XII. THE SUPPER AT THE FRÈRES PROVENÇAUX 83
XXIII. THE UNCROWNED QUEEN OF BAVARIA 157
XXVII. A SECOND EXPERIMENT IN MATRIMONY 181
LOLA MONTEZ, COUNTESS OF LANDSFELD _Frontispiece_
LOUIS OF BAVARIA, WHEN ELECTORAL PRINCE " 112
The year 1818 was, on the whole, a good starting-point in life for people with a taste and capacity for adventure. This was not suspected by those already born. They looked forward, after the tempest that had so lately ravaged Europe, to a golden age of slippered ease and general stagnation. The volcanoes, they hoped, were all spent. "We have slumbered seven years, let us forget this ugly dream," complacently observed a German prince on resuming possession of his dominions; and "the old, blind, mad, despised, and dying king's" worthy regent expressed the same confidence when he gave the motto, "A sign of better times," to an order founded in this particular year. Yet the child that thus with royal encouragement began life in England at that time learned before he could toddle to tremble at the mysterious name of "Boney," and later on would thrill with fear, delight, and horror at his nurse's recital of the atrocities and final glorious undoing of that terrific ogre. Presently he would meet in his walks abroad, red-coated, bewhiskered veterans who had met the monster face to face (or said they had); who would recount stories of decapitated kings, dreadful uprisings, and threatened invasions; who had lost a leg or an arm or an eye at Waterloo or Salamanca; which victories (they assured him) were mainly due to their individual valour and generalship. As the child grew older he would begin to make a coherent story out of these strange happenings: he would realise through what a period of storm and stress the world had passed immediately before his advent. He would listen eagerly at his father's table to more trustworthy relations of the great battles by men whose share in them his country was proud to acknowledge. Waterloo, Trafalgar, the Nile, would be fought over again in the school playground. For the best part of his life he might expect to have as contemporaries, men who had seen Napoleon with their own eyes, and shaken Nelson by his one hand--men who had seen thrones that seemed as stable as the everlasting hills come crashing down, to be pieced together with a cement of blood and gunpowder. How often the boy, or, as in this particular case, the girl, must have longed for a recurrence of those brave days, and deprecated the peaceful present. But for him (or her) far more amazing things were in store. His it was to see society emerge from its worn-out feudal chrysalis, and to take the path which may yet lead to civilisation. Those born in 1818 could have the delightful distinction of being carried in the first railway train, of sending the first "wire," of boarding the first "penny 'bus." Born in the age of the coach and the hoy, they would die in the era of the locomotive and mail steamer. Theirs was an age of transition indeed, most curious to watch, most thrilling to traverse. And--most valuable privilege of all to those that loved to play a part in great affairs--they would be in good time to assist at the widest spread and most terrific upheaval Europe had known since the downfall of the Roman Empire. To have been thirty years of age in that year of years, 1848! Those who witnessed the great drama must have felt that to have come into the world more than three decades before would have been a mistake the most grievous.