by Pat Shipman
I am losing my sanity here. I told you what I believed on the first day. I say it again. A candid interview with Captain Ladoux will be enough.
What is the point of driving me insane in this cell where I lose my head and my word? I cannot bear it. I have done nothing that merits this and I beg you again, speak with Captain Ladoux, give me my liberty. I will go and never speak of what has happened here.
Tell him, I beg you.
She added under her signature:
Captain Ladoux was wrong to mistrust me. He wanted me to bring off something great, he wanted to rise high. If he wanted me to tell him all my plans at the beginning, he would have had to pay me in advance, as I asked.
Time would not have been wasted, and I swear to you that I alone would have given him such services that no other person ever will.
I was so in love with my lover, and this made me work with the illusion of being able to win what would be my only happiness, and that I believe still.
Mata Hari wrote a similar but more hysterically pitiful letter to Clunet on May 15. She alluded to blemishes or spots on her body.
The brusque change, the horrible food and the lack of cleanliness, these are the cause of the blemishes on my body. I grow more and more unhappy. I cannot stand this life. I would rather hang myself from the bars on my window than to live like this. I beg you, please speak to the investigating magistrate and tell him that he cannot degrade a woman used to cleanliness and care, from one day until the next, until she lives in dirty misery.
Where will it end?
Does he wish to kill me?
Must he kill me?
Or give me my liberty?
One day it will be too late, there will be nothing left to do. It is horrible, horrible. If you could see how I am forced to live here! It is shameful, shameful. Have pity on me, I beseech you.
Within a few days, she wrote another letter to Bouchardon. “That which I have feared for several days arrived last night. I have a fever in my head. You have made me suffer too much in this cell. I am completely mad. Do you wish to end it all? I am a woman, I cannot bear more than my strength.”
She was, at last, broken.
Bouchardon ordered Socquet to examine her once again. He pronounced that she was not actually suffering from any “serious physical affliction” but had “an extremely nervous temperament.” He added, in a matter-of-fact statement: “One does not observe in the Zelle woman any appreciable stigmata on the different parts of the body permitting a current diagnosis of progressive syphilis. She says she never had any vulvar lesion, eruptions on her body, nor plaques on her lips. Since her incarceration at Saint-Lazare, she has been following a treatment for syphilis.”
Socquet’s conclusion: no change in her condition since her last examination. She had syphilis, currently in remission, and was having a nervous breakdown, in modern terms, but she was not really ill.
Bouchardon had succeeded. Mata Hari was shattered in spirit, mind, and body. He interrogated her again on May 21. She opened the session with a statement: “I have decided today to tell you the truth. If I have not told everything before, it was because of certain doubts which I will explain.”
What she had been hiding from Bouchardon was that she had been visited by the honorary German consul, Karl Kroemer, in autumn of 1915, at her home in The Hague. Since Mata Hari had applied for a visa for France, he knew she was planning a trip there and asked if she might “render them a service” by gathering useful information in France, for which he would pay her 20,000 francs (roughly $61,000 today) in advance. With the extraordinary logic that made no sense to Bouchardon, Mata Hari explained that it was honest to accept this money and do nothing. It was, she felt, repayment for the valuable furs that the Germans had unfairly seized from her.
She had never mentioned this encounter to Ladoux, she told Bouchardon, because she had never done anything for Kroemer and astutely judged it wiser not to bring the matter up. Unfortunately, Ladoux was a less tractable spymaster than Kroemer and refused to give her any advance. When she was arrested in Falmouth, Ladoux did not come to her aid, nor did he respond to her letters. She was in Spain, with mounting bills and very few pesetas left, and Ladoux had abandoned her, so she turned to Kalle. She told Kalle that the French had tried to recruit her and offered him some useless information cobbled together from newspaper reports and gossip. She asked for ten thousand francs in payment and Kalle dutifully telegraphed Berlin for permission to pay H21. Berlin refused.
After a few more meetings, and some “great intimacies” performed in his office, he gave her 3,500 pesetas. She interpreted this as being a lover’s gift, like so many she had received from men previously. As for the payments received in Paris through the Dutch consulate, she was not sure from whom those had come. She had instructed Anna to ask the baron for money but, if that was impossible, to ask Kroemer.
Bouchardon seized the advantage, questioning her ferociously. “Whom have you served? Whom have you betrayed? France or Germany?” Her response, that she wanted to help France and hurt Germany, and had succeeded in both, barely registered on Bouchardon. He had at last cornered his quarry and brought her down. It remained only to complete the triumph.
At this interrogation, Bouchardon told Mata Hari that he had indeed questioned her old friend and lover Jean Hallaure, and that Hallaure had not supported her version of events. Like so many other former lovers, Hallaure had been at pains to downplay his affair with Mata Hari, remarking disdainfully that she “flirted not at all badly” and admitting that he had been her casual lover some years previously. He conceded that “Mata Hari never asked me questions about military matters.”
Hallaure had said he was surprised when she asked for his advice on getting a permit for Vittel because she seemed perfectly well to him. His remarks imply much but say nothing specific. Her request for advice occurred shortly after she had met Vadime and fallen in love—a turn of events unknown to Hallaure, who was annoyed at being put off when he called to see her. In fact, Hallaure reversed the story, saying he had broken off with her after being warned by a friend that being associated with her would hurt his career. During Hallaure’s second questioning on May 19, he emphasized that she had not seemed sick when she wanted to go to Vittel and that he had not sent her to 282, boulevard Saint-Germain, nor had the trip to Vittel been his idea.
Her response to the details of his testimony was to correct certain points—for example, she had never said he sent her to Vittel but only to 282, boulevard Saint-Germain. She could not refrain from adding that it was not gentlemanly of him to criticize her so cruelly considering their former relationship.
Making no effort to conceal his disgust, Bouchardon recited to her a list of the officers she had been with in Paris, with names and dates, accusing her of gathering much information from them that must have been of great interest to the Germans. Astonished that he so ill understood her nature, she replied frankly that she had a great fondness for officers and liked to have sex with them, confirming the worst Bouchardon had thought of her.
Mata Hari was doomed from this point on. Even with Ladoux’s doctored telegrams, Bouchardon did not have a strong case against her. The telegrams said that she was a German spy but did not even hint at any information she passed, and they contained peculiar inconsistencies. But with her confession of accepting money from the Germans, her conviction was assured.
20
The Lowest Circle of Hell
BOUCHARDON QUESTIONED MATA HARI again the next day, May 22, pressing her on details and hoping for still greater revelations. He opened by saying, “We have recorded your confession yesterday, but you can hardly expect us to believe that Kroemer gave you 20,000 francs point-blank, without demanding any proofs from you. The Germans give nothing for nothing, and the sums that Germany gives to its agents for travel expenses are very far from that much.”
Mata Hari’s response was to point out the obvious: “You cannot simply send a woman like me, who has a house and
lovers in Holland, without giving her anything.” However, that was precisely what Ladoux had done: sent her off without a franc in her pocket or a new dress on her back. The implied criticism of Ladoux’s shortsighted, penny-pinching ways became more pointed when Bouchardon brought Captain Ladoux into the office to help in the questioning.
Ladoux reaffirmed his earlier deposition and denied that Mata Hari had ever been “engaged” by him. As proof, he offered the assertion that she had never been assigned a number or been given money and a means of communication.
Mata Hari made a simple statement: “Captain Ladoux promised me, if I succeeded, one million [francs] as payment.” Ladoux denied this, saying he had only remarked that, if she could penetrate the German general headquarters and bring back information on the plans and operations of the German army, such information would be worth one million francs.
“The captain was more affirmative than that,” Mata Hari responded tartly.
The interrogation proceeded with this sort of twisting of facts, first one way and then the other. Mata Hari maintained that she was spying for France; Ladoux insisted it was all rather hypothetical, especially as he already suspected she was a German spy. Why had she not mentioned this relevant fact during their meetings? “I didn’t dare,” she replied. “Besides, I never considered myself a German agent with a number, because I never did anything for them.”
Ladoux countered, “One cannot give a mission to an agent unless one is certain of him. MacLeod was always suspect to me.” He added that he had asked her repeatedly to tell him everything she knew about German intelligence, but she had offered nothing.
“I said nothing to you because you didn’t want to pay me and because I didn’t feel obliged to give you my great secret.” Mata Hari’s annoyance with Ladoux’s petty concerns was palpable.
Confronting Ladoux gave Mata Hari none of the satisfaction she longed for. He altered every fact, every utterance in their interviews to present himself in a better light and her in a worse one. Nothing factual or new was established during the interrogation except that the differences in philosophical outlook between Mata Hari and Ladoux were underlined.
The most sinister and prophetic remark of the interview was made by Bouchardon: “We must make clear that, from our point of view, maintaining contact with the enemy is considered legally to be a crime equivalent to actually furnishing information to the enemy.”
And so it would prove.
In the remaining month of investigation and interrogation, Bouchardon never managed to identify the smallest shred of intelligence that Mata Hari had passed to the Germans. The overwhelmingly probable reason for this failure was that she had passed none. “The case was perfectly clear,” Bouchardon wrote in his memoirs. Having “broken” the case on May 21 by breaking the spirit and health of the accused, Bouchardon moved on with renewed vigor.
During the interrogation of May 23, he read her Denvignes’s deposition. Denvignes had been questioned about his relationship with Mata Hari and, in particular, whether she tried to pass information through him to Ladoux. As a married man and a colonel, Denvignes was anxious to protect himself for the sake of his marriage and his career. After giving a sanitized version of their meeting and his infatuation with her, he admitted that she had told him she was a spy for France and had poured out some information he found embarrassing and garbled. But he admitted he had urged her to return to Kalle’s embraces to gather more detailed information that would be of greater value to France. He said that when he reported her information, it was dismissed as being “already known,” though this reaction differed markedly from Ladoux’s astonishment when Mata Hari told him the same information.
Concluding this self-serving account of his relations with Mata Hari, Denvignes declared: “My absolute conviction is that MacLeod was in the service of German intelligence. Because of the surveillance of which she was the subject in Madrid, she could not hide her visits to Kalle from Captain Ladoux…she had to pretend that she was going to the German military attaché for us. Otherwise, she needed to give us the illusion of great zeal in order to avoid arrest when she returned to France.”
Since he had admitted that he told her to return to Kalle to gain more information, accusing her of pretending to go to Kalle for France was particularly hypocritical. This unsupported assertion that she was indeed a German spy was a heartless accusation coming from a man who had been embarrassingly besotted with Mata Hari in Madrid.
Mata Hari’s response, when Bouchardon read her Denvignes’s statement, was simply:
A man of Colonel Denvignes’s rank should not throw stones at a woman in trouble. All the more since he asked me to become his mistress, to which I responded that my heart was taken by a Russian captain who wanted to marry me. Nonetheless, he invited me to dine with him in Paris, gave me his address at the Hotel d’Orsay [so I could visit him there].
On the subject of his suppositions that I was part of German intelligence, I respond thus: it is completely ridiculous, if he had believed this idea, he would never have displayed himself in public with me in Madrid as he did. He kept a bouquet of violets and a ribbon of mine [as souvenirs].
Mata Hari was truly frightened at this point. She had confessed to accepting money from the Germans, offering the entirely plausible (to her) explanation that she viewed the money as nothing more than compensation for the seizure of her furs. She insisted that she had had no intention of spying for them. And yet, instead of recognizing her innocence and giving her freedom, Bouchardon treated her more than ever as a convicted spy. She began writing to him frantically again, explaining, excusing, trying to make him see the truth as she saw it. It was an impossible task.
On May 24, she wrote Ladoux one letter and Bouchardon two. She begged Ladoux to see her and vowed again that she had never acted against France. To Bouchardon, she wrote that she was now convinced it was Denvignes, not Ladoux, who had spoken to the commander of Vadime’s regiment about her, saying she was a dangerous adventuress. She wanted this mark of Denvignes’s jealousy noted in the file. She also repeated the story of Denvignes’s pursuit of her, his encouraging her to go again to Kalle to uncover more information, and his strange refusal to meet with her in Paris. She implied that Denvignes had betrayed and lied about her because she was in love with Vadime, not him. To her mind, this interpretation of events completely refuted his deposition. To Bouchardon’s way of thinking, she had underscored, yet again, her lack of morals.
In hindsight, Mata Hari’s sense that Denvignes was working against her might have been accurate. Three months after her execution, Denvignes was arrested for treason and imprisoned for four months of interrogation. He was acquitted in April 1918, but the acquittal was accompanied by a demotion, suggesting a lack of evidence rather than an affirmation of innocence. The arrest left a permanent stain on his career.
Hoping for more concrete evidence against Mata Hari, Bouchardon sent policemen to various shops that she frequented, to see if they were points at which she might have dropped off intelligence. He met with no success except for a list of her expensive purchases.
Bouchardon had Mata Hari brought in for questioning on May 30. She repeated many of the same accounts of her relationship with Denvignes, emphasizing his bitter jealousy. Cruelly, Bouchardon then produced Vadime’s deposition and allowed her to read his denial of their love. Shocked and bereft by this ultimate betrayal, Mata Hari answered simply: “I have nothing to say.” A moment later she added, “I am not guilty of the death of even one of our soldiers.”
She had nothing left. All of her lovers had abandoned her and lied about her, even Vadime. There was no future to look forward to, no vision of a happy life with her lover after she was acquitted. And she was beginning to believe, with an awful, deep-seated dread, that she would never be cleared of the charges against her.
Later that day, Ladoux met with Mata Hari, but she made no dent in his ironclad belief in her guilt and forthcoming conviction. He told her she would be shot
as a spy, unless she agreed to name her accomplices. She was terrified.
On May 31 she sent a letter to Bouchardon about her meeting with Ladoux and his threats. She had no accomplices and refused to invent one.
Captain Ladoux…understands nothing of my character….
Me, because of my travels, my foreign acquaintances, my manner of living, I see grand events and grand methods. For him, it is the opposite. He sees everything as petty and small…. He did not know how to use me. It was his fault, not mine….
Today, all around me, everything is collapsing, everyone renounces me, even he for whom I would have gone through fire. Never would I have believed in such human cowardice. I will defend myself and if I fall, it will be with a smile of profound contempt.
Desperate to clear herself and earn her freedom, she wrote Bouchardon a second letter on May 31, offering to tell him the details of German intelligence in France. Of course, she could not learn their current secrets as long as she remained in a cell at Saint-Lazare. If Ladoux gave her immediate liberty, she would provide the information he desired within a month. “You can menace me and make me suffer, but I cannot tell you what I do not know.”
Her grip on reality was loosening to a dangerous degree. Her long and hard imprisonment, her isolation, and the betrayal by Vadime had shattered her sense of who she was. Did she really believe there was any chance that Bouchardon and Ladoux would free her so that she could gather information about German intelligence for them? In her confused existence, in which lies became truths, and truths lies, this far-fetched possibility seemed as likely as anything else.
She continued to write to Bouchardon, repeating and repeating her points: she was innocent; Ladoux had suggested espionage to her, not she to him; France could have refused her reentry but did not, thereby indicating official approval of what she had been doing. Over and over she thrashed helplessly against the network of lies and misinterpretations that bound her as guilty.