In the year 1844 the fine flower of Parisian society was in undisputed possession of the Boulevard--the quarter between the Opera and the Rue Drouot. "By virtue of a selection which no one contested," says the author just quoted, "nobody was tolerated there who could not lay claim to some sort of distinction or originality. There seemed to exist a kind of invisible moral barrier, closing this area against the mediocre, the insipid, and the insignificant, who passed by, but did not linger, knowing that their place was not there." The headquarters of the noble company of the Boulevard was the famous Cafe de Paris, at the corner of the Rue Taitbout. Dumas, Balzac, and Alfred de Musset were to be seen there twice or thrice a week; the eccentric Lord Seymour, founder of the French Jockey Club, had his own table there. Lola, doubtless, often tasted the unsurpassed _cuisine_ of this celebrated restaurant, for she soon penetrated into the circle of the Olympians, and was presented with the freedom of the Boulevard. She met Claudin (who indeed knew everybody). "Lola Montez," he says, "was an enchantress. There was about her something provoking and voluptuous which drew you. Her skin was white, her wavy hair like the tendrils of the woodbine, her eyes tameless and wild, her mouth like a budding pomegranate. Add to that a dashing figure, charming feet, and perfect grace. Unluckily," the notice concludes, "as a dancer she had no talent." That multiple personality whom Vandam embodies in "An Englishman in Paris" admits that Lola was naturally graceful, that her gait and carriage were those of a duchess. When he goes on to say that her wit was that of a pot-house, I seem to detect one of his not infrequent lapses from the truth. Only three years had elapsed since Lola had shone in Court circles in India, where the social atmosphere was not that of a bar-room; and since then she had been wandering about in countries where her ignorance of the language must have left her manner of speech and modes of thought almost unaffected. Pot-house wit would not have fascinated Liszt, nor the fastidious Louis of Bavaria. "Men of far higher intellectual attainments than mine, and familiar with very good society," admits our nebulous chronicler,[8] "raved and kept raving about her."