by Pat Shipman
At irregular intervals from February 15 onward, Bouchardon called Mata Hari in for questioning. She had begun to appreciate that the charges against her were very serious, yet she could not believe that she would be convicted, since she was innocent. At this interview, she again renounced legal help, signing a statement that read: “I expressly renounce, for the present interrogation, all of the formalities of the law which concern the assistance of legal counsel and the benefit of procedures at his disposition.”
Prodded by Bouchardon, she began to recount the story of her life during the interview, piece by piece. Typically, she changed some of the details to cast herself in a better light. For example, she said Rudolf divorced her not because of adultery and her immoral life—the real charges—but because she had “abandoned the conjugal home.” She made some of her relationships of longer duration than was true, skipping over periods when she was earning a living by much shorter affairs or borderline prostitution. She bragged of the large fees she received as a dancer at the top theaters of Europe. She was very vague about dates. She also mentioned her lover, Colonel van der Capellan, who maintained for her use a charming house in The Hague, thinking it would make her sound respectable.
At the end of the interview, she said:
I wish, for the rest of the questioning, that Maître Clunet, who is already occupied with my affairs, should be designated as my attorney. As for the rest, I ask you to permit me to have my linen dressing gown, which is indispensable to me. Finally, I am in Saint-Lazare under conditions that I cannot withstand and I ask that you have me examined from the point of view of health. I am suffering greatly and I need special care.
Bouchardon recorded grudgingly that “she had taken hold of herself again, and put up a good fight.” But he knew, as she perhaps did not yet, that this would be a fight to the finish. He was determined to win.
Accordingly, Mata Hari was examined by one of the prison doctors—Jules Socquet—two days after her arrest. He reported that she was
aged 40 years, tall, well-formed and seemingly vigorous. Because of the emotions caused by her arrest, she says, and the rules to which she was subjected since that day, she vomited blood that night. This frightening state is heightened by the fact that she finds herself in a cell that is dark and airless.
The cell where we visited her is spacious; the walls are padded, but it is aerated by only a single circular window with a grill measuring about 25 centimeters [less than 10 inches] in diameter, in the middle of which is an electric lamp.
At the time of our examination, we were able to verify that she was menstruating. The accused had no fever; her tongue was clean and not coated.
She was very emotional and nervous. Ascultation of her chest revealed no unusual sounds; it was the same with the sounds of the heart.
CONCLUSION: The accused Zelle is not actually suffering from any organic disease or complaint or fever. She can without any serious inconvenience withstand a regime of preventative detention. As soon as possible, as a measure of humanity, we suggest it would be necessary to change this cell for a lighter and more airy one.
On February 19 she was briefly admitted to the infirmary—a point that contradicts Socquet’s cheerful assessment of her health—and then moved from her first cell to a marginally better one. The latter can be imagined from the name of that section of the prison: La Ménagerie. Desperate women, rats, fleas, and lice were the inhabitants of this dreadful zoo.
She was left to sit in her cell until February 21, when she was called in for more questioning. Maître Clunet was present but not very effectual. Bouchardon later described him as “an old and somewhat naïve admirer of the dancer…. He carries out his defense of his client with an ardor of a neophyte and he has a tenderness toward her that I cannot explain to myself, for he knows that at the outbreak of war, the accused was in Berlin itself, the mistress of two officers and of the chief of police. It was Madame Zelle herself who told him this.”
Bouchardon made a considerable error in this statement, describing Griebel as “the” chief of police rather than “a” chief of police. But errors aside, his real point was valid: Clunet had never handled a client accused of espionage before and had little idea how to proceed.
In this interview, she described returning to Paris from The Hague to collect her personal belongings from her house at Neuilly that had been put into storage early in the war. She needed certain toilette articles, she explained, that were not available in the Netherlands. For the first time, her love affair with Vadime came into the official record. They met in July of 1916 and “it was a grand love on both sides,” she confided to the cold-eyed Bouchardon.
Bouchardon never believed that Mata Hari was in love with Vadime or anyone else, except herself and her sensuous pleasures. He wrote:
Already the official mistress of Colonel van der Capellan, of the Dutch army, she was also the mistress of the Belgian commandant the marquis de Beaufort and of the Russian Captain de Massloff, who presented her as his fiancée and for whom she played the comedy of great love. This triple liaison did not stop her from having fleeting relations with one Montegrin officer, one Italian, two Irish, three or four English and five French officers. Far from being ashamed, she flattered herself about it. “I love officers,” she declared; “I have loved them all my life. I would rather be the mistress of a poor officer than a rich banker. My greatest pleasure is to go to bed with them without thinking of money, and then, I like to make comparisons among the different nationalities.”
In Bouchardon’s view, Mata Hari was not only a whore but, worse yet, an unashamed whore. He viewed with great skepticism her claim that she applied for a permit to visit Vittel because of her love for Vadime. It was that application that had ensnared her in the tangle of espionage because it took her to 282, boulevard Saint-Germain: the home of the Deuxième Bureau and Georges Ladoux. It was Ladoux who suggested she spy for France, she told Bouchard, reciting their conversation, and it was he who gave her the permit to go to Vittel. Everything was Ladoux’s fault.
Convinced she had almost talked her way out of the charge of espionage, Mata Hari returned to her cell. Shortly she wrote a letter to Bouchardon that is surprising and pathetically amusing in its naïveté.
I again ask for my provisional liberty from the military governor of Paris. I beg you, please help me to obtain it. You see that neither my trunks nor my letters contain anything improper and never, never, have I done the slightest thing like espionage against you. I suffer too much. Until I am freed, I beg you for the following:
1. My couturier Madame Chartier, 5, rue Delambre, has at her shop a cloak of white cloth, decorated with black fox. I have 25 or 30 francs yet to pay her for a small repair to it. Could you get this garment and pay her 50 francs?
2. The chambermaid of the first floor of the Elysée Palace Hotel must have received my lingerie back from the laundress. There are 5 or 6 francs to pay. Would you please go look for this?
3. Would you ask the agents who searched my rooms what they have done with my toilet articles and my gold earrings, the large Portuguese rings, which were found in the drawer to the right of my dressing table.
4. Madame Dalodier, milliner, 14, rue Duphot, for my boa with white plumes. There are 15 francs left to pay.
Would you like to arrange all this. I would be grateful.
And then there is something close to my heart. It is the permission to go see my fiancé Captain de Massloff. I cannot find words to ask you for more.
I have never—never—done anything bad toward you.
Give me my freedom.
This may have been the only time in history that an accused spy asked her interrogator to collect and pay for her laundry and personal possessions. These requests clearly display Mata Hari’s implicit assumption that she was innocent and that a man would do almost anything for her. Doubtless she felt it entirely reasonable to ask Bouchardon to perform these errands, if he insisted on imprisoning her. Astonishingly, Bouchardon ord
ered a police inspector, Curnier, to carry out her demeaning requests and pay these bills. Curnier even put in for reimbursement for the taxi he took while on these errands.
At Bouchardon’s request, the police continued to intercept Mata Hari’s mail. By February 23, they had collected three postcards and two letters from Vadime to Mata Hari. February 12 Vadime wrote to tell her he was in the hospital at Epernay for an operation on his throat—the aftermath of being gassed—and begging her to come visit him. On the thirteenth, he wrote again.
Dearest Marina,
For five days I have been in hospital at Epernay (Hospital Marguerite). You would not believe how this life brings me down. I need so much to have you close to me to whisper words of love in my ear until my heart is full. Alas the distance that separates us obliges me to do nothing except think of you. I visit you in dreams that are so strong that I forget it is only a dream and I am seized by a sudden foolish thought that I wish to embrace you, I open my arms and suddenly the vision disappears leaving me saddened. In these painful moments your photograph, which never leaves me even on the day of battle, is a sweet consolation.
I have already expedited a letter to ask you if it is possible for you to visit me. What would it take for you to do it? Please upon receipt of this, telegraph me your response. Epernay is a small city where you will not need to bring all of your trunks, because you could come only for three or four days.
My kisses and thoughts. I cover your splendid body with kisses.
The next letter, undated, says that he has been evacuated to a hospital in Paris. On the eighteenth, Vadime wrote again “completely astonished by your silence.” He awaited her visit impatiently, not knowing she had been arrested. These letters and cards leave no doubt that Vadime was still deeply in love with Mata Hari in February, despite the warning and admonitions of his commander. She never received his letters, of course, because Bouchardon would not allow her to see them.
In addition to his surgery, Vadime also contracted diphtheria and spent most of February and March in the hospital. He was desperate to see his lover again. In March, he was well enough to be granted three days’ leave in Paris, but he could not find Mata Hari at the last hotel where she stayed. No one told him what had happened to her. What he must have thought of her disappearance can only be imagined.
Months later, after Mata Hari’s arrest had become public knowledge, Vadime was questioned in the hospital in Rennes. Then he testified that he had intended to end their relationship during the visit in March, though his ardent letters in February suggest quite the opposite. The statement seems an attempt to distance himself from her. At least he had the courage to say that she never asked him about anything military. He had been astonished to hear of her arrest. Vadime swore, “She asked me simply what part of the front I found myself on, so that she might follow in the newspapers where the Russian troops, of which I was a part, were being tested…. In the course of my relations with her, I never saw anything that was suspect from that [espionage] point of view. I had a lengthy correspondence with her, she never asked me for any military information.” Vadime turned their intimate correspondence over to the officers who had come to question him. He did not testify at her trial.
On February 23, Bouchardon received reports that nothing incriminating had been found among Mata Hari’s possessions that had been seized and placed under seal. The jewels and money from her safety deposit box were turned over to the court clerk, whom Mata Hari had to beg for small sums of money for incidentals such as postage or cigarettes. Bouchardon ordered an analysis of the substances—soaps, creams, makeup, perfumes, and the like—in her traveling bag, hoping one would be revealed as invisible ink. Inquiries sent to banks all over Paris kept coming back with negative results: not one had an account or safety deposit box in Mata Hari’s name with a suspiciously large quantity of money in it.
Frustrated, Bouchardon called Mata Hari in for interrogation again on February 24. He focused on the period immediately following her invitation to spy from Ladoux. Mata Hari told Bouchardon that, even as Ladoux was trying to persuade her to enlist as a spy for France, he strangely accused her of being German spy AF44—yet he sent her on a mission for France. She recounted her bizarre arrest at Falmouth, England, where she was mistaken for Clara Benedix; this had happened only about six months earlier. She did not know Ladoux had denied knowledge of her to the British, but Ladoux’s manipulations were visible at every crucial step in her case. The flimsy web constructed of unproven guilt somehow grew thicker.
On February 26 the petition to give Mata Hari provisional liberty, as there was no solid evidence of espionage, had been denied; written in bold hand across it was “rejet”—reject.
On February 28 Bouchardon questioned Mata Hari again, and she described her affair with Kalle, the German major whom she seduced in Madrid trying to fulfill her mission for Ladoux. Being Mata Hari and impressed by titles, she referred to him as von Kalle to indicate aristocracy. No one in France ever seemed to notice this inflation. Her account offered interesting insight into her wiles but little solid information. Kalle suspected that Mata Hari was a spy; she suspected that he might be; each tried to get information out of the other. It was from Kalle that Mata Hari learned that the Germans could read the French ciphers and could decode all their messages. When she gleaned useful information—and broken codes were of great importance—she had no means of communicating with Ladoux. This would be a fatal difficulty for any espionage agent and simply shows how ludicrous her entire “mission” was. Instead, she gave the information to Colonel Denvignes of the French embassy in Madrid. Denvignes was smitten with Mata Hari and, she foolishly thought, was placed highly enough that he could surely serve as a safe conduit for her secret information.
She was questioned again on March 1 and continued her story of naïveté and entrapment. She explained that Denvignes apparently satisfied his lust and then found it too embarrassing to be associated with Mata Hari.
By early March, Clunet had received several letters from Mata Hari pleading with him to help her. She found conditions in Saint-Lazare intolerable; she had written: “Please I beg you, ask Lieutenant Mornet, commissioner of the government: Why does he refuse me clean chemises from my lingerie for which I have asked him two times in fifteen days. I need them. Why oblige me to live in filth? What is the point of that?”
The tone of her letters was increasingly hysterical. Clunet was beginning to fear for her sanity. He wrote a very reasoned and almost genteel letter to Bouchardon asking for her to be given provisional liberty or, failing that, to be transferred to the prison hospital. His request had no effect, so he wrote a very similar letter on March 7, citing her high fever, chest complaint, and throat problems. This moved Bouchardon to request that Socquet assess her health once again.
Socquet’s report on March 10 was another masterpiece of pleasing Bouchardon. He noted that Mata Hari was in a better cell, better lit and more spacious than her previous cell, with a stove for heating.
At the time of the examination, we found the accused in bed complaining of a headache in the occipital region, a respiratory complaint, and a sore throat. She was in a very extreme state of nervousness and never stopped crying.
Upon examination, we found nothing in particular: the patient had no fever, no temperature, and ascultation of her chest revealed nothing abnormal; her tongue was clean and had no coating. In fact she was being treated by the physician of Saint-Lazare.
CONCLUSIONS: The woman Zelle, of a very nervous temperament, preoccupied with her situation as a defendant, is not currently suffering from anything serious.
The prolongation of her detention at Saint-Lazare, under the current conditions, is not likely to present any serious inconveniences.
Apparently the onset of a nervous breakdown was not considered “serious” by Socquet, in keeping with the general lack of recognition of mental illnesses at the time.
The treatment started by the prison doctor Bizard, mentioned i
ncidentally in this report, is of interest. In his writings, Bouchardon openly accused Mata Hari of having syphilis, a point that some previous biographers have regarded purely as a reflection of his disdain for her immoral life. But when the report on the substances in her traveling bag came in, one of them was a cream she had obtained on prescription in Madrid. It contained oxycyanide of mercury. Mata Hari unblushingly claimed it was a douche to prevent pregnancy. She had among her belongings another therapeutic lotion, obtained in Paris, that contained mercury bi-iodine and potassium iodine that she also claimed was spermicidal. Both potions were standard prescriptions for treating syphilitic sores at the time and were much used by prostitutes. Bizard also believed that she had syphilis, a diagnosis at which he was undoubtedly highly skilled because of his experience inspecting prostitutes.
These indications put Socquet’s assertions of Mata Hari’s health in a new light. Quite possibly, given the nature of the population imprisoned in Saint-Lazare, Socquet did not consider her having syphilis to be extraordinary, nor would it necessitate special treatment. He performed a pelvic examination of her shortly after her arrival, when she was menstruating. If her case was in remission, a common occurrence with syphilis, he may not have observed syphilitic sores or lesions upon her body.
Alternatively, Socquet may simply have glossed over Mata Hari’s symptoms because Bouchardon made it abundantly clear that he did not want her to be released on bail or imprisoned in a hospital room. The chemist Edouard Bayle, who analyzed the potions from her luggage (as well as her makeup, cold cream, perfumes, and other toiletries) declared that she might well have legitimate medical needs for these potions, which had been obtained by prescription. However, in his conclusion he observed that both potions could be diluted to make invisible ink. Of course, more common substances, including milk and lemon juice, can also be used as invisible ink. Bayle was clearly trying to produce an answer that would be useful in Mata Hari’s conviction.