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.

[Illustration: _Porte St. Martin Theatre, Paris, where Lola was a
"flop"_]

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.

Despite this untoward happening, Ludwig remained an ardent
Phil-Hellene; and, as such, conceived the idea of converting his
capital into a mixture of Athens and Floren