It was not even a dream, this new ambition of Lola's. It was a comic-opera fantasy. Bavaria, at best, was only a little German state with no special voice in the congress of nations. And Lola herself had no more aptitude for politics than she had for dancing. Nor did she stop to consider that Germans in 1846 were much more likely to tolerate a fair foreigner's meddling with their puppet king's domestic affairs than with matters of public welfare. But Lola Montez ever did the bulk of her sane thinking when it was too late. So she proceeded to put her idiotic plans into operation. First, she cajoled King Ludwig into dismissing in a body his perfectly capable and well-liked ministry. As delighted with that success as is the village cut-up when he pulls a chair from under the portly constable--and with even less wholesome fear of the result to herself--Lola next persuaded the king to change his whole policy of state. Then things began to happen. One morning Lola awoke in her ugly and costly mansion to find the street in front of the door blocked by a highly unfriendly mob, whose immediate ambition seemed to be the destruction of the house and herself. This was the signal for one more Irish rage, the last on public record. Lola, throwing a wrapper over her nightgown, snatched up a loaded pistol, and, pushing aside her screaming servants, ran out on the front steps. At sight of her the crowd roared in fury and made a dash for the steps. Lola retaliated by emptying her revolver into the advancing mob. Events had moved rapidly since the primitive days when she was content to bombard her detractors with slippers and garter buckles. The rioters halted, before the fusillade. Before they could combine for another rush, and while Lola from the topmost step was reviling them in her best and fiercest German, a company of the royal bodyguard, headed by the old king himself, charged through the crowd and rescued the angry woman. But, though Ludwig had just saved her from a sudden and extremely unpleasant form of death, he was not strong enough to stem the avalanche of public opinion that crashed down upon her. This same avalanche proceeded to brush Lola out of her big and hideous house, to knock away from her her titles of baroness and countess and her twenty-thousand-florin annuity, and to whirl her across the Bavarian frontier with stern instructions never to return. Incidentally, poor old King Ludwig came in for so much unpopularity on her account that he was forced to abdicate. Thus, in her own fall from power, Lola had also dragged a once-popular king off his throne a noteworthy achievement, in that pre-Gaby-Deslys period, for an Irish girl with a variegated past.