The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection. George Fraser MacDonald

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СКАЧАТЬ way of Paris, a city I had often wanted to visit, having heard that debauchery there was a fine art. I was disappointed: whores are whores the world over, and the Parisian ones are no different from any other. And French men make me sick; always have done. I’m degenerate, but they are dirty with it. Not only in the physical sense, either; they have greasy minds. Other foreigners may have garlic on their breaths, but the Frogs have it on their thoughts as well.

      The Germans are different altogether. If I wasn’t an Englishman, I would want to be a German. They say what they think, which isn’t much as a rule, and they are admirably well ordered. Everyone in Germany knows his place and stays in it, and grovels to those above him, which makes it an excellent country for gentlemen and bullies. In England, even in my young day, if you took liberties with a working man you would be as likely as not to get a fist in your face, but the lower-class Germans were as docile as niggers with white skins. The whole country is splendidly disciplined and organised, and with all their docility the inhabitants are still among the finest soldiers and workers on earth—as my old friend Bismarck has shown. The basis of all this, of course, is stupidity, which you must have in people before you can make them fight or work successfully. Well, the Germans will trouble the world yet, but since they are closer to us than anyone else, we may live to profit by it.

      However, all this I was yet to discover, although I had an inkling of it from studying Helmuth on our journey. I don’t bore you with details of our travels, by the way; nothing happened out of the ordinary, and what I chiefly remember is a brief anxiety that I had caught the pox in Paris; fortunately, I hadn’t, but the scare I got prejudiced me still further against the French, if that were possible.

      Munich, when we reached it, I liked the look of very well. It was clean and orderly on the surface, prices were far below our own (beer a halfpenny a pint, and a servant could be hired at two shillings a week), the folk were either civil or servile, and the guide-book which I had bought in London described it as “a very dissolute capital”. The very place for old Flash, thinks I, and looked forward to my stay. I should have known better; my eagerness to see Lola again, and my curiosity about what she wanted, had quite driven away those momentary doubts I had felt back in London. More fool I; if I had known what was waiting round the corner I would have run all the way home and felt myself lucky to be able to run.

      We arrived in Munich on a Sunday, and having dismissed Helmuth and found a hotel in the Theresienstrasse, I sat down to consider my first move. It was easy enough to discover that Lola was installed in a personal palace which the besotted Ludwig had built specially for her in the Barerstrasse; presumably I might stroll round and announce my arrival. But it pays to scout whenever you can, so I decided to put in an hour or two mooning round the streets and restaurants to see what news I could pick up first. I might even gain some hint of a clue to why she wanted me.

      I strolled about the pleasant streets for a while, seeing the Hofgarten and the fine Residenz Palace where King Ludwig lived, and drank the excellent German beer in one of their open-air beer-gardens while I watched the folk and tried out my ear on their conversation. It could hardly have been more peaceful and placid; even in late autumn it was sunny, and the stout contented burghers with their pleasant-faced wives were either sitting and drinking and puffing at their massive pipes, or sauntering ponderously on the pavements. No one hurried, except the waiters; here and there a group of young fellows in long cloaks and gaudy caps, whom I took to be students, stirred things a little with their laughter, but for the rest it was a drowsy, easy afternoon, as though Munich was blinking contentedly in the fine weather, and wasn’t going to be bustled by anybody.

      However, one way and another, by finding a French newspaper and getting into talk with people who spoke either French or English, I picked up some gossip. I soon found that one did not need to ask about Lola; the good Muncheners talked about her as Britons do about the weather, and with much the same feeling—in other words, they thought she was bad and would get worse, but that nothing could be done about her anyway.

      She was, it seemed, the supreme power in Bavaria. Ludwig was right under her thumb, she had swept out the hostile Ultramontane cabinet and had it replaced largely with creatures of her own, and despite the fact that she was a staunch Protestant, the Catholic hierarchy were powerless against her. The professors, who count for much more there than do ours in England, were solidly against her, but the students were violently split. Some detested her, and had rioted before her windows, but others, calling themselves the Allemania, constituted themselves her champions and even her bodyguard, and were forever clashing with her opponents. Some of these Allemania were pointed out to me, in their bright scarlet caps; they were a tough-looking crew, tight-mouthed and cold-eyed and given to strutting and barking, and people got out of their way pretty sharp.

      However, with Ludwig infatuated by her, Lola was firmly in the saddle, and according to one outspoken French journalist whose story I read, her supremacy was causing alarm far outside Bavaria. There were rumours that she was an agent of Palmerston, set on to foment revolution in Germany; to the other powers, striving to hold down a growing popular discontent that was spreading throughout Europe, she appeared to be a dangerous threat to the old regime. At least one attempt had been made to assassinate her; Metternich, the arch-reactionary master of Austria, had tried to bribe her to leave Germany for good. The truth was that in those days the world was on the edge of general revolution; we were coming out of the old age and into the new, and anything that was a focus of disorder or instability was viewed with consternation by the authorities. So Lola was not popular; the papers fumed against her, clergymen damned her in their sermons as a Jezebel and a Sempronia, and the ordinary folk were taught to regard her as a fiend in human shape—all the worse because the shape was beautiful.

      Here ends Professor Flashman’s historical lecture, much of it cribbed from a history book, but some of it at least learned that first day in the Munich beer-gardens.

      One thing I was pretty sure of, and it flies in the face of history: whatever may be said, Lola was secretly admired by the common people. They might shake their heads and look solemn whenever her cavalry escort drove a way for her through a crowd of protesting students; they might look shocked when they heard of the orgies in the Barerstrasse palace; they might exclaim in horror when her Allemania horse-whipped an editor and smashed his presses—but the men inwardly loved her for the gorgeous hoyden she was, and the women hid their satisfaction that one of their own sex was setting Europe by the ears. Whenever the insolent, tempestuous Montez provoked some new scandal, there was no lack of those who thought, “Good for you,” and quite a few who said it openly.

And what the devil did she want with me? Well, I had come to Munich to find out, so I scribbled a note that Sunday evening, addressed to the Chamberlain Lauengram, saying that I had arrived and was at his disposal. Then I wandered over to the Residenz Palace, and looked at Lola’s portrait in the public gallery—that “Gallery of Beauties” in which Ludwig had assembled pictures of the loveliest women of his day. There were princesses, countesses, actresses, and the daughter of the Munich town-crier, among others, and Lola looking unusually nun-like in a black dress and wearing a come-to-Jesus expression.²⁰ Underneath it was inscribed a verse written by the king, who was given to poetry, which finished up:

       Oh, soft and beauteous as a deer

       Art thou, of Andalusian race!

      Well, he was probably in a position to know about that. And to think that only a few years ago she had been a penniless dancer being hooted off a London stage.

      I had hoped, considering the urgency of Lauengram’s original letter to me, to be bidden to Lola’s palace on the Monday, but that day and the next went by, and still no word. But I was patient, and kept to my hotel, and on the Wednesday morning I was rewarded, I was finishing breakfast in my room, still in my dressing-gown, when there was a great flurry in the passage, and a lackey came to announce the arrival of the Freiherr von Starnberg, whoever he might be. There was much clashing and stamping, two cuirassiers in full fig appeared behind the lackey and stationed themselves СКАЧАТЬ