This item appears to have been unaccountably missed by Thackeray's other historians.
IV
Lola's tastes were distinctly "Bohemian," and led her, while in New York, to be a constant visitor at Pfaff's underground delicatessen café, then a favourite haunt of the literary and artistic worlds of the metropolis. There she mingled with such accepted celebrities as Walt Whitman, W. Dean Howells, Commodore Vanderbilt, and that other flashing figure, Adah Isaacs Menken. She probably found in Pfaff's a certain resemblance to the Munich beer-halls with which she had been familiar. A bit of the Fatherland, as it were, carried across the broad Atlantic. German solids and German liquids; talk and laughter and jests among the company of actors and actresses and artists and journalists gathered night after night at the tables; everybody in a good temper and high spirits.
Walt Whitman, inspired, doubtless, by beer, once described the place in characteristic rugged verse: The vaults at Pfaff's, where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouse, While on the walk immediately overhead pass the myriad feet of Broadway.
There was a good deal more of it, for, when he had been furnished with plenty of liquid refreshment, the Muse of Walt ran to length.
From New York Lola set out on a tour to Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Boston. While in this last town, she "paid a visit of ceremony" to one of the public schools. Although the children there "expressed surprise and delight at the honour accorded them," the Boston Transcript shook its editorial head; and "referred to the visit in a fashion that aroused the just indignation of the lady and her friends."
The cudgels were promptly taken up on her behalf by a New York journalist: "Lola Montez," he declared, "owes less of her strange fascination and world-wide celebrity to her powers as an artiste than to the extraordinary mind and brilliancy of intellect with which Heaven has thought fit to endow her. At one moment ruling a kingdom, through an imbecile monarch; and the next, the wife of a dashing young English lord.... Her person and bearing are unmistakably aristocratic. In her recent visit to one of our public schools she surprised and delighted the scholars by addressing them in the Latin language with remarkable facility."
It would be of interest to learn the name of the "dashing young English lord." This, however, was probably a brevet rank conferred by the pressman on Cornet Heald.
On April 27, 1852, Lola Montez appeared at the Albany Museum in selections from her repertoire. On this occasion she brought with her a "troupe of twelve dancing girls." As an additional lure, the bills described these damsels as "all of them unmarried, and most of them under sixteen."