Word: lola
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...Lola? Rumor had it (probably from Lola's own lips) that she was the daughter of Lord Byron ... or maybe of a matador. In fact, as this perfectly sober biography with a plot like a chambermaid's dream shows, Lola was born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1818, the daughter of an 18-year-old lieutenant and a 13-year-old chorine. When she was seven, Eliza's father died of cholera in India. Shipped home to Scotland, the child appalled her stepfather's Presbyterian parents by running naked through the streets. Hustled off to school...
...Lola was what the Victorians called "a superb piece." She had skin like a Dresden shepherdess, hair like a black velvet shawl, eyes that flashed and flickered like sapphires in firelight. When a man got her Irish up, she cut him across the face with a riding whip. She once fired a pistol at a disappointing lover. What Lola wanted, Lola...
...Petersburg, Lola got a "private audience" with the Czar, who gave her 1,000 rubles for services rendered. In Dresden, she got Liszt, the great lover of the age, and so wore him out that one night he locked her in a hotel room and fled, leaving a substantial sum to pay for the furniture he knew she would break. In Paris, she got culture and a taste for liberal politics in the company of Balzac, Lamartine, George Sand, Victor Hugo, and especially Dumas père. She found the great love of her life, however, with a talented radical...
...soon killed in a duel, but he had somehow refined Lola's primitive hunger for sex and power. In Munich, a year after Dujarier's death, she opened the climactic episode of her career by striding unannounced into the study of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, an aging aesthete who had transformed his dowdy Munich into the Florence of the north. When the King asked the lady if her figure was a work of nature or of art, the story goes, Lola snatched up a pair of scissors and ripped open her bodice. "I am bewitched," the King...
...Lola ruled Ludwig's kingdom as well as his imagination, and to the dismay of Prince Metternich, the Austrian archconservative who was master of Europe between the two Napoleons, her rule was quite liberal-she harassed the Jesuits and introduced the Code Napoleon. In 1847 Metternich offered Lola $250,000 if she would quietly go away; Lola threw the money in his emissary's face. Then Metternich organized a student riot, and Lola fell into his trap. Haughtily, she got Ludwig to close the university. The students rioted again, and now the riot was swollen by thousands...