by Pat Shipman
Between March 9 and 12, Mata Hari sent an undated note to Bouchardon, asking to postpone her questioning until Monday, as she was too ill to get out of bed. On the twelfth, in the presence of Mata Hari, Bouchardon examined the contents of various sealed packages taken from her hotel room. There was little of interest, save a large number of calling cards belonging to various officers, letters from various lovers, others from Vadime, Anna, and van der Capellan, clothing, and some jewelry. Bouchardon asked her if she had returned to Germany during the war, and Mata Hari answered firmly: “No, I absolutely did not.”
Bouchardon sent police to undertake questioning of the fifty-three men whose cards or letters were found in Mata Hari’s possession. They agreed universally that Mata Hari was a charming and lovely companion, that they had initiated the contact with her and not vice versa, and that she had never asked them about anything that could be construed as military information. Many were embarrassed at being questioned by the police, because they were married, and begged that their name be kept out of the court proceedings.
On March 16, Clunet again wrote a respectful letter to Bouchardon, regretting that his own poor health had not permitted him to visit his client or her interrogator. He continued, mildly, “I receive pitiful letters from Mata-Hari. She is in a pathological state of anxiety; she coughs up blood and feels her life is in danger. Excuse me for insisting, but it would be a minor inconvenience to grant a hospital room to this sick one who poses no risk of flight. It would be common humanity to arrange this.”
Coughing up blood is a classic sign of tuberculosis, which was probably rampant in Saint-Lazare. Though this symptom had been mentioned in various reports and letters, no one seemed to take this alarming development seriously.
Isolated by then for more than a month in her dirty, dank cell, Mata Hari wrote again to Bouchardon, saying pathetically, “I cried from fear in the night and no one could hear me. Take pity on me. The shock has upset me so much that I no longer feel myself. I think I am going mad. I beg you not to leave me locked up in this cell.”
The military governor of Paris rejected a plea for provisional liberty for Mata Hari again on March 16. Under the impression that a request for hospitalization (not provisional liberty) had been refused, Clunet wrote Bouchardon again on the twenty-first, asking for a second medical opinion. Mata Hari was spitting up blood, coughing, and wasting away; she was “physiologically depressed,” and, Clunet noted, such problems could ruin her constitution bit by bit.
Mata Hari wrote a pleading letter to the military governor of Paris on March 23, repeating her request for provisional liberty and asserting that she had never spied against France. Clunet petitioned through Bouchardon once again, pointing out that her already long imprisonment and investigation had not established any point of her guilt. His letter had no effect.
The terse second opinion as to the state of Mata Hari’s health, signed March 26, pronounced it “satisfactory.”
Bouchardon carried on questioning the men whose calling cards he found in her belongings—fruitlessly—hoping one would admit to some action on her part that smelled of espionage. He also took a formal deposition from Georges Ladoux, the man who enticed Mata Hari into agreeing to become a spy in the first place.
Ladoux’s testimony was openly self-serving. His battle for control over the Deuxième Bureau (within the larger Cinquième Bureau) and his fights to make espionage its special purview and himself its supreme chief were for nothing if he did not bend the facts to his advantage. One tactic he employed was using the passive voice in his deposition, so that nothing that had happened appeared to have been his idea or action.
His testimony emphasized that Mata Hari had had many affairs with officers, “without regard to their rank, from all armies, of all ages and nationalities,” as if her sexual behavior were direct evidence of espionage. He stated that in June 1916, his agents in Spain notified the Sûreté and the Prefecture of Police of Mata Hari’s intended return, so a surveillance operation “was organized” that tailed her in Spain and followed her to Paris. The most he could truthfully claim for the surveillance was that it continued until the end of August. He exaggerated considerably when he said that it revealed a “number of indications of her indiscreet curiosity, but no proof that she worked for the German intelligence service.” He continued:
It was very shortly evident that MacLeod was in the service of our enemies, but it was necessary to prove it, and for this it was necessary that MacLeod spent a long time in Spain where our intelligence service is particularly well organized.
After the voyage to England and Holland was interrupted, she acted like a good agent and went to place herself at the disposition of the German military attaché in Madrid. This put the proofs of MacLeod’s guilt into the hands of the head of the army and he could place her under arrest a few days after her return to Paris.
…In case it should seem to you that the documents of a particularly secret nature to which these proofs refer are indispensable to your interrogation, you would have to ask for permission from the Minister of War who alone could authorize their release.
Ladoux’s performance was masterfully persuasive. He produced not one piece of solid, verifiable evidence of Mata Hari’s guilt; he did not even allude to any particular information or event. He referred vaguely to information in unseen, highly secret documents. Without taking either credit or blame, Ladoux mentioned his questionable tactic of recruiting a widely recognized celebrity, who was suspected of being an enemy agent, to spy for France—and made this action appear to be a masterstroke of counterespionage.
Like Bouchardon, Ladoux believed firmly that Mata Hari was guilty because she slept with many men and traveled widely in wartime. Such a woman must be a spy. And, from his perspective, someone—someone he had been seen to catch—needed to be a spy.
Frustrated by the lack of incriminating evidence, Bouchardon continued searching. He did not call Mata Hari into his tiny office for questioning again until April 12. She was left to go mad in her cell. Bouchardon felt his plan was working.
Mata Hari was deteriorating daily from the harsh conditions of her imprisonment, from his relentless pursuit of evidence against her, from his merciless grinding of her world and her celebrity into dust.
18
Suffering
CLUNET MAY HAVE BEEN INEFFECTUAL and Mata Hari highly distressed, but she was still intelligent. She could not send letters to anyone she chose because Bouchardon intercepted and monitored them closely, but she tried to notify her consulate. The French were in an awkward diplomatic situation, as they were holding a citizen of a neutral county in prison on suspicion of a serious charge and they had yet to notify her embassy. They had also forbidden Clunet to notify the Dutch embassy, arguing it was a matter of state security.
Six weeks after Mata Hari’s arrest, on March 26, she wrote a letter to Count Limberg-Styrum, the secretary of the Dutch legation in Paris, and to Dutch consul Bunge telling them of her arrest and begging them for help. She also asked that they notify her servant, Anna, so she might in turn notify Baron van der Capellan. Bouchardon pondered what to do with the letter and sought advice from others, including the minister of war and Jules Cambon, one of Mata Hari’s former lovers who was then the secretary-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Far from having a sympathetic view of her plight, Cambon was concerned chiefly with preventing scandal or interference: “After studying the question, I believe we cannot prevent the accused from addressing an appeal to a representative of her country. [If we did that], when the situation of the Dutch woman is finally known, we would have exposed ourselves to claims by the legation of the Netherlands and from the Dutch government.”
Cambon proposed two possible solutions to the dilemma. First, they might send the letter to the Dutch minister, Ridder van Stuers, letting him know verbally that Mata Hari was guilty of espionage. Van Stuers was not the appropriate person to handle such an affair, but he might be able to exert a subtle and h
elpful influence in persuading the Dutch to do nothing on her behalf. Alternatively, they might suggest to Mata Hari that she address the minister instead of the Dutch consul, thus ensuring a delay while the information was forwarded. Cambon also cunningly suggested sending the letter by regular post, not diplomatic courier. In the end, they decided to misdirect the letter rather than send it to Bunge, whom Bouchardon suspected of somehow being involved with Mata Hari’s unproven espionage. It did not arrive on Bunge’s desk until April 22, almost a month after it had been written.
Mata Hari knew nothing of these discussions. On April 6 she wrote again to Bouchardon:
I beg you, stop making me suffer in this prison. I am so weakened by this system and [confinement to] the cell is driving me mad. I have never carried out any espionage in France and I have nothing bad in my luggage, neither in my bottles nor in my safety deposit box. Give me provisional liberty, then you can search [for evidence], but do not torture me here. I am a dancer, you cannot expect that I think and laugh calmly as before. Stop, I entreat you. I will not abuse [your kindness].
Another appeal for provisional liberty for Mata Hari was rejected on April 10. By April 11, van der Capellan had become seriously worried about his “little kitten,” asking the Dutch foreign minister, Loudon, to have inquiries made. Loudon sent a telegram to Consul Bunge in Paris and received a leisurely reply saying that they had been notified that Mata Hari had been arrested on a charge of espionage and was in Saint-Lazare.
When interrogation began again on April 12, Mata Hari was in worse psychological shape than ever. Bouchardon no longer listened quietly while she told him stories of her life; he questioned aggressively. He began by asking her if she had not already been a German spy when she presented herself at 282, boulevard Saint-Germain, offering to become a French spy. As if he had genuinely misunderstood her previous testimony, she simply corrected him, saying that she went to the office to obtain her permit for Vittel.
Bouchardon challenged her sternly: “Our question should not surprise you. Have you not told us yourself that you were an international woman and haven’t you acknowledged that there was a time before the war when you were in Berlin and had intimate relations with Lieutenant Alfred Kiepert of the 11th Hussars of Crefeld, with Captain Lieutenant Kuntze, chief of the seaplane station, and with the chief of police Griebel?”
The phrase “an international woman” had an implication at that time that it does not today. An international woman was a worldly woman, a cosmopolitan woman, and by extension, a woman of loose morals. In Bouchardon’s eyes, Mata Hari’s labeling herself an international woman only reinforced his low opinion of her.
Mata Hari saw things rather differently. “The fact that I had relations with these people does not imply at all that I committed espionage. I never did anything for Germany nor for any country except France. In my profession as a dancer, I could easily have relations with the important men of Berlin, without any mental reservations that you would later suspect something. Besides, it is I who gave you their names.”
By providing the names of her important lovers, Mata Hari felt she was being cooperative and open—unlike a spy. Bouchardon saw her “cooperation” as a further sign of her moral depravity.
He pressed her on the subject of her funds, and she explained that the baron had sent her five thousand francs through the Dutch consul in Paris, so she would have money for her trip. This was not payment for espionage. “I assure you,” she said innocently and doubtless truthfully, “that I had nothing in my safety deposit box in Paris. I had eaten up all that I had.” She offered to authorize Bouchardon to open her box, not knowing that he had already taken steps to do so. He also quizzed her about the potions and lotions in her traveling bag, not yet having received the chemist’s report on them.
After the interrogation was finished, she wrote him another letter, begging to have her toilet articles returned to her because, as he could verify, there was nothing suspect in them.
I am very astonished and saddened that you have refused my provisional liberty.
I am not abused, but the conditions under which I must live here are…so dirty that I do not know how I can bear them. Realize that I am quite a different sort of woman than those around me and yet I am treated like them. I beg of you, review this decision and permit me to live outside of prison. It is not very difficult and I will make no trouble.
Also I beg you in the name of humanity, send the letter I have written to Captain de Massloff. Do not leave him in uncertainty. Do not make him suffer needlessly.
Her toilet articles, including her medicines, were inventoried and placed in the warehouse. Alone in her cell, increasingly desperate, ill, and disoriented, Mata Hari began to write to Bouchardon frequently. Unlike the purported transcripts of her testimony, which frequently sound stilted, these letters are full of personality, emotion, and urgency. It was as if she was having a mental conversation with Bouchardon, arguing her points, emphasizing her innocence over and over, and perhaps explaining too much. On April 13 she wrote, emphasizing that it was not her choice to go to Spain after her arrest in England, that she had taken up with Kalle to fulfill her mission, and that she had written to Ladoux about the information she had gleaned immediately and soon also passed the information to Denvignes. Having sensed Bouchardon’s disapproval of her various liaisons, she added,
As for the three officers about whom you spoke to me yesterday Kiepert, Kuntze, and Griebel. Do you understand that I knew them in February or March of 1914, well before the war? when I was in Berlin to prepare for my engagement at the Metropol Theater where I had signed for six months?
Never did I hear from them again. What wrong is there in that? Have I told you that, after war was declared (my engagement at the theater was canceled), I filed a lawsuit against a couturier in Berlin? and that I had lost the suit in two instances by default [failure to appear]? The proofs of this suit can be found in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at The Hague and in the office of my attorney, Maître Hijmans (in The Hague)….
Also, in Berlin they seized my magnificent furs which were worth from sixty to eighty thousand francs [approximately $250,000 in modern currency]! Perhaps I will never be able to buy their like again. You see, my captain, that my relations with Germany were not very happy and the only way I could save…my jewels and my money was by the intervention of my government and an attorney. Because the appeals were not yet lost, I did not know in which bank my possessions were held. This judgment [against me] could not be enforced outside of Germany but if I traveled there, I risked my trunks being seized and it was for this reason that I did not follow the advice or the wish of Captain Ladoux who wanted me to go to Holland in November by Switzerland and Germany.
Later the same day, she wrote to him again, repeating her points.
Like a moth throwing itself against a lighted window, Mata Hari continued to beat herself against the unyielding, unresponsive Bouchardon. She wrote letter after letter, furiously explaining her motives and actions, trying to break through to some core of humanity within him. But there was no mercy for her, no pity.
Clunet also forwarded a letter to Bouchardon from Mata Hari, an undated one marked only “Sunday”: “I have asked you to let me have a little bit of money and you have given me nothing. You know here I am refused necessary items and even stamps for letters to Maître Clunet. Please do not leave me like this, I beg you. It has been already four days.” Bouchardon dutifully allowed her to have one hundred francs of her own money but gave her no written answer. He simply left her brooding frenzy to grow.
Clunet forwarded to Bouchardon another letter from Mata Hari, written on April 17, which repeated the same points as her earlier letters. Then she wrote another note detailing some dates and places of residence she felt she had forgotten to mention. Soon there was yet another letter with more details, ending with another pitiful entreaty:
I am very grateful that you let me have a few underclothes, but I have neither toothpaste no
r mouthwash.
I beg you again to let me have my freedom. I will give you all the explanations as well in freedom as in this horrible prison, where I am so uselessly humiliated.
Mata Hari was losing her pride and begging for any scrap of improvement in her dire situation. Bouchardon redoubled his efforts to prove her guilty as her breakdown proceeded; frustratingly, he had yet to find any solid evidence.
On April 23, Clunet, who was a mild and gentlemanly character, wrote Bouchardon a very stern letter demanding Mata Hari’s release.
I must insist most energetically of you that the questioning of my client must come to an end. It has been two months since she was imprisoned in Saint-Lazare under suspicion of espionage.
No proof has been furnished against her that supports this indictment. It is not possible any longer to maintain such a state of things against this unhappy woman, or at least it is necessary to give her provisional liberty. The accusation came from the Minister of War, so it is this department which is obliged to produce some proof immediately. It would be unjust and cruel to prolong this situation.
All Clunet’s letter accomplished was to increase the pressure on Bouchardon.
At about this time, the Dutch consul in Paris, Bunge, learned of Mata Hari’s arrest and imprisonment, as did her longtime lover, Baron van der Capellan, and her servant, Anna Lintjens. Both Lintjens and van der Capellan could have verified much of Mata Hari’s testimony about travel dates and finances, but they were never contacted by Bouchardon, nor could they write to Mata Hari directly.