Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)/Montez, Lola

MONTEZ, LOLA, the stage name of Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert, an Irish adventuress; born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1818. Her father was an Ensign Gilbert, her mother of Spanish descent. Taken out to India, she lost her father, and, her mother having remarried, “Lola” was sent home in 1826 to Europe, and brought up at Montrose, in Paris, and at Bath. To escape the match, arranged by her mother, with an old judge, she eloped with a Captain James, whom in July, 1837, she married, but the marriage ended in a separation. She appeared as a dancer in London and other European capitals. In 1846, at Munich, she captivated the eccentric King Louis I., who created her Countess of Landsfeld, and allowed her $25,000 a year. For more than a year she was all-powerful, her power directed in favor of Liberalism and against the Jesuits; but the revolution of 1848 sent her once more adrift. Again she married (this time a Lieutenant Heald), a marriage as unlucky as the first. She died, a penitent, in Astoria, L. I., on Jan. 17, 1861.