As it is hardly possible to take a long walk without overstepping the limits of the principality, not many hours elapsed before Lola was beyond the reach of Henry's wrath. She had the choice of various retreats. The neighbouring duchy of Saxe-Altenburg she, no doubt, contemptuously dismissed. To the north lay Prussia; but she could expect no welcome there. Frederick William, after her memorable adventure at the review, had given her to understand that his police could be better employed than in teaching her manners. She avoided Weimar, where her old lover, Liszt, had established himself in company with the Princess Zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. She may have lingered awhile in these pretty, petty Thuringian states, with their charming capitals set in the forest glades; and perhaps have made a pilgrimage to the Venusberg, near Eisenach, where her prototype ensnared Tannhäuser. The spirit of that old _minnesänger_ was not altogether dead. Something of it glowed in the heart of the grey-haired man who reigned over Bavaria. Deliberately or aimlessly, Lola Montez, the Venus of her generation, journeyed south towards Munich.
At that time Louis I., who wore the Bavarian crown, was a man sixty-one years old. He, "the most German of the Germans," as he had been styled, was by an odd freak of fortune born in France. His father, Max Joseph, though brother of the Duke of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, commanded a regiment in the French service, and it was at Strasbourg that the child was born in 1786. His father's grenadiers shaved off their moustaches to stuff his pillow with. The name bestowed on him in baptism was that of his godfather, the ill-fated King of France. But the Revolution soon drove him with his family across the Rhine, to Mannheim and to Rohrbach. Death quickly cleared the boy a path to the throne. His father presently succeeded his brother as Duke, and a few years later upon the extinction of the elder line of the Wittelsbachs, became Elector of Bavaria.
Even in the stormy first decade of the nineteenth century princes had to be educated, and in the year 1803 we find Louis at Göttingen, sitting at the feet of Johannes Müller, who infused him with a lively sense of nationality and a reverence for all things German. This was to stand the Prince in good stead in the dark days that followed. Those were years of profound humiliation for Germany, of poignant suffering for her people. Even in the 'forties few Germans took pride in the name, some of them settled in London and Paris, deeming it almost a reproach. In his country's blackest night the Bavarian prince loudly proclaimed his faith in a glorious dawn. He exulted in the name of German. He was "teutsch" (as he always wrote the word) to the very core.