Royal Romances: Titillating Tales of Passion and Power in the Palaces of Europe (53 page)

After this incident, the pupils at a Munich girls’ school were exhorted to pray for their “mad king,” so that God would make him see the light and banish his lover.

Public disturbances such as the one with the landlady did not endear Lola to the local police. And before she came under the king’s protection she had refused to register with the authorities, a policy required of all foreign visitors. When Lola finally agreed to comply, in the box marked “accompanied by,” she wrote “
un chien
” (a dog), referring to her pug, Zampa. The thirty-seven-year-old chief of police,
Johann Nepomuk, Baron von Pechmann, was not amused. After making some inquiries about Lola, he discovered that she had been asked to leave a number of cities, including Berlin, Warsaw, Dresden, and Baden-Baden, as a result of volatile incidents.

Although Lola’s hair-trigger temper had already instigated several disruptive episodes in Munich, the besotted Ludwig, convinced that his beloved was being unjustly persecuted, ordered Pechmann to cease his inquiries into the doorbell affair. Writing to Baron von der Tann, the monarch confided:

Lolitta (that’s what I call her) is slandered terribly, has been and will be. A foreign woman who wants to settle in Munich, who’s pretty, whom the king loves, who’s spirited, what more does it take to arouse hatred, lies, and persecution. All that will be defeated, too, firmness will triumph in the end. She is not simply someone who loves me, she is my friend, too. She’s told me that she’ll always speak the truth to me, and she’s already told me a number of things I didn’t enjoy hearing…. She loves me so much. I’m providing for her, but she’s not my kept woman.

The same day Ludwig had sent Lola to see Pechmann to smooth over the doorbell business, he had added a codicil to his will. Lola would receive the Stieler portrait, one hundred thousand florins as long as she did not marry (Ludwig didn’t know about Lieutenant Thomas James or it would surely have nullified the contract), and an income of twenty-four thousand florins for life, or until she subsequently wed.

I would not be a man of honor, would be unfeeling if I made no provision for her who gave up everything for me, who has no parents [he obviously didn’t know her mother lived], no brothers or sisters, who has no one in the wide world except me; nonetheless she has made no effort to have me remember her in my last wishes, and I do so totally on my own initiative…. Her friendship has made me purer, better. Therese, my dear, good, noble wife, do not condemn me unjustly.

All of this largesse came within six weeks of meeting Lola.

But rumors circulated throughout Bavaria that made Ludwig appear the fool and Lola a whore. It was said that she intended to marry Nüssbammer in order to secure her citizenship. And it was reputed that she was measured for her corsets and other lingerie stark naked, often with her shutters open. The king appeared unconcerned by the gossip. He also ignored the advice dispensed by a previous mistress, Jane Digby, warning him to be more discreet about the contents of his letters to his paramours. But on November 12, 1846, Ludwig was addressing himself to “My dearest Lola” and signing, “Heart of my heart, your Luis.” He wrote often and floridly, sending not only letters, but a daily poem, his modus operandi with previous paramours as well.

On December 1, Ludwig bought a town home for Lola at Barerstrasse 7, providing the property with its own guard of gendarmes. The purchase was made in Lola’s name, in part to conceal the origin of the money, and in part because as a property owner she could apply for Bavarian citizenship. The generous king also considered buying the house where Lola was staying, plus another plot of land on which to build her a third house. Nothing could be enough for his Lolitta. As far as Lola was concerned, the Barerstrasse house needed a considerable amount of refurbishing. But it took a year to complete the renovation (which included the loan, or gift, of several priceless treasures from the Pinakothek Museum), because of Lola’s willful but typical disregard for the requisite building permits.

Money slipped through Lola’s hands like sand. No sooner had Ludwig given her an allowance than it was spent and she was in debt, exceeding her hundred-thousand-florin annual income almost immediately. On Christmas Eve, 1846, Ludwig drew up a plan for her monthly expenditure, but it was impossible to tether her. Instead, he fueled the financial fire, lavishing even more money on Lola, with extravagant gifts such as a coach with all the extras, including a pair of blue harnesses for her horses.

Lola’s new nickname, “the German Pompadour,” which she took as a compliment, only sparked her imagination; how else might she emulate Louis XV’s notorious paramour? A request for her own private
chapel and confessor was denied, as no cleric would accept the post. There would be no whitewashing of Lola’s virtue.

Ludwig deputized their mutual friend Baron von Heideck to keep an eye on Lola’s expenses, and Lola sent him all her bills. However, the baron soon found himself more involved in the couple’s life than he had bargained for, when they began using his regular tea parties as a convenient location for their trysts.

Bavaria had a constitution, but Ludwig was one of the last true Western European autocrats. Nonetheless, his primary interests were aesthetic and cultural, not political. By the 1840s the king had all but ceded control of his government to a repressive Catholic faction of Jesuits called the Ultramontane, because their primary allegiance was “over the mountains,” to the pope in Rome, rather than to their local sovereign. This party was led by Bavaria’s Minister for the Interior, Karl August von Abel. Though a staunch conservative working for a socially liberal king, Abel, who had held his post for a decade, was Ludwig’s ablest minister.

Abel and Lola would become bitter enemies, and their mutual hatred would change the fate of the kingdom. As the autumn of 1846 faded into winter, Minister von Abel began to mount an opposition to Lola’s influence on the king. But Ludwig was deaf, both literally and figuratively, to Abel’s warnings that his Lolitta was a temptress who was ruining both him and the monarchy.

Lola’s other major nemesis, Munich’s chief of police, Baron von Pechmann, also confronted Ludwig directly to inform him that his mistress was generating no end of ill will. Her tantrums and outbursts alienated shopkeepers and citizens. Compelled to do damage control when a confectioner lost much of his Christmas business due to a Lola-engendered incident, the king promoted the man to the post of court chocolatier.

But even when Lola was inspired to do something beneficial, it backfired. She used her substantial influence with Ludwig to get schoolteachers a pay raise, but before the increase was formally announced, she leaked it to the press, taking credit for it. A backlash ensued when people complained that she wielded
too much
power over the king.

Baron von Pechmann had become the indefatigable Inspector Javert to Lola’s Jean Valjean. Determined to unmask her as a fraud, he planted a spy inside her household. Crescentia Ganser wasn’t totally reliable, but she was credible enough, reporting to the chief of police that Lola entertained young men at her home at all hours. Among them was Nüssbammer, whom Lola had repeatedly assured the king was just a good friend.

Ludwig was devastated by the secret reports the baron had collected. Although he was advised never to see Lola again, he could not bear the prospect. He scribbled a dramatic note to Baron von Heideck.

Happiness is not for this earth. I was happy here, but now I am thrown down from my heaven.
The unbelievable has happened
. The years I have yet to live I had hoped to pass in exalted love. It was a dream….
It is over now….
The bearer of this, the wife of the sculptor Ganser, will show you the evidence…. I intend to come to your home about 1:30 today. I think it would be best for Lolitta to meet me there. If I must break with her forever (I fear nothing else is possible), still I want to see her one more time…. The king is ashamed, but the 60-year-old man is not, that tears fill his eyes as he writes this.

Just one hour ago, happy yet was

Ludwig

Heideck had scarcely received the note when Ludwig breathlessly arrived, launching himself into the baron’s arms and weeping, “So there is no more joy for me. I thought I had found a woman to be a friend to me for the rest of my days, someone to fill the empty hours with intimate, spiritual joy and make me forget the troubles of state with quiet inspiration and companionship. I honor and love the queen, but her conversation is simply not adequate for my spirit, and my heart needs feminine society. I’m used to it. I had hoped that I’d found such a woman in Lola, and she betrayed me.”

At this point in their romance, Ludwig and Lola had yet to consummate their relationship. Lola tantalized; Ludwig pined and worshiped.
What the pair had been enjoying were indeed long sessions of stimulating discourse, rather than intercourse. And there is a great deal to be said for the fact that even in broken Spanish, Lola was witty, intelligent, intellectual, and clever enough to keep as cosmopolitan and sexual a man as Ludwig utterly infatuated.

Heideck supported a clean break with Lola, because seeing her again would only cause the king additional stress. But Ludwig insisted, “I…can’t condemn her without a hearing. I couldn’t live with myself if I did that…. She may be innocent, or at least not so guilty as this woman claims…. Think how persecuted she is, how she and I have already been slandered…. [H]er faithlessness has caused enough pain in the depths of my soul that I don’t want to compound it with self-recrimination because I was unjust to her.”

So Ludwig called on Lola, and a scene of denials, tears, and recriminations followed. And she was forgiven. Triumphant, she wrote to her friend Pier-Angelo Fiorentino,

I left Paris at the beginning of June as a lady errant and raced about the world and
today
I’m on the point of receiving the title of
countess
! I have a lovely property, horses, servants, in sum everything that could surround the official mistress of the King of Bavaria.

Adding that the king loved her passionately, in typical Lola fashion, she then launched into a mixture of hyperbole and blatant lies.

I am surrounded by the homage of great ladies, I go everywhere. All of Munich waits upon me, ministers of state, generals, great ladies and I no longer recognize myself as Lola Montez. I do everything here. The king shows his great love for me. He walks with me. Goes out with me. Every week I have a great party for ministers etc. which he attends and where he can’t do me enough homage.

The great ladies and ministers were waiting, all right. Waiting for her to leave.

The confrontation between king and royal mistress was replayed
in Lola’s drawing room after Crescentia Ganser went to the king herself, at Pechmann’s prompting. Once again, Lola wept and swore on her father’s grave that the allegations against her were false. Even Ludwig would later write that, had Lola confessed to nocturnal rendezvous with Lieutenant Nüssbammer, he would have forgiven her, so great was his passion. Nonetheless, he decided that Lola was in need of a minder and hired Lola’s old friend Maltzahn, who returned from Paris to take the job. But Maltzahn had his price: a government appointment. So Ludwig made him an adjutant at court.

Public opinion of Lola continued to sink. Count Karl Sensheim, the finance minister, endeavored to convince Ludwig that Lola was manipulating him. She, of course, denied it, but the monarch wasn’t entirely unaware of her behavior, writing in his diary that she was meddling in affairs of state, and that his concessions to her only ended up with demands for additional concessions. He worried about where it would all end.

Nonetheless, on December 8, 1846, he wrote, “I hope I may never suffer again what my poor heart suffered last Saturday the 5th (a day which I will never forget to the end of my life) and what my darling Lola suffered. They tried to tear us asunder forever.”

In a burst of passionate enthusiasm, Ludwig had offered to make Lola a countess, an event she alluded to in her letter to Pier-Angelo Fiorentino. Now, realizing he might have been too rash, the king tried to backpedal, offering to make her a baroness instead. But the horse was already out of the barn. It was countess or nothing for Lola. If not, she would quit Munich forever and never see Ludwig again!

Sigh.

Countess it would be. But first Lola would have to become a citizen.

Unfortunately, having made a sworn enemy of the chief of police, she hardly aided her cause. An incident at the post office in Munich had turned violent when she was unable to retrieve an ill-advised letter she’d just dropped in the mail to Nüssbammer. Her confrontation with Baron von Pechmann grew ugly; she told him that Ludwig would certainly inform him to lay off her. Pechmann ignored her threats and sent Lola a summons to appear in court for “excessive
behavior in the postal building.” She tore the summons to pieces, insisting that she didn’t understand German. Get a translator, growled Pechmann. Finally, Ludwig demanded that the baron cease his deliberate persecution—and prosecution—of Lola, and ordered his transfer to Landshut.

The chief of police may have been the most prominent of Lola’s victims, but he was far from the only one. This would become the pattern with anyone who displeased, crossed, or somehow insulted her. They would find themselves fined, imprisoned, transferred, or exiled by the king. On December 26, 1846, a young man who “lorgnetted” Lola (the rude term for someone ogling another through their opera glasses at the theater), was sentenced to three days’ house arrest.

Stephen Henry Sulivan, nephew of England’s prime minister, Lord Palmerston, had also been keeping a watchful eye on her, presumably on his uncle’s behalf, providing the prime minister with updates on Lola’s behavior and her influence with the Bavarian king. Evidently, Lola was denied admission to an arts club in Munich where she wished to become a member. As an explanation for why she had been blackballed, the club’s president showed the following paper to Sulivan. It was signed by the king, who overrode the vote of the admissions committee, instructing them to treat Lola with the deepest respect.