"Famous (but bad) dancer; mistress to many, including Franz Liszt and Alexandre Dumas; acquaintance of Balzac, Victor Hugo, George Sand, Lamartine; intimate of kings and prime ministers; de facto ruler of Bavaria as King Ludwig I declined; belle of the California gold rush; would-be Queen of Lolaland...When a man annoyed her, Lola typically would slash him across the face with the whip she always carried. On one occasion when a lover proved to be disappointing, she fired her pistol at the luckless romeo as he dodged ricocheting bullets while escaping down the street with his pants around his knees. But, on first meeting, she was charming, very charming...
In St. Petersburg, Russia, Lola got a "private audience" with the Czar, and then received from him 1,000 rubles for services provided...
In Dresden, she got the composer Franz Liszt, and the two of them enjoyed a burning passion, until Lola became jealous of the attention Liszt received from his legion of admirers. To upstage him, she burst in upon a banquet he was holding for royalty, and leaped up upon the table to dance among the dishes, spilling consommé into the lap of a duke.
At last Liszt (who had a reputation as the great lover of the age) was so completely worn out by Lola, that as she slept, he locked her in their hotel room and fled. At the front desk he left a generous sum of money for the furniture he knew she would smash when she awoke...
The severest charge against her involved the mysterious disappearance of one of her lovers from aboard a ship which was anchored in harbor at Fiji. Some native witnesses mentioned a man being tossed overboard from one of the better cabins, but nothing could be clearly proven. It seems that most other passengers had been driven off by the raucous noise coming from Lola's cabin, so there was a shortage of reliable witnesses of suitable station... Charges against her of ritual murder, performed in connection with a Black Mass held in the jungle of a nearby island, were considered to be specious, although no conclusive evidence of any sort was discovered."
(Thanks to Fiona Burns for this).
