alen." The woman whose voluptuous beauty and unbridled passion had
upset thrones and fired the hearts of men was now concerned with the
saving of souls. As such, she resolved to spread "the Word" among
others less happily circumstanced. To this end, she preached in
conventicles and visited hospitals, asylums, and prisons, offering a
helping hand to all who would accept one, and especially to
"unfortunates" of her own sex. She had her disappointments. But
neither snubs nor setbacks, nor sneers nor jeers could turn her from
the path she had elected to tread.

"In the course of a long experience as a Christian minister," says a
clergyman whom she encountered at this period, "I do not think I ever
saw deeper penitence and humility, more real contrition of soul, and
more bitter self-reproach than in this poor woman."

"With," he adds, in an oleaginous little tract on the subject, "a
heart full of generous sympathy for the poor outcasts of her own sex,
she devoted the last few months of her life to visiting them at the
Magdalen Asylum, near New York.... She strove to impress upon them not
only the awful guilt of breaking the divine law, but the inevitable
earthly sorrow which those who persisted with thoughtless desperation
in sinful courses were assuredly treasuring up for themselves."

But, except those who encountered her charity and self-sacrifice,
there were few who had a good word for Lola Montez in her character as
a Magdalen. People who had fawned upon her in the days of her success
now jeered and sneered and affected to doubt the reality of her
penitence. "Once a sinner, always a sinner," they declared; and "Lola
in the pulpit is rich!" was another barbed shaft.

In thus abandoning the buskin for the Bible, Lola Montez was following
one example and setting another. The example she followed was that of
Mlle Gautier, of the Comedie Francaise, who, after flashing across the
horizon of Maurice de Saxe (and several others), left the footlights
and retired to a convent. "It is true," she says in her memoirs, "that
I have encountered during my theatrical career a number of people
whose morals have been as irreproachable as their talents, but I
myself was not among them." This was putting it--well--mildly, for,
according to Le d'Hoefer, "her stage career was marked by a freedom
of manner pushed to the extremity of licence."

In the sisterhood that she joined the new name of Mlle Gautier was
Sister Augustine. As such, sh