Lola, Catherine Hermary-Vieille

On January 17, 1861, Maria Dolorès Gilbert, known worldwide as Lola Montes, died in a shabby hospital room in New York. She had been born forty-two years earlier in Ireland to a family of gentry. After a solitary and wild childhood in India, Lola was sent by her mother Margareth to Paris, to a girls' school, to complete her education. A few years later, when Margareth came to pick her up accompanied by a handsome young man who was none other than her lover, Lola discovered through him that she was promised in marriage to an old judge from Calcutta. They escaped together, took refuge in Ireland, and were married. The marriage soon failed, Lola divorced and found herself alone. Rejected by this Victorian society that did not conceive of a woman's existence outside the bonds of marriage, she changed her name and became a dancer. Thus began for this beautiful, intelligent, and cultured young woman an extraordinary destiny. Married three times, mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, Lola traveled the world in search of glory and improbable happiness. On the day of her funeral, Maguy, a former boarding school friend, would say: "Aristocrat, intellectual, artist, she was all that, but who truly understood her?" Catherine Hermary-Vieille, winner of the Prix des Maisons de la Presse 1991 for her book Un amour fou, skillfully recounts the exceptional and tragic life of Lola Montes.