II
When, at the suggestion of Baron Maltitz (a Homburg acquaintance who had suggested that she should "try her luck in Munich"), Lola set off for Bavaria, that country was ruled by Ludwig I. A god-child of Marie-Antoinette, and the son of Prince Max Joseph of Zweibrucken and Princess Augusta of Hesse-Darmstadt, he was born at Salzburg in 1786 and had succeeded his father in 1825. As a young man, he had served with the Bavarian troops under Napoleon, and detesting the experience, had conceived a hatred of everything military. This hatred was so strongly developed that he would not permit his sons to wear uniform. Under his regime the military estimates were cut down to the bone. The army, he said, was a "waste of money," and he grudged every pfennig it cost the annual budget. He did his best to abolish conscription, but had to abandon the effort. For all, too, that he was a god-son of Marie-Antoinette, he had no love for France.
Ludwig's sister, Louisa, exchanging her religion for a consort's crown, was the wife of the Czar Alexander I; and he himself was married to the Princess Theresa of Saxe-Hildburghausen, a lady described as "plain, but exemplary." Still, so far as personal appearance goes, Ludwig himself was no Adonis. Nestitz, indeed, has pictured him as "having a toothless jaw and an expressionless countenance." But his consort did her duty; and, at approved intervals, presented him with a quiverful of four sons and three daughters. Of his sons, one of them, Otto, was, as a lad of sixteen, selected by the Congress of London to be King of Greece, much to the fury of the Czar Nicholas, who held that this was a cunning, if diplomatic, attempt to set up a Byzantine empire among the Hellenes. "Were I," he said in a despatch on the subject, "to give my countenance to such a step, I should nullify myself in the eyes of my Church." Nesselrode, however, was of another opinion. "It is unbecoming," he was daring enough to inform his master, "for the Emperor of Russia to question a step upon which the Greeks themselves are not in entire accord." A remarkable utterance. Politicians had gone to Siberia for less. Palmerston, too, had his way, and Otto, escorted by a warship, left his fatherland. On arriving in Athens, the joy-bells rang out and the columns of the Parthenon were flood-lit. But the choice was not to the popular taste; and it was not long before Otto was extinguished, as well as the lights. By the irony of fate, he returned to Munich on the very day that Ludwig had erected a Doric arch to commemorate the activities of the House of Wittelsbach in securing the Liberation of Greece.