Before or after her visit to St. Petersburg the dancer saw the Tsar at Berlin. Mounted on a fiery Cordovan barb, she was among the spectators at a review given by King Frederick William in honour of his imperial guest. The horse was scared by the firing, and bolted, carrying its rider straight into the midst of the Royal party. Lola was not sorry to find herself in such company, but a _gendarme_ struck at her horse and endeavoured to drive it away. An insult of this sort Lola was the last woman to tolerate. Raising her whip, she slashed the policeman across the face. Out of respect for the Royal party, the incident was allowed to end there, for the moment; but the next day the dancer was waited upon with a summons. She instantly tore the document to pieces, and threw them into the face of the process-server. Such contempt for the law might have been attended with very serious consequences, but Lola went, as a matter of fact, scot-free. Perhaps her friends in high places interceded for her; but it is hard to believe, as she afterwards declared, that the _gendarme_ came to her lodgings to sue for her pardon.[7] In every capital of Europe it soon became known that the beautiful Spanish dancer was able and prepared to defend herself against the most determined antagonists of either sex.
But a nobler quarry than Tsar and Viceroy was now to fall before the shafts from Lola's eyes.
In the year 1844 Franz Liszt may be considered to have reached the zenith of his fame. In the two-and-twenty years that had elapsed since his first triumph, when a lad of eleven, at Vienna, the young Hungarian had taken pride of place before all the pianists of his day. The crown still rested securely on his brow, despite the formidable rivalry of Thalberg. Paris, London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Rome, and Milan had in turn felt his spell, and rapturously acclaimed him the king of melody. Honours and wealth poured in upon him. The magnates of his native land--the proudest of all aristocracies--presented him with a sword of honour. The monarchs of Europe publicly recognised the lofty genius of one whom they knew to be no friend of theirs. For Liszt, the devotee of later years, glowed then with generous enthusiasm for freedom, political and religious. Frederick William sent him diamonds, and he pitched them into the wings; the Tsar found him unabashed and contemptuous; the Kings of Bavaria and Hanover he scorned to invite to his concerts; before Isabel II. he refused to play at all, because Spanish Court etiquette forbade his personal introduction to her. The Catholic Church, he wrote, knew only curse and ban. He was the friend of Lamennais. The bourgeois--the Philistine, as we should call him now--he held in greater abhorrence even than the tyrant. In Louis Philippe he saw bourgeoisie enthroned. Yet the King of the French courted the man whose empire was more stable than his own. He reminded the pianist of a former meeting when the one was but a boy, and the other only Duke of Orleans. "Much has changed since then," said the Citizen-King. "Yes, sire, but not for the better!" bluntly replied the artist.