Alexandre Dujarier: shot dead in a duel. King Ludwig of Bavaria: forced to abdicate. George Trafford Heald: stripped of his army commission, died in poverty in Portugal. Pat Hull: drank himself into a depression and died young. Her publisher: bankrupt.1
Greene lays these out not as a tragedy but as evidence. The chapter is called Infection, and this is the case it is built from — a woman around whom a specific kind of thing kept happening to specific kinds of men.
She herself died at forty-three, two years after giving away her clothes and turning to God.2
The first thing to know is that Lola Montez was an invention.
She was born Marie Gilbert in Limerick, Ireland, in 1818, and came to Paris in the 1840s to make her fortune as a dancer. The name and the nationality were constructed — her mother was of "distant Spanish descent," which was enough to build a claim on, and she presented herself as a flamenco dancer from Spain.3
By 1845 the dancing career was languishing and she became a courtesan, "quickly one of the more successful in Paris."3
Note what that means about the sequence. The persona was built for a career that failed, and then the persona itself became the asset. Everything afterwards runs on the manufactured identity rather than on the thing it was manufactured to sell.
Only one man could revive her dancing career: Alexandre Dujarier, who owned the newspaper with the largest circulation in France and was also its drama critic.4
Her method is worth recording in detail, because it is a technique rather than an accident:
Investigating his habits, she discovered that he went riding every morning. An excellent horsewoman herself, she rode out one morning and "accidentally" ran into him.4
Research, then a manufactured coincidence executed on ground where she had a genuine skill. Within weeks they were riding daily; a few weeks after that she moved into his apartment.
Then Greene's sentence: "Although Dujarier was deeply in love, his life started to slide downhill."5
And the withheld fact — she had eloped at nineteen with an Englishman and was still legally married, which she never told him, while he told friends he would marry her in the spring.5
The death is the chapter's best evidence and its weakest link at the same time, so it is worth reconstructing exactly.
His business fortunes changed. Influential friends began avoiding him.5
He was invited to a party attended by some of the wealthiest young men in Paris. Lola wanted to come; he would not allow it. They had their first quarrel, and he went alone.6
There, "hopelessly drunk," he insulted an influential drama critic, Jean-Baptiste Rosemond de Beauvallon — "perhaps because of something the critic had said about Lola."6
Beauvallon challenged him the next morning. Beauvallon was one of the best pistol shots in France. Dujarier tried to apologise. The duel happened. He was killed.6
Now count the causal links between Lola and the body: a quarrel about a party → he attends drunk → he insults a man → perhaps over a remark about her → that man is an expert shot → the apology fails.
Greene's own hedge is doing a lot of work. Perhaps. Remove that one word and the chain runs on a quarrel and a bottle.
The same move as the Dujarier ride, run a second time.
Rechberg arranged an audience. But in the anteroom she could hear the king saying he was too busy to meet a favour-seeking stranger. So she pushed past the sentries and went in anyway — and "in the process, the front of her dress somehow got torn (perhaps by her, perhaps by one of the sentries), and to the astonishment of all, most especially the king, her bare breasts were brazenly exposed."8
She got the audience. Fifty-five hours later she debuted on the Bavarian stage. The reviews were terrible, and Ludwig arranged more performances anyway.8
That detail is the tell. The product was never the dancing.
Ludwig, in his own words, was "bewitched." He appeared in public with her, bought and furnished an apartment on one of Munich's most fashionable boulevards, and — though "he had been known as a miser, and was not given to flights of fancy" — showered her with gifts and wrote her poetry.9
Then Greene's turn: "Lola began to lose her sense of proportion."10
Two incidents carry it. Out riding, an elderly man ahead of her went too slowly and she could not pass, so she began to slash him with her riding crop. Walking her unleashed dog, the dog attacked a passer-by, and instead of pulling it off she whipped the man with the leash.10
Both are attacks on the injured party. That is the pattern in miniature, and it is more diagnostic than the romantic wreckage: the person harmed by her becomes the target.
The escalation from there is institutional. Ludwig had her naturalised as a Bavarian citizen and "those who criticized Lola were summarily fired."10 She was made a countess, had a palace built, began advising on policy, became "the most powerful force in the kingdom," and treated the other ministers with disdain. Riots broke out. A peaceful land was "virtually in the grip of civil war," with students chanting "Raus mit Lola!"11
February 1848: Ludwig ordered her to leave. She left — but not until she was paid off.12
Five weeks later the country's anger turned on the king. In March he abdicated.
England. She needed respectability, and — still married, still without a divorce — she set her sights on George Trafford Heald, a promising young army officer ten years her junior, son of an influential barrister, who "could have chosen a wife among the prettiest and wealthiest young girls of English society."13
Married 1849. Arrested for bigamy. Skipped bail. Spain. They quarrelled horribly and on one occasion she slashed him with a knife. She drove him away. He returned to England to find he had lost his army position, was ostracised, moved to Portugal, lived in poverty, and died in a boating accident within months.13
Her publisher went bankrupt a few years later.1
California, 1853, Pat Hull. Stormy, she left him for another man, he took to drink and a depression that lasted until he died four years later, "still a relatively young man."14
At forty-one she gave away her clothes and finery and turned to God, touring America lecturing on religious topics, dressed in white with halo-like white headgear. She died two years later, in 1861.2
Set out plainly, because Greene does not.
What is strong. The repetition is the evidence, not any single episode. One ruined man is a bad relationship; five, across three countries and twenty years, with the same shape — rapid capture, escalating conflict, the other party ending materially worse off — is a pattern. And two incidents show her attacking people she had already injured, which no account of bad luck explains.
What is weak. Every individual link is loose. Dujarier died of a duel he provoked while drunk. Ludwig was a king who abdicated during 1848, the year European thrones fell everywhere, and Greene never mentions that. Heald's boating accident was an accident. Hull drank. The publisher's bankruptcy has no stated connection to her at all beyond having published her.
Greene has assembled a set of independent misfortunes and presented the set as the causal claim, and the set is genuinely more persuasive than its parts — which is exactly the epistemic move his own chapter recommends: "judging people on the effects they have on the world and not on the reasons they give."
You are trying to work out whether a pattern around a person is real.
First, count the series rather than litigating the episode. Each incident will have a defensible individual explanation, and arguing about last Tuesday will never resolve anything. Lay the whole record out at once.
Second, ask what happened to the people, not what happened in the relationship. Greene's list is a list of outcomes for third parties — a commission lost, a throne lost, a business bankrupt. That is a harder measure to argue with than anybody's account of who was at fault.
Third, look specifically for harm directed at the injured party. The riding crop and the dog leash are the two most diagnostic moments in twenty years, and neither involves a lover. When someone is hurt by a person's action and then attacked for having been hurt, that is not misfortune.
Fourth, check the base rate before you credit the pattern. Ludwig abdicated in 1848. Some of what looks like a chain is a decade doing what decades do, and the honest version of this analysis names the alternative explanation rather than omitting it.
Fifth, notice who the targets are. Every man on the list held something transferable — a newspaper, a throne, a commission, a name. That is a selection pattern, and it belongs in the assessment.
And the record as it actually reads: this is a nineteenth-century courtesan whose survival depended on attaching herself to powerful men, told as a story about a virus, by an author who does not once ask what her options were.
Strongest support. The volume and the consistency. Five named men across three countries over roughly fifteen years, each ending materially worse, with two independently documented incidents of violence toward uninvolved strangers.
Tension — the strongest link is hedged in the source itself. "Perhaps because of something the critic had said about Lola." The chapter's flagship death rests on a perhaps, and without it Dujarier died of drink and a duel.
Tension — 1848 is missing. Ludwig abdicated in the year of revolutions across Europe. Greene attributes the abdication to Lola and does not mention the continental context, which is the single largest confound in the case.
Tension — the chapter names her as a type and the vault has already built her as a triumph. See below.
Tension — no agency is granted anywhere. She is described throughout as a force acting on men, never as a woman without legal independence, living by attachment, in a century that offered her few alternatives. Greene's own framing ("there is almost a desire to destroy and unsettle") attributes motive without evidence.
🚩 SINGLE SOURCE · 🚩 SECONDARY WITHOUT PRIMARY — no biography, no date of any source, no citation. Greene reports her private thoughts, Ludwig's private word ("bewitched"), and the intent behind a torn dress that he simultaneously admits may have been torn by a sentry. [POPULAR SOURCE]
Open questions.
This is the sharpest thing in Law 10 and Greene never registers it: the vault has already built Lola Montez as a success story, from this same book.
Lola Montez and the Queen's Box sits at Law 6, where she is the worked case for courting attention at all cost — and specifically for the moment the technique failed, when she arrived after Queen Victoria and the room followed the queen's lead in refusing to look.
Run the two chapters together and Greene is using one woman to prove opposite lessons.
Law 6 treats the conspicuous self-invention — the Spanish identity, the scandals, the refusal to be ignored — as the correct strategy, and her failure as a matter of timing and audience.
Law 10 treats the identical behaviour as pathology: "an inward instability that radiates outward, drawing disaster upon itself."
And Law 44 uses her a third time, as the warning that ruined Wagner.
So the same career is craft in one chapter, disease in another, and a cautionary tale in a third, with no cross-reference between any of them. The variable that decides which reading applies is never named, and on inspection it appears to be simply whether the episode ended well. That is not a theory of character; it is outcome-sorting applied retrospectively, and it is the same defect this build logged at Law 8, where Napoleon is both the man destroyed by the bait and the exemplar of speed.
→ psychology · The Infector
The mechanism page carries Greene's type and its five diagnostic signs, and locates the capture at identification — the lover is lost once he takes the problems on as his own.
The case supplies what the mechanism page cannot: the selection half.
Greene's type is described as a force that radiates outward and catches whoever is near. But this chain is not random. Dujarier owned the largest newspaper in France and reviewed drama — the two things a failing dancer needed. Ludwig was a king. Heald was a barrister's son with a commission. Every target held exactly the asset required at that moment, and each was approached through researched, manufactured contact — the morning ride, the fall from the horse at Rechberg's feet.
The insight neither page produces alone: the infecting pattern here is preceded by a targeting pattern, and Greene's diagnostic contains nothing about it. His five signs are all about turbulence and force of character — things you notice once you are already involved. The observable that would actually have warned Dujarier is that the meeting was engineered and the engineering was invisible.
Which suggests the practical protective question is not is this person unstable but how did this person come to be in my life, and who arranged it — a question available at the start, when the five signs are not.
→ behavioral-mechanics · Attack the Most Visible Target
Law 6's entry technique: Aretino, a servant boy, satirises the pope's affection for his pet elephant and arrives instantly in the public eye — a move Greene explicitly flags as single-use.
The torn dress in Ludwig's anteroom is the same instrument. She was being refused an audience, so she manufactured a shock that made refusal impossible, and it worked in the only way such a thing can — once, immediately, totally.
The pair isolates what she did not have. Aretino's page carries a warning that the move cannot be repeated; the operator needs something else afterwards. Aretino had something else — he could write, and he built a career on it.
Lola's post-entry asset was the same trick again. The reviews of her Bavarian debut were terrible and the performances continued regardless, which means nothing was ever converted from access into value. So the escalation into politics, the countess title, the palace, the disdain for ministers, is not megalomania so much as the only direction available to someone whose entry technique never handed off to a second act.
The insight the pair produces: single-use techniques are not dangerous because they fail — hers all worked — but because succeeding with one leaves you holding a position you have no means of occupying. Greene flags the shelf life at Law 6 and never connects it to the woman he uses at Law 10 to prove that some people simply carry ruin.
Sharpest implication. The chain's persuasive force comes entirely from aggregation, and every individual link is weak enough to have an ordinary explanation — a drunk man's duel, a year of European revolutions, a boating accident, a drinking problem, a failed publishing house. Greene's own method tells you to judge the aggregate and ignore the reasons, and this case shows both what that method buys and what it costs: it catches a real pattern that link-by-link analysis would miss, and it cannot be falsified by any individual fact, which means it will read as equally conclusive when it is wrong.
Generative questions.