrote that, I hope they never time travel Now I had the same thought. Oh, oh friend. Most of Lola's performances in Europe had been dances during the act breaks of other works, but her US tour was built on much longer appearances. She commissioned a play called Lola Montes in Bavaria, in which she, of course played herself. The text of this play has been lost, but it presented Montes as introducing all kinds of liberal advances to Bavaria before fleeing in the wake of a counter revolution. Yeah, a lot of the accounts of how much how much liberalizing influence she had over the king seems to have come from people interpreting descriptions of this play as being definitely grounded in reality, maybe somewhat, but yeah, it's she. This was both a touring piece for her and self promotion. Montees had reworked her Spanish inspired dance at several points over the years, and she had picked up new styles. A suggestive pantomime involving stomping on a spider seems to have been there from the very beginning. I mean that first review doesn't give a play by play of what she was doing, but there's this whole like sauciness and stamping pettishly in the description. It was really in the United States, though, that her most famous dance became known as the Spider Dance and also gained a reputation for being absolutely scandalous, so this pantomime hinged on the idea that a spider was crawling into Lola's dress. Audiences would see flashes of her skin as she tried to get rid of the spider, although exactly how much skin and how much she was wearing under her skirts kind of depends on which account you read. Newspapers in the US started describing this as indecent, which prompted Montez to write angry letters to their editors, while also making the dance even more risky. Lola, Montes and Bavaria ran on Broadway, and then she toured around the eastern part of North America. Her last stop was in New Orleans, and while she was there, she got into a dispute with her lady's maid. Her lady's maid had decided she wanted to stay in New Orleans and leave Lola's service. Lola struck her, and when the police arrived to arrest Lola for battery, she drew her dagger and tried to fight them before drinking the contents of a vial that was labeled as poison, so something that she said she always carried on her person in case she needed to escape a truly impossible situation, but she miraculously recovered. There are many ways to interpret this, and the one I'm sticking with is that she had a fake poison vile to be dramatic. Uh huh, it's probably full of sugar water. In eighteen fifty three, Montes left New Orleans bound for San Francisco by sea, with a land crossing in Panama. Along the way, she met newspaper editor Patrick Purdy Hull, and they married about six weeks after arriving in California. This marriage was stormy and brief. At one point, Lola threw all of his possessions out a hotel window, and not long after that she threw him out of the home she had bought in Grass Valley. There are also that a German doctor who was named in the divorce suit was mysteriously shot. All of that is a little bit murky, since its unclear whether divorce papers were ever actually filed. Montes had become tired of quote splendor and fast living, and she's spent about the next two years living in Grass Valley. Before this, she'd always had a lapdog, but now she indulged her love of animals, with a personal menagerie that included a parrot, two dogs, and a grizzly bear cub. Really, grizzly bear cubs do not make good pets, and after this one mauled her, she put it up for sale. I'm sure that bear is long gone, but I worry for it just the same me too. I could not figure out the ultimate fate of the bear. Oh, I know how that stuff goes. In Grass Valley, Montes doted on her neighbor's children, including a lot of crabtree, who Lola encouraged in her acting and dancing. She also started studying spiritualism and reading the Bible. This time was not all harmonious, though. When the Grass Valley Telegraph criticized a dancer who she knew, Lola whipped its editor, Henry Shipley, in the street. In eighteen fifty five, Montes decided to tour Australia. She hired Noel Fallen, who used the stage name Noel fall End with a d as a manager. He was estranged from his wife and children in New York, but he was financially supporting them. Montes performed to full houses in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, and she appeared on stage around Australia's gold fields, where she encouraged her audiences to tip her by tossing gold nuggets at her. This tour was just as full of drama and strife as all of her earlier tours had been. Various parties tried to shut down her shows for their indecency. In Melbourne, she had a running feud with the Reverend John Lawrence Milton after the baler at times ran an unflattering letter about her. She got into a fight with editor Henry Seacamp, with the two of them whipping each other until onlookers physically separated them. Did everyone carry a whip? Well, she did like to ride and was reportedly a very good rider, and apparently Henry Seacamp also equipped with a whip. Yeah. I think a lot of people who rode horses had horsewhips with them. Montes experienced recurring illnesses throughout her life. Like we said earlier, she probably got malaria while she was in India, and she was sick a lot. While in Australia. She started describing her spider dance as involving being bitten by the spider to explain away any swooning or fatigue that she showed on stage. Eventually, she cut the tour short and she disbanded the company that had traveled with her from California. Their contracts had included passage back to the United States, so the actors tried to take her to court. When the authorities try to arrest her, she argued that their warrant was not in her real name, and because she was married, legal action also had to go through her husband. This was an argument that she made more than once. When somebody, would, you know, offer give her a summons that said Lola Montes, She'd be like, Ah, that's not my name though, so that's not valid. Then she left town, basically leaving her performers with no recourse. Montes and Fallen left for the US in May of eighteen fifty five. Their ship back to San Francisco stopped in Hawaii, and shortly after setting sail again, Noel Fallen fell overboard and drowned. It's not clear exactly what happened, but Montes blamed herself for his death. She personally notified his family and tried to support them financially, including selling her jewelry and property. She owned in San Francisco to send them the proceeds with the note that she wanted his children to be educated in Spa spiritualism. Around the same time, Montes also learned that George Healed had died. She became more focused on spiritualism and she joined the Episcopal Church. After making one last visit to Grass Valley, she sold her property there and then did another brief tour of the East Coast, performing Lola Montes in Bavaria again and also visiting Nolfallen's stepmother. In eighteen fifty seven, at the age of thirty six, Lola Montes changed directions and became a lecturer. While she still went by the name Lola Montes, she mostly dropped the pretense that she was Spanish and Catholic. Her lecture, titled Gallantry, was about the gallantry of men, including King Ludwig. The First Wits and Women of Paris, was a tour of notable people she had met in Paris, including Alexandra Dumatpier and George sand Romanism was a vehement condemnation of the Catholic Church. Sometimes people described Montes as an early feminist, but her lecture heroines and strong minded women of history makes it clear that she did not have a high opinion of feminism. It's at least feminism in terms of how she saw it in the nineteenth century world. She described suffragists and activists for women's rights as scolds and convention women, before walking through historical examples of women, warriors and monarchs, who she saw as real examples of women's strengths, not those complainers who were having conventions to say how victimized they were. Montesa's first book was a collection of these lectures, along with an autobiography. And this autobiography is kind of weird. We mentioned before. It's written in the third person, it's sometimes credited to Charles Chauncey Burr, and often it's actually not flattering of her at all. At times she has depicted almost as a child, throwing tantrums to get her way among wealthy and powerful men. And when I read it, I was like, who who wrote this? And why did they hate you? I mean, I can see many reasons why somebody would have a negative impression of Lola Montes, but I was like, this is your autobiography in your book, and it is making you sound like a petulant like Immature Terror. Montes published two other books after that lecture collection. They were The Arts of Beauty or Secrets of a Lady's Toilet with Hints to Gentlemen on the art of Fascinating and Anecdotes of Love, being a true account of the most remarkable events connected with the history of love in all ages and among all nations. Like other beauty books that we have talked about on the show before, Montese notes that beauty is totally subjective and that standards of beauty have varied around the world and throughout history. And then she moves into twenty eight chapters on how to be beautiful, including how to obtain a handsome form, habits which destroy the complexion, a beautiful bosom, and beauty of dress. This book drops a lot of names of notable people that she's met in places that she's traveled. It also includes a lot of recipes, with Montez advising readers to make their own cosmetics, since commercially available products are often full of poisons, they often were full of bosons, so that part, that part mostly makes sense. The Arts of Beauty ends, as we said, with fifty rules for the art of fascinating and This is a tongue in cheeks satire written as tips for men, but for the amusement of the women reading the book. So, for example, rule the tenth is quote. If you are invited to dine, go at least an hour or an hour and a half before the time for then the lady will be sure never to forget you, as the attentive and polite gentleman who allowed her neither time to dress nor to superintend her dinner, Like its name suggests, Anecdotes of Love is a collection of famous historical love stories, including past podcast subjects of Spasia and Pericles and Abalard and Eloise. In eighteen fifty seven, Montes briefly considered marrying again, this time to Prince Ludwig Johann Sukalski of Austria. He was one of the many royals she had met while she was in Europe. We did not name all of these royals. Before he had fled Austria in the wake of the revolutions of eighteen forty eight. Montes sailed to Paris, believing that he was going to meet her there, but it turned out he was already married. And this whole thing was a giant hoax. I'm debating over whether I feel like this is a taste of her own medicine or not, but I had the same I had the same response, honestly. In eighteen fifty eight, Montes return to the UK. She gave another lecture tour, and in London she gave a speech on the institution of slave in the US. Her argument here was kind of a tangle. She described slavery as an enormous national sin and lynch law as a terror we can all agree with, but she also claimed that enslaved people on southern plantations were content and that the institution would somehow just disappear on its own. British abolitionists criticized this lecture heavily, and Montes countered that this reaction was hypocritical, considering the British Empire's treatment of the native peoples of the places it was colonizing, including India. Montes returned to New York in the fall of eighteen fifty nine and continued to lecture around the US. On June thirtieth, eighteen sixty, she had a stroke. Her mother came to the United States to see her. In some cases, this was to take care of her and in others it was more to try to get money from her. Either way, their reunion doesn't seem to have gone very well, and her mother didn't stay long. Lola Montes seemed to be recovering well, but then she contracted pneumonia. She died on January seventeenth, eighteen sixty one, at the age of thirty nine. Yeah, there's been various speculation about what could have caused her to have a stroke at such a relatively young age, with explanations anywhere from the malaria that she pretty clearly had for her whole life to syphilis. But again that's like very speculative based on the fact that somebody had a stroke at a pretty young age, then one would typically think of someone having a stroke. When Lola Montes died, Ludwig the First of Bavaria was seventy four. He had not seen her in thirteen years, and he learned of her death through news reports. Later on, he got a letter from her friend Maria E. Buchanan, which was sent to Lola's request, and this letter expressed Lola's sincere regard for him and said that she had died as a true penitent. Ludwig to appreciate this, he wrote back, and it was a nice little note. And then Maria later wrote to him again, suggesting that he might pay to have a fence put around her grave at Brooklyn's Greenwood Cemetery. Invig did not answer that one. Lola's first husband, Thomas James, also outlived her. He died in eighteen seventy one, so he could have gotten remarried. He sure could. I One of the biographies that I read of her was called Lola Montes, a Life by Bruce Seymour, and I think he traced what happens to Thomas James afterward, and I don't remember off the top of my head. Lola Montes's notoriety continued for decades after her death, with fictional characters based on her, and plays and movies fictionalizing her exploits. More recently, she inspired the song whatever Lola Wants Lola Gets from the nineteen fifty five Broadway musical Damn Yankees. I could sing that by heart. And there is a running bit about her in season of Dickinson on Apple Plus that as a show I was watching before I started working on this episode, and when I learned there was a Lola Montees running bit. I was like, oh, gotta stop what else I'm watching and catch up and see this? Yeah, In Damn Yankees? Do you know the story? In Damn Yankees, she's basically now packed with the devil and becomes involved with the lead character when he makes a similar pact, and it's sort of their story. She's not so violent in that and is much more of a winsome character. She is not physically present on screen anywhere on Dickinson, but it's a running joke that spans over multiple episodes. Today. Mount Lola in the Sierra Nevada is named for her, as are two Lakes and Tahoe National Forest. Her home in Grass Valley, California is a State Historic Landmark. That is Lola Montez. I don't know, having referenced all this, if I would actually call her a trip. However, most of the things that would make me maybe not call her that are things that aren't usually covered in quick writeups of her, like like striking her lady's maid when her lady's maid try to leave her service, and leaving her touring company stranded in Australia. Like, I can't get behind any of that I can. You know, I often take some glee in people who push against societal norms, and then that way, she's kind of a trip, But in other ways, I'm like, you're more of a mess to me. See now, I'm like, what does a trip mean to you? Because to me, those all factor in.

00:43:45
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, okay, but I think that's just one of those like colloquial vernacular things that probably has no clear definition anyway, right, sure, yeah, yeah, I think in my head I would describe somebody who was a trip as a little less harmless than Lola.

00:44:06
Speaker 1: See. To me, part of it is a juxtaposition of oh, she was a super like fun, love and party gal but also very violent. What a trip? But oh, I see, like the journey from one to the other. This is so interesting to me. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts. The iHeartRadio app and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.