Montez, LOLA

Montez, LOLA, adventuress, was born in 1818 at Limerick, and was christened Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna, her father being an Ensign Gilbert, her mother of Spanish descent. Taken out to India, she there lost her father by cholera; and, her mother having remarried, Dolores (or 'Lola') was sent home in 1826 to Europe, and brought up at Montrose, in Paris, and at Bath. To escape the match, arranged by her mother, with a gouty old judge, she eloped with a Captain James, whom in July 1837 she married at Neath; but the marriage ended in a separation and in her return from India (1842). She now turned dancer, coming out at Her Majesty's Theatre; and after visits to Dresden, Berlin, Warsaw, St Petersburg, and Paris (where she formed a liaison with Dujarrier, a young Republican editor, who fell in a duel), she came towards the close of 1846 to Munich. There she soon won an ascendancy over the eccentric artist-king, Louis I., who created her Countess of Landsfeld, and allowed her £5000 a year. For more than a twelvemonth she was all-powerful, her power directed in favour of Liberalism and against the Jesuits; but the revolution of 1848 sent her once more adrift on the world. Again she married (this time a Lieutenant Heald), a marriage as unlucky as the first; and, after touring (1851-56) through the States and Australia, and after two more 'marriages' in California, in 1858 she delivered in New York a series of lectures written for her by C. Chauncey Burr. She died, a penitent, at Astoria, Long Island, on 17th January 1861, her last four months devoted to ministering in a Magdalen asylum near New York, and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery. See her Autobiography (1858), and The Story of a Penitent (1867).