Did a divine voice cry out on August 7, 1876, the day Margaretha Zelle, known as Mata Hari (1876-1917), was born, and sentence her to death, a verdict that would be carried out forty-one years later? It seems that every event in this tragic figure’s life fit together to lead to the bitter end, on October 15, 1917, before a firing squad. Mata Hari built the legend of her life, layer upon layer, until it all collapsed like a house of cards, amid especially hostile historical circumstances. Who was Mata Hari, a celebrity in her lifetime and a myth after her death? A heartless femme fatale? A double agent who coldbloodedly caused the deaths of thousands of French soldiers?
A century after her death, historians and biographers almost unanimously agree that Mata Hari caused no harm to either side, and that she was thrown into the abyss as a scapegoat meant to atone for the military leadership’s failures. The Mata Hari association, together with her hometown of Leeuwarden, has filed a request with the French Ministry of Justice for a retrial, aiming to clear her name.
Margaretha Zelle: From a Happy Childhood to Tragedy and Orphanhood
Gertruida Margaretha Zelle was born in 1876 in the town of Leeuwarden, the capital of the province of Friesland in the northwest of the Netherlands. The mist that wraps the sleepy town and its canals blurs the line between fact and fiction, erasing the border between truth and invention. From early childhood, little Margaretha seemed to move through life as if on a stage, basking in her father’s loving, admiring gaze: he denied her nothing. For her sixth birthday he had a princess’s carriage built for her, with four seats, drawn by a pair of goats. Little Margaretha was proud to drive it herself, taking friends along for rides. Adam Zelle was a wealthy man.
His hat and cloak shop was thriving. He, his wife and their children lived comfortably above the shop. Adam Zelle called himself a “baron.” Margaretha knew perfectly well that her father was nothing but an impostor, but what did she care? Wasn’t life just theater anyway? Any means were fair game to embellish it and make it shine. Margaretha herself told her astonished friends that she had been born in a castle where the local nobility of Leeuwarden lived. Her friends naturally suspected these stories were nothing but the invention of their imaginative friend, but Margaretha was a popular girl, and even her teachers were fond of the brilliant student, who showed a clear talent for music, singing and languages.
Margaretha, the only daughter among three sons, was very different from her fair-skinned, blue-eyed brothers. Her skin was dark, her hair thick and black, her eyes brown and velvety. It was impossible not to notice the girl who stood out with her dark coloring. Did Asian blood run in her veins? Her father, who saw her as a rare orchid in a field of yellow buttercups, indulged her with eye-catching outfits and an excellent education. In the small town, people whispered. They did not look kindly on the rise of Adam Zelle, a simple hatter posing as a baron, who was chosen to carry the royal flag welcoming the King of the Netherlands on a visit.
When Margaretha was 13, her father lost his entire fortune to bad speculation. The wealthy merchant’s money disappeared somewhere in the oil wells of the Dutch East Indies, then a Dutch colony. His disastrous advice dragged the family to the edge of ruin. Adam Zelle disappeared, saying he was off to find new work in The Hague. In 1890, Margaretha’s parents divorced. Her mother and the children left their spacious home in the upscale district and moved to a wretched apartment near the harbor, in dreadful conditions. Margaretha’s mother could not bear the strain, sank into depression, fell ill and died a year later. Adam Zelle came to the funeral but did not take his children in. They were scattered among various relatives. Margaretha, 14, went to live in the home of one of them, but was not wanted there.
The tragedy Margaretha experienced in her childhood clearly shaped the course of her future life and contributed to her downfall. Her father’s bankruptcy was the first crack, one that kept widening. Margaretha did everything she could to win back the lost wealth and respect, but lost them again later when she, like her father, wrapped herself in a thousand masks of invention, acted without wisdom and misread reality. By then, the girl had grown to an unusually tall height for the time, five foot ten. In those days, that was not an advantage but a drawback on the path to finding a suitable match.
Margaretha’s small breasts also did not match the aesthetic standards of the time. But the tall, charismatic girl, with skin the color of olives, kept drawing glances and sparking interest. The relative in whose house she was staying advised her to train as a teacher. The headmaster of the school in Leiden, where she studied for this purpose, fell for her charms. The scandal that broke out got the headmaster fired and the student expelled.
Lady MacLeod: A Married Life
At 18, Margaretha found shelter in the home of one of her uncles in The Hague, but her future was still uncertain. A newspaper ad placed by an officer of the Dutch navy looking for a bride caught her eye, and so she became Lady MacLeod, as she would later call herself, the wife of Rudolf, twenty years her senior. Rudolf MacLeod, a Dutchman of Scottish descent, had returned home on leave from his service in the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia) due to his failing health. Marriage seemed like the ideal solution for a girl with nothing, whom no one looked after. Margaretha surely saw in Rudolf a substitute for the father who had vanished from her life so suddenly and so cruelly. But her husband was a violent drinker, jealous and possessive toward his wife, and himself an incorrigible womanizer. The marriage was doomed from the start. Their son, Norman, was born in 1897.
Captain Rudolf MacLeod was ordered back to the East Indies. He, his young wife and their newborn son sailed for Java. Rudolf’s jealousy toward his wife kept growing. At the same time, he took a local mistress, and he repeatedly harassed the household’s maids as well. Margaretha put her talent for languages to use and learned Javanese. She also developed a strong interest in Hindu epics and the ritual dances connected to them, in which the dancers appeal to the gods, seeking to please them, appease them and satisfy them, in order to drive away the forces of evil, win victory over wickedness and earn blessing, prosperity and fertility. Sometimes the gods demanded a heavy sacrifice in return for granting the request.
In 1898, between one quarrel and the next, the couple had a daughter, Louise. Her mother called her “Non,” meaning “little girl” in Javanese. She herself took the name “Mata Hari,” meaning “eye of the day.” Margaretha’s enthusiasm for the local culture was unusual among the colonial wives, who largely kept to their own closed social circle. A move to Sumatra improved MacLeod’s standing, and Margaretha fulfilled her duties as a society wife. She spoke with her guests in Dutch, German, Spanish, English or French, languages she commanded well. With the servants, she spoke the local language. She also played the piano and danced gracefully, under the admiring, covetous gaze of her high-ranking guests. Margaretha began to take real pleasure in her new status.
A new tragedy, worse than the last, shattered her happiness. On June 27, 1899, screams rang out from the children’s room. Norman and Louise vomited black fluid and their bodies convulsed. The children had been poisoned by their nanny, who was the father’s jealous, vengeful mistress. Norman did not survive. Louise, “Non,” survived by a miracle, but sadly was not destined for a long life either. Louise MacLeod died of a stroke at 22, two years after her mother was executed. Margaretha sat for days on end without moving, staring into the void in despair. Rudolf blamed her for their son’s death and made her life miserable. The couple returned to the Netherlands with their daughter, and Margaretha obtained a divorce. Rudolf refused to pay her alimony, kept their daughter and kept Margaretha, a “dangerous woman” in his words, from seeing her. And so she found herself once again, at 26, with nothing, alone, without a single loving friend, forced to beg relatives for mercy.
Mata Hari, Javanese Princess
A fierce hope drove the penniless young woman to start a new life in the opulent Paris of the Belle Époque, “the beautiful era.” Her first visit ended in professional disappointment: the painters whose doors she knocked on to offer her services as a model did not treat her properly. But Margaretha, forced to return to the Netherlands, did not give up. In 1903 she went back to Paris, determined to reinvent herself and succeed in the arts. The strategy she chose this time paid off. With her last money, she bought an extravagant dress.
Lady MacLeod walked into the luxurious Le Grand Hôtel, near the Opéra, 2 Rue Scribe, and picked out her target. Already in the elevator, a wealthy wine merchant, Louis Castenil, fell under the spell of the exotic beauty, dressed in finery, with her aristocratic manners. By the third floor, the matter was already settled. Her stay at the hotel, along with all her needs, would be paid for by her besotted admirer. This is how Margaretha joined the high society women of the Belle Époque: the courtesans. Merchants, bankers, diplomats, noblemen, but above all men of rank (an insatiable longing for paternal authority, perhaps?) would fund her extravagant life.
But Margaretha had artistic ambitions. She wanted a career and fame. Nothing could discourage her. Not yet thirty, at the height of her sensuality, she achieved her dreams beyond expectation, climbing the ladder of success. Two years after arriving in Paris, in early 1905, she knocked on the door of Ernest Molier, who had founded a prestigious circus in the Passy district. She wanted to join the horsewomen, the Amazons. Molier offered her a riding act in the revealing costume of a Hindu dancer. Margaretha agreed, and this was the beginning of the legend, a springboard to a brilliant independent career. Lady MacLeod became Mata Hari again: “eye of the day,” the rising sun, the morning star.
Why not trade the riding act for an Indonesian dance combined with a striptease? In front of a refined audience eager for anything exotic and Eastern, adorned with jewelry, a tiara, necklaces, bracelets and anklets, her breasts covered with pearl-studded metal domes, Mata Hari writhed like a snake in a sensual dance, slowly shedding her wrappings. The crowning moment was her performance at the museum of Asian art named for its founder and director, Émile Guimet (1836-1918), who had heard about the dancer’s private performances and invited her to enlighten and entertain his guests: statesmen, diplomats, noblemen, artists and journalists.
The Dance of Death at the Musée Guimet
On March 13, 1905, Mata Hari’s performance in the museum’s library, transformed into a Hindu temple for the occasion, was a dazzling success. The tension was at its peak, the hall shrouded in darkness until the star appeared, surrounded by four backup dancers dressed in black. The dancer’s supple body, wrapped in sheer, shimmering silk, stirred the senses of the audience. In the first scene, the erotic priestess danced a hymn of praise to the god Shiva, in a slow rhythm. In the second scene, she brandished a dagger in a fast, violent dance in honor of the god of war, Subramanya. Plays of light and shadow heightened the dramatic effect. Passions flared. As the music turned harsh and oppressive and the backup dancers broke into cries, the audience held its breath. This was the third scene. Mata Hari, after a series of rapid spins, collapsed in exhaustion at the feet of her lover Shiva, the god who determines destinies, sacrificing herself in ecstasy on his altar. The audience flushed with pleasure.
An ominous pantomime? An ironic hint? It never crossed Mata Hari’s mind that twelve years after her triumph at the Musée Guimet, she would be executed by firing squad.
The performance ended in near-complete nudity. Mata Hari would never remove the metal cups covering her small breasts, and she would explain that her violent, jealous husband had once bitten her breast and torn off a nipple.
The Good Twelve Years
The performance at the Musée Guimet launched a brilliant career. The leading impresario of the time was Gabriel Astruc (1864-1938), son of a distinguished rabbi, Elie-Aristide Astruc, who served as deputy chief rabbi of Paris and as chief rabbi of Belgium. Gabriel Astruc took the young performer under his wing for the next ten years. Mata Hari, the Javanese princess, became famous overnight. Her name was on everyone’s lips, the newspapers praised the boldness of her dancing, and her picture was printed on postcards, matchboxes and biscuit tins. The dancer conquered Paris and performed at the legendary Olympia music hall.
The great impresario organized a tour of European cities for the sought-after performer: Vienna, Berlin, Rome, Madrid. In Monte Carlo, she played the role of an Indian dancer in the opera “Le Roi de Lahore” by composer Jules Massenet (1842-1912), performing before Prince Albert I of Monaco (r. 1889-1922). Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) was captivated and showered her with flowers. The star documented her successes in two thick journals, filled with newspaper clippings and photographs, now kept in a hall dedicated to her memory at the Fries Museum in her hometown of Leeuwarden.
Mata Hari rented a luxurious apartment at a prestigious address, 3 Rue Balzac, near the Arc de Triomphe, and renovated and furnished it with the best money could buy. From then on, she employed a loyal maid, a compatriot who would stay with her until the day she died. The gossip columns described her outfits and counted her jewels, her furs and her lovers. Margaretha Zelle fueled their imagination, claiming she had been born in southern India into a holy Brahmin family, to a righteous and generous father who, in another version, became an English lord, and to a Hindu temple dancer who died at age 14 giving birth to her daughter.
The daughter, she said, was taken in by the temple priests, who taught her the secrets of the ritual dance and gave her the name Mata Hari. One cannot help but admire the way Margaretha Zelle recruited reality into the service of fiction. She kept spinning her tall tales, claiming to be the widow of a British officer or the wife of a Dutch colonel. During their time in the distant colony, she and her husband moved in the company of princes and rulers who hosted them in palaces where ritual dance ceremonies were held. The versions kept changing, and so did the lovers.
At the height of her success, the star suddenly stopped performing to follow a German officer, Alfred Kiepert, to Berlin. She thought she had found the love of her life, but in Berlin she grew bored. She missed the stage. It is known that she boasted of an affair with Crown Prince Wilhelm, whose weakness for beautiful women, especially singers and dancers, poisoned his marriage. After a few months, in 1907, having grown thoroughly tired of life in the German capital, she returned to Paris, but success had turned its back on her. New stars were now exploiting the idea of the erotic, exotic dance disguised as ritual, an idea Mata Hari had invented.
The most famous of them was Colette (1873-1954), who performed on the stage of the renowned cabaret, the Moulin Rouge. Mata Hari was now reduced to performing in popular clubs and begging for work. In such lean times, she frequented brothels, where her famous name still impressed clients. The considerable money she had earned during her glory days, before her stay in Berlin, she had squandered on luxuries as if there were no tomorrow. Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929), the renowned ballet impresario, rejected her brazen request to join his company. Mata Hari had never been trained as a dancer, and professionals considered her nothing more than an illusion. Respected experts in Eastern culture also raised serious doubts about the authenticity of her art.
The dancer of yesterday, nearing forty but still well-groomed and alluring, continued to sell her body as she had before, without inhibition, to the highest bidder, though her heart remained closed. The memory of her failed marriage to her possessive, violent husband kept her from falling in love and settling down. Restless, she wandered from place to place, from identity to identity. Between 1910 and 1911, she stayed at a country château that a banker lover had put at her disposal in the Loire Valley, the Château de la Dorée, devoting herself to riding her beloved horses. Margaretha had always been an excellent rider. She returned to Paris and settled into a townhouse in the upscale Neuilly district. She still managed to perform at La Scala in Milan, her swan song. On the eve of the war, the dancer of the past was buried in debt up to her neck. At the end of 1915, the courtesan sold her furniture, horses and carriages and returned to her homeland, settling in The Hague, in a house rented for her by a colonel among her acquaintances.
The Belle Époque, “the beautiful era,” carefree, permissive, creative, progressive, and thriving, had come to an end. A long and bloody war was wreaking havoc. The joyful, carefree Paris of yesterday was now gripped by shortages, austerity and fear. Hatred of Germans and foreigners was rising. An atmosphere of witch-hunting had taken over the city. Margaretha Zelle saw that the entertainment clubs had closed, that nightlife had shut down, that men had been sent to the front, that women had taken their place, driving streetcars, delivering mail and working in factories. But she failed to understand that the new, dark era no longer allowed life to be treated as a light theatrical performance. Mata Hari, blind to it all, continued to carry on as if she were a star on a stage before an adoring audience.
Mata Hari, the “Spy”
In her neutral homeland, Mata Hari received an unexpected offer for a new, adventurous role. The German consul in The Hague, Karl Kroemer, offered to pay off her debts in exchange for her services as a spy. Mata Hari was a polyglot socialite whose powers of seduction and connections with French officers and statesmen were well known to all. It was a chance to return to the stage from which she had been banished, to play a new and amusing part, to line her pockets with money and to leave boring Holland behind. Mata Hari accepted Karl Kroemer’s offer and returned to Paris in mid-1916, with the advance payment she had received from the German diplomat in her pocket. From the ship carrying her to Paris, she threw overboard the jars of invisible ink that her “handler” had given her.
Did Mata Hari ever pass important intelligence to the Germans? No. Margaretha lived in a bubble of champagne. Matters of world importance did not interest her, and espionage techniques interested her even less. She was never in a position to do meaningful good or harm to either side. Mata Hari was a spy straight out of operetta. The “secrets” she revealed to the Germans to justify her pay, she had simply read in the newspapers. She never intended to betray France. She never, for instance, approached the French minister of war, Adolphe Messimy, who was among her lovers, to extract firsthand information from him.
Mata Hari’s frequent visits to Berlin and her ties with German officers raised the suspicions of the French and British authorities. When she arrived in France, she was placed under constant surveillance, which turned up nothing. But the noose was tightening around her neck all the same. At the end of 1916, Mata Hari, at 40, fell in love like an innocent young girl with a 22-year-old Russian officer, the same age her son Norman would have been had he lived. Margaretha most likely saw in Vadim Maslov the image of the son she had lost at two and a half years old. Mata Hari did everything she could to fulfill her dream: to marry the man she loved, a captain fighting alongside the French, and to live with him happily and richly for the rest of her days. Maslov was wounded in battle and hospitalized in a military hospital near Vittel. Mata Hari was determined to go visit him.
How could she get a travel permit to go to Vittel during wartime? By coincidence, one of her acquaintances called her at that exact moment and advised her to approach the head of French counterespionage, Georges Ladoux. Margaretha had no idea that this was a trap the cunning Ladoux had set to lure her into his office. Ladoux wanted to catch spies in order to climb the ranks. When she knocked on his door, he offered her the chance to spy for France. Espionage paid well, so why not stand on the side where her new beloved was fighting, and build a future?
Mata Hari promised Captain Ladoux that she would lure a German general into her bed and extract information about enemy army plans from him. In exchange for her services as a spy, she demanded one million French francs. That was the sum she needed to abandon her life of adventure and start a new chapter with the young Russian knight, who was, on top of everything else, buried in debt himself. Ladoux promised but never delivered. Mata Hari set off for Belgium, via Spain, to seduce the top ranks of the German command: now she was a “double agent.”
During a stopover in England, the British mistakenly took her for a German spy named Clara Benedix. Once they realized their mistake, they released her from custody but forbade her from continuing her voyage and sent her back to France via Spain. Mata Hari was now a marked woman. The British and the French suspected her of spying for Germany. In Madrid, she arranged a meeting with the German military attaché, Arnold Kalle, presenting herself as a spy working for Germany, under the code name the German consul in The Hague had given her, H 21.
Mata Hari was elated: she had managed to seduce the attaché, who had fallen completely under her spell, and she extracted important information from him about German submarines landing on the coast of Morocco. She rushed to inform Georges Ladoux. But the man she thought was her prey turned out to be the hunter. Arnold Kalle decided to bring down the woman posing as a German spy while actually working for France. There is no easier way to get rid of a double agent than to hand them over to the enemy. Kalle knew perfectly well that the telegraph messages he sent to his superiors in Berlin would fall into French hands at the wireless station set up on the Eiffel Tower, “the big ear.”
Arnold Kalle thus sent long messages to Berlin detailing agent H 21’s activities, along with the sums of money she was demanding. There could be no mistake: the agent was none other than Mata Hari. French intelligence decoded the messages with no difficulty, and here, seemingly, was the proof that Mata Hari was a dangerous spy in the service of the German enemy, who had received payment from them, cash in hand.
A Trial That Ended in Execution
France had stopped counting the wounded and the dead slaughtered in the trenches. Most of the bloodiest battles were being fought on its own soil. Posters urged residents to keep their ears open and report spies. Panic, fear and despair gripped both the front and the home front. Paris was being bombed from the air. Civilian victims were buried with state honors. The enemy on the ground kept advancing. Mutinies against the command broke out in the ranks. Soldiers and spies were executed, so others would see and fear. Enemy agents faced one sentence: death. The order of the day was to unite the people, glorify patriotism and distract from military failures. The leadership needed scapegoats. Mata Hari would pay the price of the war and its horrors, and would be led to the altar.
On February 13, a few weeks after she returned to France, Mata Hari was arrested in her hotel room, held at the Saint-Lazare women’s prison, and brought before a military tribunal on charges of spying for Germany. The investigator, Captain Pierre Bouchardon, a patriot, sincerely believed in her guilt. Mata Hari had indeed been in contact with German intelligence and had received substantial payments from it: these were facts. Of the hundreds of high-ranking lovers she had known, only one, Henri de Marguérie, an intelligence officer, bothered to testify on her behalf and confirm her account. The others preferred to disown the suspect and hide their ties to her. The scheming Georges Ladoux naturally did nothing to help. From the start, he had been determined to see her convicted.
Worst of all for the woman in love was the betrayal of Vadim Maslov, the man for whom she had gone through fire and water. Captain Vadim Maslov, on his superiors’ advice, decided to disown her the moment he heard of her arrest. He had never intended to marry Madame Mata Hari, who was, in his words in a written statement, nothing but an “adventuress.” At the trial, Mata Hari was portrayed as a corrupt woman who had abandoned her husband and neglected her daughter to lead a permissive, dissolute life: a shameless liar. Mata Hari, enemy agent, a devil’s daughter, embodied all that was evil.
Her experienced lawyer, Édouard Clunet, who was himself one of her former lovers and was now past seventy, spared no effort to save her, but in vain. The final act of the drama had already been written and sealed. After Clunet’s desperate attempt to present his old friend Mata Hari as pregnant failed, he appealed to President Raymond Poincaré (1860-1934) for a pardon, which was denied at once. After three rushed days of trial, before dawn, the condemned woman was led to the Vincennes woods, where a firing squad awaited her. About a hundred spectators attended the execution. “What a success!” Mata Hari cried, dressed in an elegant fur-trimmed gown, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a coat draped over her shoulders, and blew a kiss toward the twelve riflemen.
Upright, proud and brave, she walked toward her death, looking it straight in the eye, and refused to have her eyes bound with a cloth. A last smile for Sister Léonide, the nun from the women’s prison who had been her friend and companion through the months of her detention, and a wave of farewell. The commanding officer raised his sword in a sharp motion: the signal was given. To the sound of drums and trumpets, the woman sank to the ground. A bullet pierced her heart. No one claimed her body, which was handed over to the faculty of medicine and later cremated. The ashes of Margaretha Zelle vanished and disappeared, but the myth of Mata Hari lives on. It has never been forgotten, and it still stirs the public imagination.
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