Lola Montez

, at Vienna, the young Hungarian had taken pride of place before all the pianists of his day. The crown still rested securely on his brow, despite the formidable rivalry of Thal

s; the Tsar found him unabashed and contemptuous; the Kings of Bavaria and Hanover he scorned to invite to his concerts; before Isabel II. he refused to play at all, because Spanish Court etiquette forbade his personal introduction to her. The Catholic Church, he wrote, knew only curse and ban. He was the friend of Lamennais. The bourgeois-the Philistine, as we should call him now-he held in gr

n of passion that led her to abandon home, husband, and position, to throw herself into the pianist's arms at Basle. She was deeply in love with him; but she wished to be more than a wife, more than a lover: she aspired to be his muse. Liszt, however, needed no inspiration from without. In an oft-quoted phrase, he said that the Dantes created the Beatrices; "the genuine die when they are eighteen years old." The man chafed more and more under the ties that bound him. He had no wish to abandon the mother of his children, but his genius demanded to be unfettered. He wandered over Europe, sad and b

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ong nature could yield only to a stronger. We have heard how she spoke of Nicholas I.; we shall find this almost sensuous craving for force of personality in her subsequent relations. To her, the pianist must have been a new revelation of manhood. Her life so far had brought her in contact with Indian officers and civilians, a few men about town, and (for a few hours) with one or more potentates. Now she met a great man with a beautiful soul. She had heard the stories current of Liszt's abnegation, his boundless generosity, his pride in his vocation. In her, too, he recognised a haughty intolerance of patronage, a contempt for those in high places, such as he had himself exhibited. Both cou

ul letter. Liszt, in Calypso's grotto at Dresden, answered proudly and coldly. The Comtesse wrote, announcing the end of their relations. Most men are frightened at the abrupt termination of a love affair of which they

this brief love story began; we are quite in the dark as to how it ended. A report was current that the two travelled together from Dresden to Paris, where both appeared in the spring of '44. We do not hear that they were seen together in the French capital, so the adieux may already have been exchanged. Liszt stayed there but a few weeks, and then started on a tour through

f which she never tired. She ardently espoused the cause of the Revolution in 1848. More fortunate than her old lover, she never lost the sane and generous sympathies of her youth.