Lola Montez

 Lola Montez was a fascinating woman, born 1821, a "Spanish dancer" of Irish birth. Beautiful, intelligent and independent.  She was the consort of King Ludwig I of Bavaria and was able to use her position and influence to institute liberal reforms, during a time in history when women did not have a lot of influence or power. She traveled the world, had adventures in Australia and lived her last years in the United States. She was a dancer and an actress and lectured on beauty and the state of womanhood in general. She had an uncanny ability to see beyond her own time, to see into the past and take note of the larger forces that determined the mores of the society of in which she lived.  I became aware of her through her book, "The Arts of Beauty, or, Secrets of a Lady's Toilet." We'll get to that one later... 


Today I was reading "Autobiography and Lectures of Lola Montez", by C. Chauncey Burr, 1860. These snippets are from her lecture, "Beautiful Women". 


"- It won't last. Beauty has it's date, and it is the penalty of nature that girls must fade, and become wizened as their grandmothers have done before them."


"The old abbey and the aged oak are more venerable in their decay; and many are the charms around us, both of art and nature, that may still linger and please. The breaking wave is most graceful at the moment of it's dissolution; the sun when setting is still glorious and beautiful; and though the longest day must have it's evening, yet is the evening as beautiful as the morning- the light deserts us, but it is to visit us again; the rose retains it's charms for the sense, and though it falls into decay, it renews it's glories at the approach of another spring."


"But for woman there is no second May! To each belongs her little day; and time, that gives new whiteness to the swan, gives it not unto woman. The winner of a hundred hearts, in the very bud of her beauty, in the morn and liquid dews of youth even, cannot obtain a patent for her charms. "They all do fade as a leaf." While the fair lady curls her hair, is it not imperceptibly going gray?"


"To borrow an Arabian Proverb, let her "be light as the full moon", yet when her eye is fullest of light, it is nearest the point where it begins to fade. The fuller the rose is blown, the sooner it is shed. When the peach is ripest, what next?"


"...She has a summer as well as a spring, an autumn, and a winter. As the aspect of Earth alters with the changes of the year, so does the appearance of woman adapt itself to the time which passes over her. Like the rose, she buds, she blooms, she fades, she dies..."


Lola Montez died at 39. She considered that the "zenith" or the "high noon", if you will, to be at the age of 30. She died, in her Autumn...