However, with Ludwig infatuated by her, Lola was firmly in the saddle, and according to one outspoken French journalist whose story I read, her supremacy was causing alarm far outside Bavaria. There were rumours that she was an agent of Palmerston, set on to foment revolution in Germany; to other powers, striving to hold down a growing popular discontent that was spreading throughout Europe, she appeared to be a dangerous threat to the old regime. At least one attempt had been made to assassinate her: Metternich, the arch-reactionary master of Austria, had tried to bribe her to leave Germany for good. The truth was that in those days the world was on the edge of general revolution; we were coming out of the old age and into the new, and anything that was a focus of disorder or instability was viewed with consternation by the authorities. So Lola was not popular; the papers fumed against her, clergymen damned her in their sermons as a Jezebel and a Sempronia, and the ordinary folk were taught to regard her as a fiend in human shape—all the worse because the shape was beautiful.

Here ends Professor Flashman’s historical lecture, much of it cribbed from a history book, but some of it at least learned that first day in the Munich beer-gardens.

One thing I was pretty sure of, and it flies in the face of history: whatever may be said, Lola was secretly admired by the common people. They might shake their heads and look solemn whenever her cavalry escort drove a way for her through a crowd of protesting students; they might look shocked when they heard of the orgies in the Barerstrasse palace; they might exclaim in horror when her Allemania horse-whipped an editor and smashed his presses—but the men inwardly loved her for the gorgeous hoyden she was, and the women hid their satisfaction that one of their own sex was setting Europe by the ears. Whenever the insolent, tempestuous Montez provoked some new scandal, there was no lack of those who thought, “Good for you,” and quite a few who said it openly.

And what the devil did she want with me? Well, I had come to Munich to find out, so I scribbled a note that Sunday evening, addressed to the Chamberlain Lauengram, saying that I had arrived and was at his disposal. Then I wandered over to the Residenz Palace, and looked at Lola’s portrait in the public gallery—that “Gallery of Beauties” in which Ludwig had assembled pictures of the loveliest women of his day. There were princesses, countesses, actresses, and the daughter of the Munich town-crier, among others, and Lola looking unusually nun-like in a black dress and wearing a come-to-Jesus expression.20 Underneath it was inscribed a verse written by the king, who was given to poetry, which finished up:

Oh, soft and beauteous as a deer

Art thou, of Andalusian race!