Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

The Scandalous Waltz of Lola Montez

She arrived in Munich like a storm in silk. Hair dark as scandal, eyes sharp as swords. The year was 1846. The city buzzed with rumors before she even opened her mouth—a Spanish countess, they whispered, a dancer, a courtesan, a spy, maybe all three. But really, she was just Lola. Born Eliza Rosanna Gilbert in County Sligo, Ireland—although “just” never suited her.

Lola Montez was a lie dressed as a woman. A performance stitched together from hunger, beauty, and rage. And what a performance it was.

She captivated Europe not with talent, not exactly, but with audacity. She didn’t dance so much as demand attention—flamenco with a side of fury. In Vienna, in Warsaw, in Paris, she left men blinking in the smoke of her drama. And then came the king. Ludwig I of Bavaria, sixty and sentimental, his crown slipping from age and distraction, met Lola and fell headfirst into obsession. The old man never stood a chance.

But let’s rewind.

The Girl Who Wouldn't Behave

Lola was trouble before she was even Lola. As a child, Eliza Gilbert bit her tutors, threw tantrums, and flirted with soldiers. She once ran naked through the family estate, just to prove she could. Sent to India with her British officer father—he died quickly—then packed off to boarding school in England, she was a shapeshifter early on. Too wild for the drawing room, too cunning for the classroom.

By seventeen, she had eloped with a British army officer and promptly regretted it. The marriage crumbled. Society turned its back. So she turned hers, too.

Europe was the stage now. And she needed a role.

She became “Lola Montez,” allegedly born in Seville, trained by the finest Spanish maestros, exiled for her political views. A fabricated past. A future built on fishnet tights and arched eyebrows. No one asked too many questions. She performed in Berlin, Warsaw, Paris, swinging castanets and reputations in equal measure. Was she good? The reviews were... mixed. But it didn’t matter. She was a spectacle. A live wire in corsets and petticoats.

And like all great myths, she became real the more people believed her.

The King and the Countess

Munich was not ready.

King Ludwig I was a romantic, and dangerously bored. He wrote poetry to marble statues. He once commissioned 36 portraits of beautiful women he’d admired—the Gallery of Beauties, they called it. He wanted art to breathe, and when Lola walked into his court, art did exactly that.

She asked for an audience. She lifted her veil. He gasped. “Too beautiful for this world,” he reportedly said, and then—within hours—he made her his mistress.

What followed was part opera, part political crisis. Ludwig gave her a title: Countess of Landsfeld. He built her a palace. He allowed her to sway court decisions, inflame cabinet meetings, dismiss ministers. Lola, for her part, whipped students into a frenzy, earning the devotion of radical thinkers and the contempt of nearly everyone else. Her presence ignited protests. Beer halls turned into battlegrounds.

One day, she slapped a police chief in public. Another day, she stormed into parliament and screamed at conservatives. The Bavarian elite gnashed their teeth. The church hissed. The students cheered. The monarchy shook.

By 1848—the year revolutions flared across Europe—the pressure broke Ludwig. He abdicated, signing away the throne he had inherited, the country he had loved, the legacy he had built. All for a woman who wasn’t even Spanish.

Exile, Again

Lola fled. She always fled. The crowds wanted her head; she gave them a disappearing act.

She resurfaced in London. Married a soldier. Forgot to mention she already had a husband. Bigamy charges followed. So she fled again—France, then New York, then San Francisco. In California, she lived in a mining town, briefly ran a theater, and got in bar fights. One paper described her as “a whirlwind of skirts and daggers.”

She lectured, oddly, on morality and beauty. She published a book called The Arts of Beauty, doling out tips like "avoid worry" and "never marry an old man." Irony seemed to amuse her.

In Australia, she performed for gold miners and slapped journalists. Her dance was less dance than defiance now—feral, theatrical, ghostly. They loved her. Or hated her. It was all the same.

The Quiet End

By her early forties, her body had betrayed her. Syphilis. Poverty. Memory loss. The fire dimmed, then guttered.

She died in Brooklyn in 1861, at the age of 39. The newspapers called her “notorious.” Others called her “infamous.” Few called her “Eliza.”

She was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery under a stone that said only: Mrs. Eliza Gilbert. The grave, modest and unvisited for years, doesn’t hint at the woman who once danced revolution into a king’s heart.

The Legacy of Lola Montez

Today, Lola Montez survives as a footnote in royal scandals, a cautionary tale, a punchline in some histories. But look closer.

She was more than a dancer or a con artist. She was the collision of ambition and artifice, the product of a world that left women very few choices—and then punished them for choosing. She used performance as weaponry. Seduction as leverage. Identity as invention.

Before there were Kardashians, there was Lola. Before the age of viral fame, there was the Countess of Landsfeld setting Europe on fire in high heels and lies. Her life reads like a novel written in lipstick and gunpowder.

She reminds us that history is not just about kings and borders—but about the messy, magnetic people who set them spinning.

And sometimes, it only takes one woman—angry, dazzling, impossible—to unseat a monarch.