The rabble, who feared her manlike valour, did not attempt to molest her in her retreat, but having made sure that she was gone, they broke into her house, pillaging and wrecking. A curious, unaccountable impulse drew the King to the spot, where he must have passed many of the happiest hours of his life. With strange emotions he must have watched the human swine routing in this bower of Venus. He stood there, a pathetic figure--an old man surveying the wreckage of his last and supreme passion. Unheeded and seemingly unrecognised, he was suddenly dealt a violent blow on the head, probably by a revolutionary agent, and tottered back to his palace, bruised and dazed. The next night, disguised in man's clothes, Lola the intrepid slipped back into Munich, and took refuge in the house of her loyal partisan, Berks. She sent a secret message to the King, confident that if she could see him, she could regain her power. Those must have been anxious moments, while she was awaiting the reply. It came at last, in the form of a letter brought by two police commissaries, Weber and Dichtl. The King refused to see her, and wished that he had come to that decision before. She turned to the officials. They read an order for her expulsion from Bavaria. Lola tore the document to pieces and threw them in their faces. Not till they presented their pistols at her bosom did she consent to accompany them. It was reported that she had been sent to Lindau on the Bodensee, thence to be conducted into Switzerland. In reality, Louis had selected for her the oddest and most fantastic place of seclusion. The mental crisis through which he had passed seems to have weakened his understanding, and he actually was persuaded by his new clerical friends that Lola's power over him was due to witchcraft. These enlightened Ultramontanes repeated some ridiculous yarn about a great black bird that visited her room by night. At a place called Weinsberg lived a man named Justinus Kerner, who exercised the profession of an exorcist or expeller of devils. To this person's custody was Lola confided on 17th February, as was first learnt from the charlatan's letters, published some ten or fifteen years ago.[17] In one of these he says:-- "Lola Montez arrived here the day before yesterday, accompanied by three Alemannen. It is vexatious that the King should have sent her to me, but they have told him that she is possessed. Before treating her with magic and magnetism, I am trying the hunger cure. I allow her only thirteen drops of raspberry water, and the quarter of a wafer. Tell no one about this--burn this letter." To another correspondent Kerner writes:-- "Lola has grown astonishingly thin. My son, Theobald, has mesmerised her, and I let her drink asses' milk."