a.

Like other celebrated favourites who, with all her personal
charms, but without her glimpses of a better human nature,
have sacrificed the dignity of womanhood to a profligate
ambition, this one upbraided herself in her last moments on
her wasted life; and then, when all her ambition and vanity
had turned to ashes, she understood what it was to have been
the toy of men and the scorn of women.

Altogether a somewhat guarded suggestion of disapproval about the
subject of this particular memoir.

II

Three years after the thunderous echoes of Waterloo had died away, and
"Boney," behind a fringe of British bayonets, was safely interned on
the island of St. Helena, there was born in barracks at Limerick a
little girl. On the same day, in distant Bavaria, a sovereign was
celebrating his thirty-fifth birthday. Twenty-seven years later the
two were to meet; and from that meeting much history was to be
written.

The little girl who first came on the scene at Limerick was the
daughter of one Ensign Edward Gilbert, a young officer of good Irish
family who had married a Senorita Oliverres de Montalva, "of Castle
Oliver, Madrid." At any rate, she claimed to be such, and also that
she was directly descended from Francisco Montez, a famous toreador of
Seville. There is a strong presumption, however, that here she was
drawing on her imagination; and, as for the "Castle Oliver" in Sunny
Spain, well, that country has never lacked "castles."

The Oliver family, as pointed out by E. B. d'Auvergne in his carefully
documented _Adventuresses and Adventurous Ladies_, was really of Irish
extraction, and had been settled in Limerick since the year 1645. "The
family pedigree," he says, "reveals no trace of Spanish or Moorish
blood." Further, by the beginning of the last century, the main line
had, so far as the union of its members was blessed by the Church,
expired, and no legitimate offspring were left. Gilbert's spouse,
accordingly, must, if a genuine Oliverres, have come into the world
with a considerable blot on her 'scutcheon.

Still, if there were no hidalgos perched on her family tree, Mrs.
Gilbert probably had some good blood in her veins. As a matter of
fact, there is some evidence adduced by a distant relative, Miss D. M.
Hodgson, that she was really an illegitimate daughter of an Irishman,
Charles Oliver, of Castle Oliver (now Cloghnafoy), Co. Limerick, and a
peasant girl on his estat