She was finished on the London stage, of course. Lumley dismissed her, and although one or two attempts were made to present her at other theatres, the damage was done. All sorts of people now seemed to remember her as Mrs James, and although she wrote a letter of denial to the press, no one believed it. A few weeks later she had disappeared and that, thought I, was the end of Lola Montez so far as I was concerned, and good riddance. A brilliant bed-mate, I don’t deny, in her way, and even now the picture of her kneeling naked among the bed-clothes can set me itching—but I’d never liked her particularly, and was glad to see her sent packing.

But it wasn’t the end of her, by any means. Although it was some years before I saw her again—in circumstances that I couldn’t have dreamed of—one heard of her from time to time through the papers. And always it was sensational news; she seemed to have a genius for thrusting herself into high places and creating scandal. First there was a report of her horse-whipping a policeman in Berlin; next she was dancing on the tables during a civic banquet in Bonn, to the outrage of Prince Albert and our Queen, who were on a State visit at the time. Then she was performing in Paris, and when the audience didn’t take to her she stripped off her garters and drawers and flung them at the gallery; she started a riot in the streets of Warsaw, and when they tried to arrest her she held the peelers off with pistols. And of course there were scores of lovers, most of them highly-placed: the Viceroy of Poland, the Tsar of Russia (although I doubt if that’s true), and Liszt the musician.18 She took up with him two or three times, and once to get rid of her he locked her in a hotel room and sneaked out by the back door.

I met him, later on, by the way, and we discussed the lovely Lola and found ourselves much in agreement. Like me, he admired her as a tumble, but found her all too overpowering. “She is a consuming fire,” he told me, shaking his white head ruefully, “and I’ve been scorched—oh, so often.” I sympathised; she had urged me on in love-making with a hair-brush, but with him it had been a dog-whip, and he was a frail sort of fellow, you know.