At his office, he spent his lunch hour writing up the story. He kept very close to Gerda’s version of events and painted Suzette as a victim with no escape from a cruel three-way affair. It made page two of the Late Evening Special.
When the case came to trial two weeks later, the Counsel for the Prosecution portrayed Suzette Harrault as a calculating murderer who’d shot a man down in cold blood. The Counsel for the Defence presented the same scenario as du Parcq’s story: that Suzette Harrault was the victim of a brutal sadist, hellbent on making her life a misery. The avocat cited Gerda’s testimony in du Parcq’s story as supporting evidence. The Presiding Magistrate declared that, after hearing both Counsels, he’d decided to treat the shooting as a crime passionnel. ‘And therefore,’ he said, ‘Suzette Harrault is acquitted.’
Du Parcq spent that evening in the bar across from the offices of Le Monde and glowed with pleasure at the compliments his colleagues paid him. Later, when he was a little drunk, he told them about the mysterious woman called Gerda. ‘Without her testimony,’ he said, ‘that girl would never have got off.’
9
Paris, 1905
I am Émile Guimet, the founder of the Musée Guimet in Paris, where Lady MacLeod gave her first performance as Mata Hari. My friend Georges du Parcq introduced me to the delights of Mata Hari’s wonderful and exotic stage performances. He telephoned me at my museum one day in January and told me of a woman he had met while filing a story, a woman who wanted to be an Oriental dancer. I thought it a marvellous idea. The Orient, for so long a distant and unknown part of the world for most French citizens, was slowly becoming more familiar. Only five years before, a whole Javanese village had been reconstructed on the Champ de Mars during the Exposition Universelle. Debussy was composing music inspired by the pagodas of the East and Gauguin had lived among the peace-loving natives of Tahiti in order to revitalise his wasting senses.
It was to the Perroquet Bleu in rue Chaptal, just off place Pigalle, that Georges took me on the night of 4 February 1905. It was hardly the most auspicious venue for a professional début. It was a tall, thin building in a narrow street where filles de joie accosted passers-by and sly men tried to sell cheap stockings. The street was so dark that, for a moment, we couldn’t find the right place. There were no illuminated signs and no doorman to show the way, just a black door on which we had to bang in order to be admitted. A scantily dressed woman pushed open the door and motioned us inside. She pointed the way forward down a rickety staircase. The fact that there was no entrance fee didn’t augur well, but Georges slipped her a franc piece in any case. As we descended, I told Georges of my discomfort in such unsavoury surroundings, but he pacified me, saying, ‘Patience, Émile. Patience.’
Georges had been to see her in two or three cabarets dansants in Pigalle and Montmartre, where she had performed free of charge during the entr’acte. On the telephone, Georges attempted to describe the voluptuous movements of her dances, but admitted he was unable to. Instead, he was telling all his friends and colleagues to go and see her. In recognition of his help, she had given Georges a silver statuette of the Hindu god Siva, which, she told him, was from Java. He put it on his mantelpiece, where it has remained, smiling benignly over the whole of his small apartment. This is what finally swayed me. When he showed it to me, I was piqued at the thought that she knew of Siva and became interested to see her interpretation of the great Eastern religions.
We found a table near the back of the dark room. There were wooden shafts and beams throughout, supporting a warped roof. In front of us were ten or so round wooden tables, like ours, and in front of those was the small dais, barely a metre away, and edged with red curtains. The stuccoed walls were cream-coloured and smeared, the roof yellow with pipe smoke. The place was nearly full and lively with the expectant shouts of men waiting for the night’s entertainment. A woman with a tray ran up and down the back stairs, ferrying drinks to the tables and tucking the tips she received into her dress front. Most of the men were drinking bocks – beer in wine glasses – and absinthe. Georges ordered a cognac. I ordered my usual sloe gin with seltzer water. When the waitress left, I noticed a man on his own in one corner. He had a pad on his knee and was drawing the interior scenes.
A compère then appeared on stage and announced the attractions. The first act was a troupe of three Arabian dancers, who wore fake rubies in their navels and cavorted around the stage as though they were members of a seraglio, aiming to please their sultan. It was a grotesque and inane display, but the audience was very taken with it. Some raised their glasses and whistled; others threw centimes on to the stage, which one of the troupe made sure to collect before disappearing into the wings. The second act was a juggler, whose performance involved the use of skittles, knives and flaming torches. As you can imagine, the audience was not overly enthusiastic. The third act, ‘Leo and His Infernal Violin’, was even worse and doesn’t merit a mention at all. I drank my sloe gin and wished I had never come.
The compère appeared again and announced a set of acrobats.
‘But first,’ he said, ‘please welcome a sensational new dancer from the Orient – Lady MacLeod!’ The audience cheered in anticipation and Georges sat upright in his chair to get a better view. When she came on to the stage, with her eyes cast down and only the merest hint of a smile on her lips, the audience settled down and everyone was agog. She was dressed in a brassière, trimmed with gold, and a short gold sarong, over which fell a transparent veil. Her black hair hung loosely, held in place by a plain hairband. She wore wooden clogs, which were similar to ones worn by geishas in northern Japan, but which must have come from her native Holland. Her attire was simple, drab even, but it belied the hypnotism and guile of the performance to follow.
She stood looking out towards a spot somewhere above and behind the audience. Her face was as still as a winter pond, as though she had done this a thousand times before. Some music started up off-stage – wailing, dervish-like music – and she began a series of slow turns and twirls, always extending her arms upwards or outwards and always holding her head steady. Several times, she remained crouching on the floor with her back to us and, on the last such crouch, she cast aside her veil and swirled round to reveal that she was naked except for her brassière. The crowd of men rose to their feet, clapping and whistling in appreciation and then, suddenly, she disappeared from the stage.
My first reaction was of immense excitement and invigoration. My sixty-nine years seemed to melt away at such an extraordinary sight. Here was a woman who had interpreted most perfectly the slow seductive dances of the bayadères. I had never seen it done so well before – indeed, I had never seen it done at all before. The whole of Paris was ignorant of such dancing and, if nurtured and directed, I realised at once that she had the potential to carve a lucrative niche for herself in the world of performance.
We sat talking our way through the acrobats and a dismal chanteuse. Or rather, I talked and Georges listened. I told him of the plans and projects that I had already envisaged off the top of my head. I imagined her dancing to audiences of thousands across Europe’s major cities. I was so immersed in my thoughts that I did not notice Lady MacLeod suddenly materialising at our table. She was dressed in the plainest of clothes. We stood up and Georges introduced us. Her dark eyes looked at me. What a sweet smile she had! One could sense the naïveté in her manner, but also the splendour of her presence. She sat down with us and, when asked, ordered a glass of vin blanc. I felt compelled to tell her immediately what I thought. I told her that she had a great future, that she was perfect. I’m afraid I rambled on somewhat about the collection of Oriental jewellery and costume that I have in my museum and how I could imagine her dressed in those fine robes and shiny stones. She smiled and listened patiently.
Eventually, I asked how much she was to be paid for her performance that night. She didn’t hesitate when the question came. ‘Twenty francs,’ she said. I told her I could secure her 1,000 gold francs a night.
Well, it was a joy to see the expression on her face! She brought her hand up to her open mouth in astonishment. I told her about a room in my museum that would be an ideal backdrop for her performance. I mentioned several people I knew who would be very interested to see her. She readily agreed and I promised to make the necessary arrangements as soon as possible. I began to enquire as to her background, in preparation for any advance publicity, and she proceeded to tell me about the places she had been in the Dutch East Indies. She made great mention of the music and dance of the natives and told me how inspired she was by their art. Oh, how lucky she was to have been to Java, a place I have often travelled to in spirit but never in person. Then I remembered my sole concern: that she must have a more exotic sobriquet. I asked if she knew any Eastern or Oriental expressions for, alas, I have no knowledge of any foreign languages. She admitted that she knew nothing except one or two things in Malay. I told her it didn’t matter if her stage name was Malay, Siamese or Mandarin, it just had to be foreign and exotic-sounding. She struggled to recall as much as possible and, after a kind of verbal tit-for-tat, we came up with an expression she had learnt while she was ill with typhoid in the Indies: ‘Mata Hari’, which means ‘Eye of the Morning’, or ‘Dawn’. I thought it perfect and, much to my delight, she agreed.
My museum is on avenue d’Iéna, opposite the Tokyo Palace. I opened it in 1884, a year after the Orient Express began its regular service to Constantinople. The whole venture was made possible by the legacy my father left me when he died. My father was a successful financier, trading in cheap cotton imports from Indo-Chine, but he was also an amateur collector of Oriental trinkets and knick-knacks. He used to keep them in a cabinet of curiosities. As a child, I would sort through them, turning them over in my hands and imagining the far-off lands they had come from. I particularly remember a piece of Chinese jade and a Khmer figurine. When my father retired, he settled in Arcueil, a Parisian suburb. I used to visit him there on Sundays. We would have luncheon in his new ‘conservatory’ and then walk in the nearby park. He became more absorbed in his collection and made many new acquisitions. He showed them to me, telling me of their origins and meanings, and explained to me his baffling system of taxonomy. His collection was quite well known locally – so much so that, one morning, he woke to find the whole collection stolen. The police mounted an investigation and the local paper reported the crime. It was Georges who wrote the story. That was how he and I met. Georges interviewed my father and helped the police as much as he could, but they never recovered any of the collection. My father was never quite the same after that. I continued to visit him and encouraged him to start afresh, but he was clearly depressed over the whole experience. Less than a year after the burglary, he died.
His death seemed so senseless and sad. At that time, I had a job as an industrialist, but was bored. I longed to travel. I spent months in a dilemma, going back and forth from my work in Paris to my father’s house, before making the decision to leave my job. From then on, I vowed to follow in my father’s footsteps and devote my life to the collection of all things Oriental. I wanted to keep alive the spirit of knowledge he had engendered in me. I sold my father’s house and began planning trips to the Orient. The first of these was to Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, where I learnt the basic techniques of ikebana – flower arrangement – and brought back the first Japanese woodcuts to be exhibited in Europe. I planned and completed two further trips, during which I acquired many kimonos, sumi-e paintings and three complete cha-no-yu tea sets. Gradually I accumulated hundreds of Oriental art objects, including some Tibetan tankas, Nepalese inlaid silverwork, some early Amaravati carvings and a fine gilded figure of a dancing Dakini. I was finally able to house these artefacts in my present museum when an old trading warehouse closed down. After several years of pouring my father’s money into the museum to keep it open, it is now running profitably and I have more than 1,000 visitors per annum.
In 1903, one of these visitors was Giacomo Puccini, whose latest opera, Madam Butterfly, was preparing for its world première. He travelled from his home in Monte Carlo to the museum in order to seek my advice on the authenticity of the costumes and stage designs. He had several drawings with him and we sat in my office, drinking sweet leaf tea and discussing the finer points of kimonos and geisha hair design. I pointed out that one of the drawings depicted a hair design called monoware, which has a strong sexual reference in its resemblance to a split peach. Puccini paled somewhat and left our meeting more thoughtful than when he had arrived. I was very honoured to receive an invitation from him to attend the première at La Scala in Milan and made the journey wondering what effect our conversation had had. As I sat in the magnificent red and gold auditorium watching the performance, I quickly realised he had decided to omit any hint of monoware. When I returned to Paris, I wrote to him thanking him for the invitation and said I hoped he hadn’t been offended by our meeting. I was somewhat relieved to receive a reply from him saying that, on the contrary, he had found our discussion extremely stimulating. My only other contact with him was in 1906, when Mata Hari was at the height of her success. She had been booked by Monsieur Antoine, the Director of the Opéra in Monte Carlo, for a performance of Massenet’s Le Roi de Lahore. Thinking he might be interested in its Oriental setting, I wrote to Puccini inviting him to the opening night. Much to my delight, he accepted and I later found out he was so impressed that he sent her some flowers with his felicitations, describing her as a charmante artiste.
Before this, however, Mata Hari had performed under her new name for the first time on 13 March, five weeks after that fateful evening at the Perroquet Bleu. As a venue, I chose the museum’s rotunda on the second floor, which houses the library. My assistants and I transformed the airy cylindrical space into an Indian temple. The eight columns holding up the balcony were garlanded with flowers, and sheets of gauze were hung from them to provide a backdrop. The museum’s centrepiece, a one-metre-high bronze statue of Siva Nataraja, originating from southern India and dating from the eleventh century, was wheeled into the library and dozens of candles placed about it. The candlelight was reflected in the sapanwood wainscotting, steeping the whole library in a lustre of red.
I compiled the small guest list with care. In the end, I sent out invitations to twenty-five people, including the actress Cécile Sorel, the theatrical agent Maître Clunet, the Japanese and German ambassadors, Madame Kiréevsky, who was organising a benefit for the Russian Ambulancemen, and the journalist Édouard Lepage. On the evening in question, my assistants showed the guests to their seats and served them Turkish pastilles and sherbets made from mangoes and pomegranates while they waited. I selected Mata Hari’s costume from the museum’s collection of clothing and jewellery – a white cotton brassière covered with jewel-studded breastplates, bracelets for her wrists and upper arms and an Indian diadem that curved backwards over her hair, which was knotted à l’espagnole. From the back of her brassière to the wrist bands, a sarong was attached so that it flowed over her hips when her arms were wrapped around her and opened into a fan when her arms were outstretched. The rest of her was bare. She looked exquisite.
When she was ready and the hired orchestra of Javanese gongs and drums were in position just off-stage, I introduced her to the illustrious audience by talking a little bit about the bayadères and religious dances of India. When I had finished, the electric lighting was turned off. Standing behind my guests, I watched her emerge from behind a column and take her place by the candlelit Siva. The orchestra began its soporific and sombre rhythms. As Mata Hari outstretched her arms and stood on tiptoe to begin her dance, I was reminded of Botticelli’s Venus. The same pose, the same proportions. I made a mental note that Mata Hari must have her portrait painted presently, and I knew several good but poor artists who would be more than happy to capture her on canvas. Yes, I thought, her beautiful image must be immortalised for ever.
Suddenly Mata Hari appears, The Eye of the Day, the Glorious
Sun, the sacred Bayadère whom only the priests and the gods can claim to have seen in the nude. She is tall and slim and supple like the unrolled serpent which is hypnotised by the snake charmer’s flute. Her flexible body at times becomes one with the undulating flames, to stiffen suddenly in the middle of her contortions, like the flaming blade of a kris.
Then, with a brutal gesture, Mata Hari rips off her jewels, tears her veils. She throws away the ornaments that cover her breasts. And, naked, her body seems to lengthen way up into the shadows! Her outstretched arms lift her on to the very tip of her toes; she staggers, beats the empty air with her shattered arms, whips the imperturbable night with her long heavy hair . . . and falls to the ground.
Édouard Lepage, 14 March 1905
10
La Presse
I have heard vague rumours about a woman from the Far East, who has come to Europe laden with perfume and jewels, to introduce some of the richness of the Oriental colour and life into the satiated society of European cities. There are supposed to be scenes of veils encircling and being discarded, giving a suggestion of naughtiness that such a display should take place in a private drawing room.
The King, 1905
Lady MacLeod, that is to say Mata Hari, the Indian dancer, voluptuous and tragic, dances naked in the latest salons. She wears the costume of the bayadère, as much simplified as possible, and, towards the end, she simplifies it even a little more.
The Red Dancer Page 6