Femme Fatale

by Pat Shipman

  Semprou declared the hearings closed, and the judges retired to consider their verdict. According to Massard, they deliberated for only forty-five minutes. Massard also claimed to have heard a Commander C—(not a member of the tribunal) remark while the judges were out of the room: “It is frightful to send to death a creature so seductive with such intelligence…. But she has caused such disasters that I would condemn her twelve times if I could!”

  They had eight charges to consider, the eight that Bouchardon had recommended for prosecution in his report.

  Had she entered the entrenched camp of Paris in December 1915? Yes. This point was uncontested. Since all of Paris was considered an “entrenched camp,” Mata Hari did enter the entrenched camp of Paris in December 1915—on a government-approved visa. The tribunal agreed unanimously. She was guilty.

  Had she given documents and information to Consul Kroemer while she was in The Hague, during the first six months of 1916? Six men voted yes although no evidence was produced that Mata Hari gave any documents or information to Kroemer. She was again guilty; one voted no.

  Had Mata Hari maintained contact or talked with Kroemer in May 1916? The judges—and Mata Hari in her testimony—concurred that she had indeed met with Kroemer in May of 1916. (Actually, she met with him in the autumn of 1915, though her memory was faulty on this point.) To demonstrate the breadth of this charge, contact was probably also maintained with Kroemer during May of 1916 by his butcher, baker, cook, and many other people wholly innocent of espionage. Mata Hari was again pronounced guilty.

  Had she returned to Paris in June of 1916 with the intention of obtaining information to aid the German cause? Again, each judge voted yes, as she clearly did return to Paris in June 1916. No evidence of Mata Hari’s intention was produced, but the charge was framed in such a way that the judges could not agree to the statement of fact (that she was in Paris in June of 1916) and disagree with the statement of intention. She was guilty again.

  Had she maintained contact with Germans while she was in Paris in 1916? Again, most voted yes, but one man still answered no, since the prosecution had produced no evidence of meetings, telegrams, or letters passing between Mata Hari and the Germans.

  Had she maintained contact with Germans, in the person of Kalle, while she was in Madrid in December of 1916 with the intention of furthering the aims of Germany? She admitted that she had been in Madrid in December and had met with Kalle. The second part of the charge was not separately supported by any evidence, and Mata Hari testified that her meetings were in the service of France. Nonetheless, she was considered guilty by unanimous vote.

  Had she passed “documents susceptible to damaging the operations of the army or of endangering the security of places, posts or other military establishments, said documents or information dealing in particular with interior politics, the spring offensive, the discovery by the French of the secret of German invisible ink, and the disclosure of the name of an agent in the service of England”? This was a complex charge.

  Yes, she gossiped with Kalle about Princess George of Greece, about political maneuverings in Paris, and about rumors of a spring offensive. Any of these topics were in the daily newspapers, and even Bouchardon and Mornet, who were totally convinced of Mata Hari’s evil intentions, could not support the accusation that she had passed vital details along on any of these matters. What precisely was meant by the part of the charge that dealt with invisible ink is mysterious; Mata Hari had reported to Denvignes information from Kalle that German agents carried invisible ink in crystals under their fingernails, but this hardly constituted passing information to Kalle. Ladoux claimed he had told her that the French had discovered how to reveal all invisible inks used by the Germans, but this discovery occurred after she had left Spain, so she cannot have passed Kalle that information. The last part of the charge implies that Mata Hari revealed the identity of an Allied agent to the Germans. On her voyage on the Hollandia, she had been told by the captain that a Belgian couple on the ship named Allard were spies. He worked for England, she for Germany, was the shipboard gossip. She repeated this story to an Allied agent in Madrid and to Kalle. And so, on this charge also, she was judged to be guilty by six members of the tribunal, innocent by one.

  The final charge was that in January 1917 Mata Hari had maintained contact with Germans in Paris. No meetings were observed during her extensive surveillance, nor were there letters, phone calls, or telegrams. Nonetheless, the tribunal voted unanimously that she was guilty of this charge.

  Pronounced guilty on all charges, Mata Hari needed to be sentenced. Semprou asked the tribunal to vote that she should be shot, and they concurred.

  The tribunal returned to the courtroom. With much pomp and circumstance, the verdict and sentence were read.

  IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE OF FRANCE,

  The Third Permanent Council of War of the military government of Paris has rendered the following judgment:

  Today, the twenty-fifth of July 1917, the Third Permanent Council of War in Paris, heard by the Commissioner of the Government in the requisitions and conclusion, has declared

  the named ZELLE, Marguerite, Gertrude, called Mata-Hari,

  divorcée of Mr. Mac Leod,

  guilty of espionage and intelligence with the enemy with the end of assisting his enterprises.

  In consequence, the aforementioned Council condemns her to pain of death, by application of articles 205 paragraph 2, 206 paragraphs 1 and 2, 64, 69, 269, 139, 187 of the Code of Military Justice and 7 of the Criminal Code.

  And, by the articles 139 of the Code of Military Justice and 9 of the Law of 22 July 1867, the Council condemns the aforesaid ZELLE

  to reimburse, by the gifts of her property and by sale, to the Public Treasury, the costs of the trial.

  It was not enough that she was sentenced to death, but her possessions were to be sold to pay the French state for the cost of prosecuting and convicting her. The total amount called for was 335.65 francs. The greatest single expense (299 francs), ironically, was the fees to be paid to the medical men who examined her and attested to her ability to withstand the rigors of her imprisonment.

  Paris newspapers gleefully reported that Mata Hari, sitting next to Clunet, heard this appalling verdict and whispered, “It’s impossible! It’s impossible!” Another described her as “a sinister Salomé, who played with the heads of our soldiers in front of the German Herod.” The evocation of a biblical seductress who killed heartlessly only heightened public feeling against Mata Hari. She was condemned twice over, once for her sexuality—which was undisputed—and once for her dubiously proven espionage.

  22

  Waiting

  BACK IN SAINT-LAZARE, Mata Hari was moved to cell number 12, where those condemned to death waited. There were two beds in addition to her own, occupied by other prisoners who had earned a position of trust by their good behavior. The task assigned her companions was to keep her from suicide. Sisters Marie and Léonide also kept a close eye on her. Out of kindness, Sister Léonide brought her a cup of coffee early every morning.

  Within a few days, Mata Hari resumed her letter-writing campaign while she awaited the appeal: a review of her trial to determine whether correct procedure had been followed. She wrote to Dr. Bizard, asking for permission to walk for a few minutes in the prison courtyard every day, a privilege that had been given her before the trial but that had been revoked because she was under sentence of death. “I cannot stand it any longer,” she wrote. “I need some air and exercise. This will not prevent them from killing me if they absolutely want to, but it is useless to make me suffer, closed in as I am. It is too much to bear.”

  She received no visitors during this period, no letters except those from Clunet. She attempted to write to Anna Lintjens, each missive asking her to carry out a list of commissions for her, such as paying for a very pretty portrait of her in pastels that she felt either Baron van der Capellan or Anna herself would want to own. She also wrote to her Dutch sol
icitor Hijmans, in hopes of straightening out the long-unpaid bills with the couturier. She attempted to send letters to the Dutch legation in Paris, though all her letters were read before posting and some were returned to her because of the unflattering description of French justice contained in them. She asked for a list of the objects seized from her and their whereabouts, but this was refused until after her appeal was heard.

  On July 28 the Dutch ambassador to Paris was asked to try to have Mata Hari’s punishment reduced to a prison sentence, if the appeal was unsuccessful. Mata Hari passed her forty-first birthday on August 7, in Saint-Lazare. On August 17 her appeal was denied.

  In September, she became more frantic and wrote more urgently. She wrote to Consul Bunge, in Paris—the man Bouchardon suspected of participating in her espionage activities—begging for assistance in obtaining additional funds from the Netherlands. She also asked what the Dutch government was doing to help her, adding truly: “Here, I am without defense.”

  Though in prison, Mata Hari was still viewed as potentially dangerous. The request by Maître Milhaud, the solicitor appointed by the court to wind up her affairs, to meet with her was debated, lest she somehow smuggle out vital information. Milhaud’s letters to Mata Hari were scrutinized, but he was reluctantly given permission to visit her in prison.

  On September 12 a Dutch publisher from Sneek, A. J. Kooij, wrote what must be one of the most outrageous letters of the entire affair. Knowing Mata Hari was in prison and condemned to execution—and almost certainly acquainted with her now humiliated and embarrassed relatives in Sneek—Kooij wrote asking for the rights to publish her memoirs, which he hoped she was working on. He addressed the letter to her “à Vincennes” (at Vincennes, the execution ground). The letter was forwarded to the Military Government of Paris on September 29, but there is no indication whether she received it. She did not reply. She did, however, have a soldier clerk make four copies of a memoir, for which her account was charged 5.50 francs. However, the chief of the Bureau of Military Justice found it “repugnant” for a soldier to receive money from Mata Hari and denied the payment. The memoir disappeared.

  On September 22 she wrote to the Dutch legatee in Paris, van Stuers, to intervene on her behalf and beg for a presidential pardon for her. Since her first appeal had been turned down, her next hope lay with the Supreme Court of Appeals. They too refused to overturn Mata Hari’s conviction. Van Stuers and Clunet consulted, and the latter wrote to the Dutch envoy. A request for clemency from The Hague was sent via van Stuers to the French foreign minister, to be forwarded in turn to President Raymond Poincaré. The basis of the request was “for reasons of humanity.”

  Poincaré never granted such appeals during his tenure and would certainly not commute the sentence of death for one such as Mata Hari. He was dealing with mutinies in both the French and Russian armies. He was so strongly anti-German that he was personally blamed by some for the outbreak of war. His conviction that traitors deserved no leniency was strongly supported by Georges Clemenceau, former prime minister and a rising political power in 1917. Though the two men disliked each other intensely, on November 16 Poincaré suppressed his loathing of Clemenceau and asked him to form a government as prime minister. Clemenceau immediately purged the country of leaders whom he thought weak or traitorous, including Minister of the Interior Louis Malvy, who was wrongly thought to have been a lover of Mata Hari, and Joseph Denvignes, who had indeed been her lover. Poincaré’s rejection of the appeal for pardon was sent to Clunet’s office on October 13.

  On Sunday, October 14, in a last attempt to save his client, Clunet wrote to the commandant, hoping to use a technicality in the law to postpone the execution.

  In the theater world, where everyone is naturally interested in the fate of Mata Hari, the rumor is that she is pregnant. If that is so, and if the pardon is rejected, the execution by the Third Council of War will naturally be suspended. My concern is to beg you to order that a medical expert be consulted to determine the physiological state of the condemned?

  …P.S. My compatriot and friend, the eminent general Marchand, reported as missing in a recent combat, was not killed but imprisoned by the Germans. Why not impose on our enemies the restitution of this general, in exchange for Mata Hari, deprived by us of all value, and the capital punishment commuted to exile?

  Clunet’s clever appeal did not work. Considering the conditions of her imprisonment and her isolation from all men except the physicians Socquet and Bizard, her remorseless interrogator Bouchardon, and Clunet himself, a recent pregnancy was most unlikely. Even if she had been pregnant, this provision for postponement in such cases was a matter of civil, not military, law. However, the dramatic possibilities of such a last-minute claim appealed to Massard, who wrote a scene in his memoirs claiming that, on the morning of her execution, Clunet all but begged Mata Hari to say she was pregnant by him.

  The news of Mata Hari’s impending execution had reached Holland in September, but there was little solid information. Neither the Dutch newspapers nor even the Dutch minister of foreign affairs could get a copy of the charges upon which Mata Hari had been sentenced to death. Clunet did not pass on the news of the French president’s refusal to pardon Mata Hari to the Dutch envoy immediately, because he did not wish to disturb such an important man on the weekend. When the envoy received the information on the morning of Monday, October 15, Mata Hari was already dead.

  The order for her execution was signed on October 14. All her appeals had been exhausted. Clunet was to be taken as a witness to the execution grounds at Vincennes at six-fifteen the following morning. In attendance would be Captain Thibaut, the chief scribe, or recorder, for the Third Council of War (who had not been present at the trial); Lieutenant Colonel Semprou, president of the tribunal; and Lieutenant Choulot, a tribunal judge who had not been present at Mata Hari’s trial. The execution would be carried out by firing squad provided by the Fourth Regiment of the Zouaves. The coup de grâce would be delivered by Sergeant Major Petoy of the Twenty-third Regiment of Dragoons. A military physician, Robillard, would be present to declare her dead. Pastor Arboux and Sisters Marie and Léonide from the prison would also attend.

  A tender story of dubious accuracy involves Bizard, the resident physician at Saint-Lazare, who learned on October 14 that Mata Hari was to die the next morning. Mata Hari had had great difficulty sleeping since her trial. She worried all night, each night, because she never knew when the sentence would be carried out. Bizard wrote that he visited her cell on the evening of October 14 and deliberately turned the subject to dancing. He and Sister Léonide asked Mata Hari to show them one of her dances, so she arose and performed for a few minutes. While she was preoccupied, Bizard slipped a dose of chloral hydrate, a sleeping potion, into her water. She would have a good sleep on her last night on earth.

  23

  Dying Well

  THE CROWD OF MEN woke her in the darkness just before 5 a.m.

  Her hated interrogator, Bouchardon, was there along with Jean Estachy, the prison director; Bizard, the prison doctor; Captain Émile Massard, the chief of military staff in Paris; and her dear old attorney, Clunet. The prison pastor, Jules Arboux, was waiting with Captain Thibaut, the chief military recorder of the Third Council of War.

  Her time had come. She may have been fuzzy-headed from the chloral hydrate Bizard had slipped into her drinking water the night before. She quickly realized that he had known what would happen on this morning even if she had not. And she understood why the doctor and Sister Léonide had asked her to dance a little for them the night before. They had wanted to see Mata Hari, the true Mata Hari, once before she died. She had shown them as best she could, though her long and wretched months in the dismal prison had stolen most of her grace and loveliness.

  The last appeals and requests for pardons had failed; there was no other reason they would awaken her in the dark hours of that cold and foggy morning. She was to be shot at dawn. The nuns hovered in the background as she he
ard the dreadful news.

  She had perhaps already decided to die as she had lived, with flair and courage. She had nothing left but pride and dignity. She would die as Mata Hari.

  Pierre Bouchard and prosecutor André Mornet worked together closely to convict Mata Hari of espionage on flimsy evidence. This photo was taken on the day of her execution. (Collection Roget-Viollet)

  The men, except for Bizard, left the room while she dressed slowly and carefully for this, her last performance. She wanted to look her best, but she had no extensive wardrobe to choose from, only what her captors had allowed her. She asked permission to wear a corset, which was given. Most accounts say she also donned the only decent clothes she had been allowed, the ones she had worn to her trial: stockings, a low-cut blouse that showed off her beautiful shoulders under a two-piece, dove-gray costume, and fashionable ankle boots. A story from The Little Parisian—which would have appeared on October 16, 1917, had it not been suppressed by the censor—described her outfit as a very elegant one trimmed in fur. Sister Léonide and Sister Marie helped her dress, but soon their wrinkled faces streamed with tears and Mata Hari had to comfort them. Then she pinned up her unwashed hair carefully, slowly, as high and elegantly as possible. The gray hairs that she had once hidden with dye were beginning to show badly, which hurt her vanity. She would conceal the gray with her hat.

  She felt no need for a last-minute confession, though Pastor Arboux accompanied her and the others to the execution. She was not a religious person. Even had she believed in the power of confession to wipe away sins, she had done nothing wrong in her view: she had only loved men and let them love her. Where was the harm in that? Hurriedly she wrote three last letters, one to her daughter and two to gentlemen friends, probably Vadime and Henri de Marguérie, the one whom she loved still and the other who had so kindly and bravely come to court to testify on her behalf. Naïvely, she trusted her captors to see to their delivery. She handed them over to the pastor, but the letters were never seen again. Her jailers were taking no chances of posthumous protest. She made no will.