The "conversion" of Lola Montez was no flash in the pan, or the result of a sudden impulse. It was a real one, deep and sincere and lasting. Her former triumphs on the stage and in the boudoir had become as dust and ashes. Compared with her new-found joy in religion, all else was vanity and emptiness.
"I can forget my French and German, and everything else I have valued," she is declared to have said to a pressman, who, scenting a "news story," followed hot-foot on her track, "but I cannot forget my Christ."
She had been "Montez the Magnificent." Now she was "Montez the Magdalen." The woman whose voluptuous beauty and unbridled passion had upset thrones and fired the hearts of men was now concerned with the saving of souls. As such, she resolved to spread "the Word" among others less happily circumstanced. To this end, she preached in conventicles and visited hospitals, asylums, and prisons, offering a helping hand to all who would accept one, and especially to "unfortunates" of her own sex. She had her disappointments. But neither snubs nor setbacks, nor sneers nor jeers could turn her from the path she had elected to tread.
"In the course of a long experience as a Christian minister," says a clergyman whom she encountered at this period, "I do not think I ever saw deeper penitence and humility, more real contrition of soul, and more bitter self-reproach than in this poor woman."
"With," he adds, in an oleaginous little tract on the subject, "a heart full of generous sympathy for the poor outcasts of her own sex, she devoted the last few months of her life to visiting them at the Magdalen Asylum, near New York.... She strove to impress upon them not only the awful guilt of breaking the divine law, but the inevitable earthly sorrow which those who persisted with thoughtless desperation in sinful courses were assuredly treasuring up for themselves."
But, except those who encountered her charity and self-sacrifice, there were few who had a good word for Lola Montez in her character as a Magdalen. People who had fawned upon her in the days of her success now jeered and sneered and affected to doubt the reality of her penitence. "Once a sinner, always a sinner," they declared; and "Lola in the pulpit is rich!" was another barbed shaft.
In thus abandoning the buskin for the Bible, Lola Montez was following one example and setting another. The example she followed was that of Mlle Gautier, of the Comédie Française, who, after flashing across the horizon of Maurice de Saxe (and several others), left the footlights and retired to a convent. "It is true," she says in her memoirs, "that I have encountered during my theatrical career a number of people whose morals have been as irreproachable as their talents, but I myself was not among them." This was putting it--well--mildly, for, according to Le d'Hoefer, "her stage career was marked by a freedom of manner pushed to the extremity of licence."