Coming back from the Antipodes, she settled for a time in San Francisco. There, in rather quick succession, she married twice. One of her two California spouses was Hull, the famous pioneer newspaper owner, of San Francisco.
But she quickly wearied of the West, and of her successive husbands. Back she came to New York. And--to the wonder of all, and the incredulity of most--she there announced that, though she had been a great sinner, she was now prepared to devote the rest of her life to penance.
Strangely enough, her new resolve was not a pose. Even in her heyday she had given lavishly to charity. Now she took up rescue work among women. She did much good in a quiet way, spending what money she had on the betterment of her sex's unfortunates, and toiling night and day in their behalf.
Under this unaccustomed mode of life, Lola's health went to pieces. She was sent to a sanitarium in Astoria, L.I. And there, in poverty and half forgotten, she died. Kindly neighbors scraped together enough money to bury her.
Thus ended in wretched anticlimax the meteor career of Lola Montez; Wonder Woman and wanderer; over-thrower of a dynasty and worse-than-mediocre dancer. Some one has called her "the last of the great adventuresses." And that is perhaps her best epitaph.
Her neglected grave--in Greenwood Cemetery, in Brooklyn, by the way--bears no epitaph at all. That last resting place of a very tired woman is marked merely by a plain headstone, whose dimmed lettering reads:
~Mrs. Eliza Gilbert. Died June 16, 1861. Age 42.~
One trembles to think of the near-royal Irish rage that would have possessed Lola if, at her baroness-countess-Bavarian zenith, she could have foreseen that dreary little postscript to her lurid life missive.
This story opens with the account of a deathbed scene; somewhat different from any other you may have read. It is brought in to throw a light on what heredity and careful instruction can do in molding a young mind. But don't necessarily skip it for that reason.
One day in 1630, the Sieur de L'Enclos lay dying in his great, dreary bedroom in his great, dreary Touraine castle. There was no especial tragedy about the closing of his life. He was elderly, very rich, and possessed of a record for having used, to the full, every minute of a long and exciting life.