dical practice, was
managing a Christy Minstrels entertainment at this period, has some
recollections of Lola Montez. "Many a long chat," he says, "I had with
her in our little bandbox of a ticket-office. Thackeray's _Vanity
Fair_ was being read in America just then, and Lola expressed to me
great anger that the novelist should have put her into it as Becky
Sharp. 'If he had only told the truth about me,' she said, 'I should
not have cared, but he derived his inspiration from my enemies in
England.'"

This item appears to have been unaccountably missed by Thackeray's
other historians.

IV

Lola's tastes were distinctly "Bohemian," and led her, while in New
York, to be a constant visitor at Pfaff's underground _delicatessen_
cafe, then a favourite haunt of the literary and artistic worlds of
the metropolis. There she mingled with such accepted celebrities as
Walt Whitman, W. Dean Howells, Commodore Vanderbilt, and that other
flashing figure, Adah Isaacs Menken. She probably found in Pfaff's a
certain resemblance to the Munich beer-halls with which she had been
familiar. A bit of the Fatherland, as it were, carried across the
broad Atlantic. German solids and German liquids; talk and laughter
and jests among the company of actors and actresses and artists and
journalists gathered night after night at the tables; everybody in a
good temper and high spirits.

Walt Whitman, inspired, doubtless, by beer, once described the place
in characteristic rugged verse:

The vaults at Pfaff's, where the drinkers and laughers meet
to eat and drink and carouse,
While on the walk immediately overhead pass the myriad feet
of Broadway.

There was a good deal more of it, for, when he had been furnished with
plenty of liquid refreshment, the Muse of Walt ran to length.

From New York Lola set out on a tour to Philadelphia, St. Louis, and
Boston. While in this last town, she "paid a visit of ceremony" to one
of the public schools. Although the children there "expressed surprise
and delight at the honour accorded them," the _Boston Transcript_
shook its editorial head; and "referred to the visit in a fashion that
aroused the just indignation of the lady and her friends."

The cudgels were promptly taken up on her behalf by a New York
journalist:

"Lola Montez," he declared, "owes less of her strange fascination and
world-wide celebrity to her powers as an _artiste_ than to the
extraordinary mind and brill