Less than six years of such splendour and luxury, and the inevitable end of it all came. Napoleon's eyes were dazzled by the offer of an alliance with the eldest daughter of the Austrian Emperor. His whole ambition now was focused on providing a successor to his crown (Josephine had failed him in this important matter); and in Marie Louise of Austria he not only saw the prospective mother of his heir, but an alliance with one of the great reigning houses of Europe, which would lend a much-needed glamour to his bourgeois crown. His mind was at last inevitably made up. Josephine must be divorced. Her pleadings and tears and faintings were powerless to melt him. And one December day, in the year 1809, Napoleon was free to wed his Austrian Princess; and Josephine was left to console herself as best she might, with the knowledge that at least she had rescued from her downfall a life-income of three million francs a year, on which she could still play the rôle of Empress at the Elysée, Malmaison, and Navarre, the sumptuous homes with which Napoleon's generosity had dowered the wife who failed. CHAPTER XIII THE ENSLAVER OF A KING More than fifty years have gone since the penitent soul of Lola Montez took flight to its Creator; but there must be some still living whose pulses quicken at the very mention of a name which recalls so much mystery and romance and bewildering fascination of the days when, for them, as for her, "all the world was young." Who was she, this woman whose beauty dazzled the eyes and whose witchery turned the heads of men in the forties and fifties of last century? A dozen countries, from Spain to India, were credited with her birth. Some said she was the daughter of a noble house, kidnapped by gipsies in her infancy; others were equally confident that she had for father the coroneted rake, Lord Byron, and for mother a charwoman. Her early years were wrapped in a mystery which she mischievously helped to intensify by declaring that her father was a famous Spanish toreador. Her origin, however, was prosaic enough. She was the daughter of an obscure army captain, Gilbert, who hailed from Limerick; her mother was an Oliver, from whom she received her strain of Spanish blood; and the names given to her at a Limerick font, one day in 1818, two months after her parents had made their runaway match, were Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna. When Captain Gilbert returned, after his furlough-romance, to India, he took his wife and child with him. Seven years later cholera removed him; his widow found speedy solace in the arms of a second husband, one Captain Craigie; and Dolores was packed off to Scotland to the care of her stepfather's people until her schooldays were ended.