ed of a comedy, _Der
Weiberseind von Benedix_, followed by a cachucha and a fandango with
Herr Opsermann for a dancing-partner.

Lola's success was assured; and Herr Frays, who had started by
refusing to let her appear, was now full of grovelling apologies. He
offered her a contract. But Lola, having other ideas as to how her
time should be employed in Munich, would not accept it.

"Thank you for nothing," she said. "When I asked you for an
engagement, you told me I was not good enough to dance in your
theatre. Well, I have now proved to both Fraeulein Frenzal and yourself
that I am. That is all I care about, and I shall not dance again,
either for you or for anybody else."

If she had known enough German, she would probably have added: "Put
that in your pipe and smoke it!"

Munich in those days must have proved attractive to people with small
incomes. Thus, Edward Wilberforce, who spent some years there, says
that meat was fivepence a pound, beer twopence-halfpenny a quart, and
servants' wages eight shillings a month. But there were drawbacks.

"The city," says an English guide-book of this period, "has the
reputation of being a very dissolute capital." Yet it swarmed with
churches. The police, too, exercised a strict watch upon the hotel
registers; and, as a result of their activities, a "French visitor was
separated from his feminine companion on grounds of public morality."

"None of your Parisian looseness for us!" said the City Fathers.

But Lola appears to have avoided any such rigid censorship. At any
rate, a certain Auguste Papon (a mixture of pimp and _souteneur_),
whom she had met in Paris, happened to be in Munich at the same time
as herself. The intimacy was revived; and, as he did not possess the
entree to the Court, for some weeks they lived together at the Hotel
Maulich. In the spring of 1847 a young Guardsman found himself in the
town, on his way back to England from Kissengen. He records that, not
knowing who she was, he sat next Lola Montez at dinner one evening,
and gives an instance of her quick temper. "On the floor between us,"
he says, "was an ice-pail, with a bottle of champagne. A sudden
quarrel occurred with her neighbour, a Bavarian lieutenant; and,
applying her foot to the bucket, she sent it flying the length of the
room."

IV

Lola certainly made the running. Five days after she first met him,
Ludwig summoned all the officials of the Court, and astonished (and
shocked) them b