The exact nature of the relations between individual men and women is not in general a legitimate matter for curiosity or speculation. It is a question which concerns the parties only. In this instance, however, it may be in the interests of Louis and Lola to observe that their relations were in all probability what is called platonic. The King's nature was æsthetic, poetical, sentimental; he was eminently capable of that unsensual affection that seems to have animated Dante and Michelangelo. It must not be forgotten, too, that he was sixty years of age. "The sins of youth," he said "are the virtues of age." He affirmed publicly and solemnly that Lola had been his friend, never his mistress; and the word of Louis of Bavaria is not to be lightly disregarded. Lola repeatedly said the same thing. Nothing to the contrary was ever alleged by the King's immediate _entourage_; and--most significant fact of all--the Queen, Therese of Sachsen-Hildburghausen, never manifested the slightest jealousy of her husband's friend, but, on the contrary, more than once expressed her sympathy with her policy and actions.
It was not, of course, to be expected that the public would take this view of Louis's relations with the famous adventuress. Least of all would it find acceptance with the Roman Catholic clergy, whose tendency it has ever been to exaggerate the sensual instincts in man's nature and to ignore the subtler, finer phases of passion. Puritan and prurient are generally synonymous terms. Nor were the King's ministers and clerical advisers at all anxious to place a favourable construction on Lola's presence at the court.
The Jesuits' agents in different capitals reported unfavourably on the dancer. They professed to believe, as we have seen--perhaps, they did believe--that she was an emissary of the Freemasons, a body which in England is regarded as a gigantic goose club, but by the Catholic world as the most dangerous of secret anti-clerical societies. Now from what Frau von Kobell tells us, it is plain that the Jesuits looked on Lola as a foe from the moment she set foot in Munich. We must seek for some antecedent cause. The lady's own explanation is improbable, but worth repeating. She alleges that while in Paris she was approached by the agents of the Society, and invited to assist in the conversion of Count Medem, a Russian nobleman. This proposal, possibly because of her inherited dislike of the Roman Church, she declined; and communicated the matter to Monsieur Guizot, then Prime Minister, who had long been puzzled by the ever-increasing numbers in which the Russian nobility in Paris were going over to Rome. Their conversion is attributed by Catholics to the apostolic zeal of Madame Swetchine, a Russian lady of some literary attainments, whose _salon_ was the rendezvous of the clerical party in Paris. Vandam's informant (if he ever existed in the flesh) and one or two writers with an Ultramontane bias suggest that the feud between Lola and the Jesuits arose simply because it was impossible for the latter to give any countenance to a King's mistress. But we know that they recognised her as their enemy before she became the royal favourite; moreover, German writers say that the clericals had never made any remonstrances or raised any difficulties respecting her predecessors in His Majesty's affections. I see no reason to doubt that Lola's anti-clerical or anti-Catholic sentiments were genuine and frankly expressed; we find similar instances of the _odium theologicum_ in Nell Gwynne and Louis de Kèroual. Intercourse with Liszt and Dujarier would have strengthened such a prejudice. In Lola's haughty disregard, too, of the etiquette of courts and fearlessness in the presence of the great, we may detect the temperament, which would find its political expression in advanced Liberalism.