Almost before her twinkling feet had carried her to the centre of the stage an ominous sound broke the silence of expectation.  A hiss came from one of the boxes; it was repeated from another, and another.  The sibilant sound spread round the house; it swelled into a sinister storm of hisses and boos.  The light faded out of the dancer’s eyes, the smile from her lips; and as the tumult of disapprobation rose to a deafening climax the curtain was rung down, and Lola rushed weeping from the stage.  Her career as a dancer, in England, had ended at its birth.

But Lola Montez was not the woman to sit down calmly under defeat.  A few weeks later we find her tripping it on the stage at Dresden, and at Berlin, where the King of Prussia himself was among her applauders.  But such success as the Continent brought her was too small to keep her now deplenished purse supplied.  She fell on evil days, and for two years led a precarious life—­now, we are told, singing in Brussels streets to keep starvation from her side, now playing the political spy in Russia, and again, by a capricious turn of fortune’s wheel, being feted and courted in the exalted circles of Vienna and Paris.

From the French capital she made her way to Warsaw, where stirring adventures awaited her, for before she had been there many days the Polish Viceroy, General Paskevitch, cast his aged but lascivious eyes on her young beauty and sent an equerry to desire her presence at the palace.  “He offered her” (so runs the story as told by her own lips) “the gift of a splendid country estate, and would load her with diamonds besides.  The poor old man was a comic sight to look upon—­unusually short in stature; and every time he spoke he threw his head back and opened his mouth so wide as to expose the artificial gold roof of his palate.  A death’s head making love to a lady could not have been a more horrible or disgusting sight.  These generous gifts were most respectfully and very decidedly declined.”

But General Paskevitch was not disposed to be spurned with impunity.  The contemptuous beauty must be punished for her scorn of his wooing; and, when she made her appearance on the stage the same night it was to a greeting of hisses by the Viceroy’s hirelings.  The next night brought the same experience; but when on the third night the storm arose, “Lola, in a rage, rushed down to the footlights and declared that those hisses had been set at her by the director, because she had refused certain gifts from the old Prince, his master.  Then came a tremendous shower of applause from the audience, and the old Princess, who was present, both nodded her head and clapped her hands to the enraged and fiery little Lola.”