La Vie Parisienne, 1905
I know nothing of the East, but was thrilled with the beauty of her body. She interprets the admirable poesy of the Malayan race. I predict a great future for her.
Camille de Sainte-Croix, Revue Théâtrale, 1905
The little breasts only were covered with chiselled brass cupules, held in place with thin chains. Glittering bracelets, encrusted with precious stones, were on her wrists, arms and ankles. The rest of her was bare, fastidiously bare, from the nails of her fingers to her toes. Dominated by the ornamental bust, the plastic and firm stomach showed a sexless suppleness in symmetric curves which from the armpits under the raised arms, traced themselves to the haunches. The raised legs were ideal, like two fine columns of a pagoda. The kneecaps, amber-coloured, seemed plated with gold leaf that had rosy reflections. I can never forget her dancing. With serpentine movements, Mata Hari turned smiling the while towards the sleeping god (a standard prop in the mise en scène), and prostrated herself three times. Then turning again slowly, she took from her left wrist in the same rhythmic fashion, the large metal bracelet she wore. We could see then in place of this copper bangle, a thin natural bracelet, tattooed in blue on the pale gold skin, which represented a snake swallowing its tail.
Louis Damur, 1905
Seeing Mata Hari so feline, extremely feminine, majestically tragic, the thousand curves and movements of her body trembling in a thousand rhythms, one finds oneself far from the conventional entrechats of our classical dancers. Mata Hari dances like David before the Holy of Holies, like Salambo before Tanit, like Salome before Herod!
Gaulois, 17 March 1905
Mata Hari dances with veils, bejewelled brassières, and that is about all. The tall Mrs MacLeod wore the dress of the bayadère with incomparable grace. From Java, on the burning soil of which island she grew up, she brings an unbelievable suppleness and a magic charm, while she owes her powerful torso to her native Holland.
No one before her has dared to remain like this with trembling ecstasy and without any veils in front of the god – and with what beautiful gestures, both daring and chaste! She is indeed Absaras, sister of the Nymphs, the Naiads and the Walkyrie, created by Sundra for the perdition of men and sages.
Mata Hari does not only act with her feet, her arms, eyes, mouth and crimson fingernails. Mata Hari, unhampered by any clothes, plays with her whole body. And then, when the gods remain unmoved by the offer of her beauty and youth, she offers them her love, her chastity – and one by one her veils, symbols of feminine honour, fall at the feet of the god. But Siva wants even more. Devidasha gets closer to him – one more veil, a mere nothing – and erect in her proud and victorious nudity, she offers the god the passion which burns in her.
And, sitting around her, the Nautsches excited her further in uttering terrible ‘stâ-stâ-stâ‘ sounds and finally the priestess, gasping for breath, sinks down at the feet of the god – where her dancing girls cover her with a golden sheet. Then Mata Hari, without any feeling of shame got up gracefully, pulled the holy veil around her, and, kindly thanking both Siva and the Parisians, walked off amid thunderous bravos!
Afterwards, Mata Hari, now dressed in an elegant evening gown, joined the public and, playing with a Javanese wajong puppet which she held in her hands, told us gaily the story of the prehistoric drama of Adjurnah.
La Presse, 18 March 1905
The door opened. A dark figure glided in, her arms folded upon her breast beneath a mass of flowers. For a few seconds she stood motionless, her eyes fixed upon the statue of Siva at the end of the room. Her olive skin blended with the curious jewels in their dead gold setting. A casque of worked gold upon her dark hair, she was enshrouded in various veils of delicate hues, symbolising chastity, beauty, youth, love, voluptuousness and passion.
The next dance was equally impressive. She stands before us a graceful young girl, a slendang – the veil worn by Javanese maidens – around her waist. In her hand she held a passion flower, and she dances to it with all the gladness of her sunny nature. But the flower was enchanted, and under its charm she loses command of herself and slowly unwinds the slendang. As the veil drops to the ground, consciousness returns. She is ashamed and covers her face with her hands.
Nothing inanimate will render the emotion conveyed by the performer, nor the colour and harmony of the Eastern figure. It was a tropical plant in all its freshness, transplanted to a Northern soil. The Parisians who witnessed the performance were struck with the unconscious art of the dancer, and with the intelligence and refinement she displayed. Miss Duncan is Vestal, but Lady MacLeod is Venus.
Frances Keyzer, Daily Mail, 1905
Miss Isadora Duncan reincarnated Greece. With the music of Beethoven, Schumann, Gluck and Mozart she restored the pagan dance movements. All Paris salons wanted to have Miss Duncan. Then, like everything on earth, she disappeared. She, her mother and her longhaired brother who accompanied her on the violin, went to conquer Berlin.
This season we have Mata Hari. She is Indian, with an English mother and a Dutch father, all of which is a little complicated. Yet she is Indian. Miss Duncan apparently danced with only her feet and arms showing, while Mata Hari is entirely naked, with only some jewels and a piece of cloth around her hips and legs. She is charming – a rather big mouth, and a pair of breasts which make many a spectator, too heavily provided for comfort, sigh with envy.
La Vie Parisienne, April 1905
At the salon of Emma Calvé, the dances of Mata Hari are not of a moving or impressive interest or perfection. However, although Mata Hari dances in the nude, do not believe that her dancing is indecent or that the sight of the beautiful Indian woman might provoke inappropriate thoughts – even though she danced naked from head to foot, with big eyes, and with a smiling mouth that is set into her face like a cut in the flesh of a ripe apple.
Écho de Paris, 1905
I have seen her dance at Emma Calvé‘s. She hardly danced in the real sense at all. She arrived fairly naked at her recitals, and with graceful movements and downcast eyes shed her clothes, and would then disappear enveloped in her veils. She even appeared at a Hindu fête in a garden, bare under a great June sun, riding a big white horse, richly caparisoned with saddlery encrusted with real turquoises. Her skin amber by night, seemed mauve by daylight, but patchy from artificial dyeing. She moved her long, thin and proud body as Paris has never seen one moved before. Paris swallowed her, and raved about her chaste nudity, retelling anecdotes that Mata Hari had uttered about her hot Asiatic past. She was invited everywhere, men fought to pay her way.
Colette, Figaro, December 1923
PART II
11
Orient Express
On last Friday evening at 7:30 the new quick railway service between Paris and Constantinople, via Vienna and Giurgevo, came into operation. For the present it will be a bi-weekly service both ways, leaving Paris at half-past 7 p.m. on Tuesdays and Fridays; and the train will consist of three saloon carriages, fitted with 42 beds, a refreshment saloon, and a sufficient number of luggage vans, in which the luggage will be so arranged that it can be examined in the vans by the Customs officers at the frontier stations, thus avoiding the delay and annoyance unavoidable when the luggage has to be removed from the train. There will be no change of carriages between Paris and Giurgevo, and it is expected that the entire journey between Paris and Constantinople will be completed in about 75 hours.
The Times, October 1883
Georges Nagelmackers was a large man, close to six feet tall. His eyes were piercing. His large moustache, sideburns and massive, hoary beard were the fashion for men in the late Victorian era. Photographs show him wearing a thighlength frock coat of brushed fustian, and a double-breasted cream waistcoat. He carried a black polished cane and wore a high, silver-grey top hat.
Born in Liège in Belgium, a city built around its iron and steel works, he trained as an engineer. In his early twenties, his profession led him to the United States, where the
Americans were building the Union Pacific Railroad, the world’s first transcontinental railway. While Nagelmackers was there, he witnessed the completion of the final section through the Rockies between Omaha and Sacramento, thus linking the Pacific with the Atlantic.
Nagelmackers was greatly impressed by the efficiency of the rapidly expanding American railroad system. In particular, he admired the new sleeping cars used on long-distance trains, which were designed by George Pullman. The tables between the seats used by day in these cars were designed to be removed and the seats pulled towards each other, so that a kind of bed was formed. Curtains could be drawn along rods that ran along either side of the central aisle, making the whole carriage into a dormitory. By comparison, the European trains of the 1870s were like cattle trucks and Nagelmackers resolved to use Pullman’s example to create a brand new form of luxury travel.
On 4 October 1883, thirteen years after Nagelmackers’ trip to the United States, the newly christened Orient Express stood at Gare de l’Est, ready to begin its inaugural run. Nagelmackers had had posters advertising the new service displayed in London, Paris, Brussels and Vienna. In Constantinople, Nagelmackers had every poster emblazoned with the letters ‘O–E’, painted in the colours of the Ottoman Empire, thus engendering the idea that the new train linked Moslem Turkey and Christian Europe.
Gilt-edged invitation cards had been sent to the First Secretary of the Embassy in Paris for the Ottoman Empire, Belgium’s Minister of Public Works, the General Manager of the Belgian State Railways and the Chief Controller of the French Minister of Finance to attend the departure of the train. The first passengers would be a group of forty international diplomats, publicists and pressmen.
There were five coaches in total, each resting on two assemblies of four wheels placed at either end of the coach. These assemblies, called ‘bogies’, were a recent invention of Nagelmackers’. The four wheels of each bogie were arranged to cushion bumps and provide a much smoother ride. He boasted that passengers would now be able to shave safely at eighty kilometres per hour.
The rear coach was the fourgon, or baggage-wagon, which also carried provisions and other necessary stores. Next to the fourgon was the wagon-salon-restaurant car, half as long again as any other coach in the world, with crystal-clear windows that stretched along almost the entire length of the carriage. Each window had its own spring-loaded pull-down blind as well as a set of pleated damask curtains.
The whole of the interior of the dining-parlour-car was panelled in oak and maple. The edges of the panelling, doors and door arches were decorated with scrolls and curlicues. In each corner was a swag of gilded flowers, set against geometric designs carved into the wood. Net racks, for hats and small items of luggage, ran the length of the coach and were supported by ironwork brackets. All doorknobs, window-catches and handles were made of brass.
At one end was a small parlour for women. Adjacent to this was a ‘snug’ – a smoking room with easy chairs for gentlemen. This snug could, if necessary, be cleared and fitted with tables and chairs to accommodate an extra number of dining passengers.
The dining room proper had tables for four running along the whole of one side of the carriage and smaller tables, set for two, along the other. Each was spread with a white cloth and the napkins were folded into shapes of birds and butterflies. On every table were two cut-glass decanters filled with burgundy wine and a vase of fresh, brightly coloured flowers.
The silver cutlery and crystal wine glasses on each table reflected the bright light given off by gas-lamps fixed to the sides of the carriage. Each of these lamps, made by Pintsch, had eight gas-jets, which were fed by cylinders hanging beneath the coach, between the bogies. These lamps had been designed to imitate the crystal-and-gilt chandeliers of the Paris salons.
All chairs were free-moving and upholstered in dark, embossed leather, with brass studs the size of doubloons running along the edges of the mahogany frames. These chairs stood on wall-to-wall carpeting, which was dark red.
Next came the two sleeping cars. These were both as long as the dining car and contained two-berth, three-berth and one or two four-berth compartments. The lower berths were fixed and doubled as sofas during the day. The upper berths were lowered at night, using a hinge system that Nagelmackers had designed. The underside of the upper berths were panelled in oak so that, when fixed to the wall, they matched the rest of the oak interior. Each compartment window had heavy damask curtains, which matched those in the dining car.
A dark leather armchair was placed by each window, with just enough space to allow for the swing of the wardrobe doors, on the inside of which were mounted full-length mirrors. Above each berth, another Pintsch gas-lamp and a small counter-top were placed within easy reach. A glass and water jug rested on the counter-top.
Separating the sleeping cars from the engine was another fourgon, in which the mail was carried. Nagelmackers had secured the monopoly on mail-carrying over the distance from Paris to Constantinople and the fees his company received from the participating governments were a sizeable offset to the overall running costs.
The locomotive itself was the latest design, called an ‘EST 24-0’. Above the actual furnace was a brass steam-dome and a tall stove-pipe chimney, which was flared to allow steam to escape easily and so avoid super-heating in the pipes. Along its sides ran the control-rods, levers and linkage. Below these were the exterior cylinders and brass-rimmed wheelsplashers. The cab had a roof, but it was too small to afford any real protection. The driver and fireman could only keep warm if they stood close up against the firebox.
On the outside of each of the five coaches, painted along the top, was the name of Nagelmackers’ dream: Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens.
12
Vienna, 1906
The Orient Express left Gare de l’Est promptly at 7:30 p.m. on a cold Tuesday evening in December. The whistle blew and echoed around the station where Mata Hari had arrived from Amsterdam three years previously. She sat in her compartment, facing the window, and looked out as the spectators on the platform slid past. All wore long, dark overcoats. Some had brought their children to watch the departure. Two or three people waved sadly as the train pulled out of the station, then the platform ran out and all she could see were the street lights shining along the diverging tracks and dark walls looming.
Out of a small wooden box she took a gilt clock and placed it next to her bed. She put her lavender packet, soap, masque de boue, powder puff and rouge stick next to it. Under her bed, she placed her Chubb safe-box and jewellery case. She sorted through her trunks, hanging dresses in the wardrobe and her dressing gown on a hook behind the door. On the bed, she laid out three dresses to choose from for her evening in the dining car.
Just before nine o’clock, she entered the dining car wearing a sateen dress the colour of magnolias, and a matching hat and boa. A waiter showed her to a table. As she followed him, Mata Hari scanned the dining car: nearly all men, sombrely dressed and deep in discussion. Only two women. She hoped she wasn’t going to have a dull evening. The waiter pointed to a seat at a table where two men were already eating. They put down their knives and forks and stood up. The man next to her was small, but stocky. The other was much taller and more handsome. As she took off her hat, they both nodded to her and smiled.
‘Enchanté,’ the taller one said.
‘Good evening,’ she smiled back. ‘May I sit here?’
‘Of course. Allow me to introduce myself,’ he said. ‘Oleg Jankovsky. And this is my friend Pierre Nozière.’ He pointed.
‘I’m Mata Hari,’ she said and sat down.
As he sat down, Nozière looked surprised. ‘The dancer?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Very honoured to meet you, madame.’
‘Thank you.’ She settled in her seat and smoothed down the front of her dress.
‘Are you travelling for a performance by any chance?’ Nozière continued.
‘Oh,’ Nozière said.
‘If there’s anything I can do to make your passage as agreeable as possible, please don’t hesitate to ask,’ said Jankovsky.
‘You’re very kind.’ The train swayed slightly, making the glasses on their table clink together.
‘Wine?’ Jankovsky held up the bottle of red.
‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘I hardly ever drink.’
‘Because of your profession?’ Jankovsky inquired.
‘Yes. I have to treat my body with care.’
Jankovsky smiled. ‘I’m sure you treat your body with the utmost care,’ he said and filled his own glass.
The lights in the dining car suddenly dimmed, hiding the faint smile on her face. White shirt fronts and the gold finishings in the carriage stood out in the gloom before the lights flicked back on. The waiter appeared. She looked briefly at the menu.
‘The lamb is very good,’ Nozière said.
She followed his advice and ordered the lamb. The waiter nodded and left. ‘Are you gentlemen travelling on business?’ she asked.
Jankovsky spoke first. ‘I’m an industrialist. My firm has an office in Stuttgart, where I have some business. And Pierre here is taking a holiday in Buda-Pest.’
Nozière smiled. ‘I’ve never been,’ he said.
‘I hear it is like Paris, but without the trees,’ she said.
‘I was telling Pierre that the Gellert Hotel spas are excellent. They keep one bath at thirty-four degrees and another at thirty degrees. You alternate between the two, then every once in a while, you plunge into the bain froid.’
‘That sounds wonderful,’ she said.
Jankovsky was looking at her. ‘It’s very invigorating.’ He picked up his glass and drank the wine in one gulp.
The Red Dancer Page 7