"You have, of course, already heard of my immense success in London," she announced with an assured air.
M. Pillet had not heard of it. But this did not matter. As had been the case with Lumley before him, Lola's ravishing smile inflamed his susceptible heart; and he promptly engaged her to dance in the ballet that was to follow Halévy's Il Lazzarone, then in active rehearsal.
Lola's début as a première danseuse was made on March 30, 1844. It was not a successful one. Far from it. The fact was, the Parisians, accustomed to the dreamy and sylph-like pirouettings of Cerito and Elssler and Taglioni, and their own Adèle Dumilâtre, could not appreciate the vigorous cachuchas and boleros now offered them. When they voiced their disapproval, Lola lost the one thing she could never keep--her temper. She made a moue at the audience; and, if de Mirecourt is to be trusted, pulled off her garters (a second authority says a more intimate item of attire) and flung them with a gesture of contempt among the jeering crowd in the first row of stalls.
As may be imagined, the Press was unsympathetic towards this "demonstration."
"We will avoid damaging with our strictures," remarked Le Constitutionnel in its next issue, "a pretty young woman who, before making her début, has obviously not had time to study our preferences."
A much more devastating criticism was published in Le Journal des Débats by Jules Janin. He went out of his way, indeed, to be positively offensive. Nor did Théophile Gautier, who in his famous waistcoat of crimson velvet was present on this eventful evening, think very much of the would-be ballerina's efforts to win Paris.
Beyond, he wrote, a pair of magnificent dark eyes, Mademoiselle Lola Montez has nothing suggestively Andalusian in her appearance. She talks poor Spanish, scarcely any French, and only tolerable English. The question is, to what country does she really belong? We can affirm that she has small feet and shapely legs. The extent, however, to which these gifts serve her is quite another story.
It must be admitted that the public's curiosity aroused by her altercations with the police of the North and her whip-cracking exploits among the Prussian gendarmes has not been satisfied. We imagine that Mademoiselle Lola would do better on horseback than on the stage.
An odd account, headed: "Singular Début of Lola Montez in Paris," was sent to New York by an American journalist: "When, a few days ago, it was announced that two foreign dancers, Mlle Cerito and Mlle Lola Montez, had just entered the walls of Paris, the triumphs achieved by the Italian ballerina could not eclipse the horse-whipping exploits of Mlle Lola. 'Let us have Lola Montez!' exclaimed the stalls and pit. 'We want to see if her foot is as light as her hand!' Never did they witness a more astounding entrée. After her first leap, she stopped short on the tips of her toes, and, by a movement of prodigious rapidity, detached one of her garters from a lissome limb adjacent to her quivering thigh (innocent of lingerie) and flung it to the occupants of the front row of the orchestra.... Notwithstanding the effect produced by this piquant eccentricity, Mile Lola has not met with the reception she anticipated; and it has been deemed proper by the management to dispense with her reappearance."