The Magnificent Montez | Page 3

remarkable qualities. The natural powers of her mind were considerable. She had a strong will, and a certain grasp of circumstances. Her disposition was generous, and her sympathies very large. These qualities raised the courtesan to a singular position. She became a political influence; and exercised a fascination over sovereigns and ministers more widely extended than has perhaps been possessed by any other member of the demi-monde. She ruled a kingdom; and ruled it, moreover, with dignity and wisdom and ability. The political Hypatia, however, was sacrificed to the rabble. Her power was gone, and she could hope no more from the flattery of statesmen. She became an adventuress of an inferior class. Her intrigues, her duels, and her horse-whippings made her for a time a notoriety in London, Paris, and America.
Like other celebrated favourites who, with all her personal charms, but without her glimpses of a better human nature, have sacrificed the dignity of womanhood to a profligate ambition, this one upbraided herself in her last moments on her wasted life; and then, when all her ambition and vanity had turned to ashes, she understood what it was to have been the toy of men and the scorn of women.
Altogether a somewhat guarded suggestion of disapproval about the subject of this particular memoir.
II
Three years after the thunderous echoes of Waterloo had died away, and "Boney," behind a fringe of British bayonets, was safely interned on the island of St. Helena, there was born in barracks at Limerick a little girl. On the same day, in distant Bavaria, a sovereign was celebrating his thirty-fifth birthday. Twenty-seven years later the two were to meet; and from that meeting much history was to be written.
The little girl who first came on the scene at Limerick was the daughter of one Ensign Edward Gilbert, a young officer of good Irish family who had married a Se?orita Oliverres de Montalva, "of Castle Oliver, Madrid." At any rate, she claimed to be such, and also that she was directly descended from Francisco Montez, a famous toreador of Seville. There is a strong presumption, however, that here she was drawing on her imagination; and, as for the "Castle Oliver" in Sunny Spain, well, that country has never lacked "castles."
The Oliver family, as pointed out by E. B. d'Auvergne in his carefully documented Adventuresses and Adventurous Ladies, was really of Irish extraction, and had been settled in Limerick since the year 1645. "The family pedigree," he says, "reveals no trace of Spanish or Moorish blood." Further, by the beginning of the last century, the main line had, so far as the union of its members was blessed by the Church, expired, and no legitimate offspring were left. Gilbert's spouse, accordingly, must, if a genuine Oliverres, have come into the world with a considerable blot on her 'scutcheon.
Still, if there were no hidalgos perched on her family tree, Mrs. Gilbert probably had some good blood in her veins. As a matter of fact, there is some evidence adduced by a distant relative, Miss D. M. Hodgson, that she was really an illegitimate daughter of an Irishman, Charles Oliver, of Castle Oliver (now Cloghnafoy), Co. Limerick, and a peasant girl on his estate. This is possible enough, for the period was one when squires exercised "seigneurial rights," and when colleens were complacent. If they were not, they had very short shrift.
Mrs. Gilbert's wedding had been a hasty one. Still, not a bit too hasty, since the doctor and monthly nurse had to be summoned almost before the ink was dry on the register. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Gilbert must have gone to church in the condition of ladies who love their lords, for this "pledge of mutual affection" was born in Limerick barracks while the honeymoon was still in full swing, and within a couple of months of the nuptial knot being tied. She was christened Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna, but was at first called by the second of these names. This, however, being a bit of a mouthful for a small child, she herself soon clipped it to the diminutive Lola. The name suited her, and it stuck.
While these facts are supported by documentary evidence, they have not been "romantic" enough to fit in with the views of certain foreign biographers. Accordingly, they have given the child's birthplace as in, among other cities, Madrid, Lucerne, Constantinople, and Calcutta; and one of them has even been sufficiently daring to make her a daughter of Lord Byron. Larousse, too, not to be behindhand, says that she was "born in Seville, of a Spanish father"; and, alternatively, "in Scotland, of an English father." Both accounts, however, are emphatic that her mother was "a young Creole of astonishing loveliness, who had married two officers, a Spaniard and an Englishman."
It was