Femme Fatale

by Pat Shipman

  She checked her hair, set a three-cornered hat upon her head and angled it just so, and drew on long, elegant, buttoned gloves. She threw a vivid blue coat over her shoulders like a cape and stood erect to look in the mirror. Her skin was sallow and wrinkled, her once-luxuriant hair now thin and dull, but her carriage was still proud. It would have to do.

  With grave dignity, she thanked Dr. Bizard, who had tried to win better treatment for her during her miserable imprisonment. At this gesture, Sister Marie began sobbing like a heartbroken child.

  “Do not cry,” Mata Hari comforted the sister, wiping her cheeks. “Be cheerful like me…. Imagine that I am going on a long journey, that I will return and we will find each other again.” They were words she might have spoken tenderly to a lover, to Vadime, but he had abandoned her in her troubles. Now she had only herself to rely on. The situation was familiar; she had made her life and now she would make her own death. “Besides, you will come a little way with me, won’t you?” she pleaded with the sister. “You shall accompany me.”

  She walked down the dank corridor holding Sister Léonide’s hand. She refused to let the warder touch her. Prison rats, their fur dark and matted with grease and filth, scurried past in the hallway. Their presence no longer made her shudder. She had become used to them over the months. She, who once lived in the best hotels and finest houses like a queen, did not flinch at mere rats.

  At the door there were dozens of strangers: prison officials, journalists, onlookers jostling to catch sight of her. She wondered who they all were. “All these people!” she whispered to Sister Léonide cheekily, as if they were best friends from the theater, peeking out through a gap in the curtain to see the size of the audience. “What a success!” Whoever they were, they would be her audience, and she played her role to perfection. She let herself be led to a black car with its window blinds drawn, but she would not be hustled or hurried. The cortège of five identical cars sped rapidly through the still streets, losing the gawkers and journalists who tried to follow. The procession went to the Caponnière, the muddy fields near Vincennes that were used for drill practice by the cavalry. It was an apt choice. She had always favored military men.

  The bleak autumn light of the coming dawn illuminated a somber scene. There was a firing squad of twelve from the Fourth Regiment of Zouaves, in their khaki uniforms and red fezzes, and the sergeant major from the Twenty-third Dragoons in his navy blue uniform with a black beret. She assessed them calmly. They all looked ridiculously young and nervous. In another time and place, she would have charmed and flattered them, made them feel like men of the world, won them over. Now she felt a little sorry for them; to be responsible for executing Mata Hari was going to be a burden to live with, she supposed. There was no time to think of that. She had a performance to give and it required all her nerve and skill.

  She refused to be tied to the stake, and so she stood, lonely but regal, in the desolate field on her own. Dawn had broken just minutes before, and the light was still soft and pearly. When the senior officer offered a blindfold, she declined with a dignified movement of her head. “That is not necessary,” she said graciously. She waved kindly to the two weeping nuns who had done as much as they could do to comfort her. Their kindness had been a great gift to her. She blew a kiss to the priest—just a moment of naughtiness, she couldn’t resist—and another to her lawyer. She knew he was still in love with her. She knew he would think of her for the rest of his dull life.

  Thibaut read out the sentence. “By the order of the Third Council of War the woman Zelle has been condemned to death for espionage.” His words hung in the quiet misty air. Mata Hari awaited her fate like the magnificent heroine she was. They could take her life but they could not rob her of her identity.

  “By God,” the sergeant major of the dragoons said in quiet admiration, watching her. “This lady knows how to die.”

  He lifted his saber and the men shouldered their rifles. Then the sergeant major shouted, “En joue!” (Aim!), and then, after a long pause, “Feu!” (Fire!) The squad did their duty. No one knew which rifle shots killed her. She was proud and silent as the bullets struck, and then she slumped over, bleeding. Petoy slowly walked over to her flaccid body and administered the coup de grâce, firing one shot into her head. The act was a sort of macabre salute.

  Mata Hari was dead.

  Robillard, Thibaut, and Choulot signed the execution order, signifying that it had been duly carried out. Pitifully, no one came to claim her body. Her head was sent to the Institute of Anatomy museum in Paris for study with those of other criminals.

  The next morning the French newspapers were full of stories about Mata Hari. One identified her as a “choreographic artist of foreign origin” and announced triumphantly:

  The items that came into the hands of French justice demonstrated the evidence of the guilt of the accused and the value of the information handed over by her to the enemy.

  On the day of the declaration of war, Mata Hari frequented political, military, and police circles in Berlin, [she] was in the service of Germany. She was enrolled under an organization number in the service of German espionage…[by] notorious chiefs of espionage, and received from Germany in the month of May 1916, important sums as remuneration for various missions and information she furnished.

  Faced with material proofs, she admitted all of these facts.

  Of course, she had admitted nothing of the kind, but the truth no longer mattered.

  Although there was often an outcry about the secrecy surrounding executions—hundreds of convicted spies were executed during the war—one paper editorialized that the execution was given exactly the attention it deserved. “One does not ask for the crowd to attend such a horrible spectacle—a woman shot. But it must be that the traitors, whatever their sex, know what punishment awaits them.”

  Several Paris newspapers gave nearly identical reports because they were all following an official press release, which deviated from the truth in several particulars. One used an especially congratulatory headline: “The Spy Mata-Hari Paid Yesterday for Her Crimes.” Criticisms of the execution or trial were strongly discouraged, and the official censor suppressed or modified some stories. The overall tone of the press stories was fervently, exaggeratedly patriotic. There was no suggestion of criticism of the French government or military.

  Throughout the month of October, The Times in Paris ran a regular daily column entitled “Commerce and Intelligence with the Enemy,” in which Bouchardon was frequently praised for his successes in achieving convictions of spies. His harsh treatment—and occasional abrogation of rights—of those accused was approved as being entirely necessary to keep France safe. Convicting Mata Hari had made Bouchardon a public hero.

  Four days after Mata Hari’s execution, Georges Ladoux was arrested as a German spy. It was Ladoux who had enticed her into the shadowy world of espionage; it was he who probably altered the contents of the telegrams that were the only solid evidence against Mata Hari. One of his own agents, Pierre Lenoir, had been arrested a few months earlier for defecting to the enemy. Lenoir protested that the Germans had manufactured evidence that he had been “turned”—all of his activities had been carried out for France, he said. Asked to name his accomplices, he pointed to Ladoux, who seems to have recruited and abandoned more than one agent.

  Ladoux was immediately arrested, though the news was kept from the newspapers. Morale was dangerously low in France. News that the head of French counterespionage, the man who had done so much to convict Mata Hari, was in turn being investigated for espionage would be disastrous. Ladoux was suspended from the Deuxième Bureau, put under house arrest, and subjected to relentless questioning.

  The case against Ladoux was dismissed on January 1, 1919, but he was rearrested on January 2. After the second arrest, he was imprisoned at Cherche-Midi, a grim military prison that may have been as horrific as Saint-Lazare. Ladoux was interrogated for four months, court-martialed, and finally acquitted on Ma
y 8, 1919. “All the world dropped me,” Ladoux wrote sullenly of the period of his imprisonment and interrogation, an experience about which Mata Hari could have told him much. His defense was that his arrest was part of a clever plot, planned in all probability by the Germans:

  At the beginning of August 1914, I was assigned to be a sentinel behind our lines by the greatest of our military chiefs and, as it was my duty, I have rung my alarm bells as soon as the danger appeared to me. It is thus not my fault if they have sometimes left me too exposed, so much so that I was used as primary target by the quiet enemy which approached, at the same time I was exposed also to the attacks which came from our own ranks and which have killed me off…[causing] my abrupt departure of the headquarters of the army in October 1917.

  How closely Ladoux’s defense of himself against charges of espionage parallels that offered by Mata Hari and Lenoir! All three cases followed the same script: the undertaking of a dangerous job for France; the false accusation supported by false evidence, producing isolation, humiliation, and punishment. It may be that Ladoux himself was the original author of this scenario.

  Ladoux’s acquittal in May of 1919 may have been influenced as much by the end of the war in November 1918 as by the paucity of proof against him. His name was never fully cleared, however. Ladoux wrote:

  The day after my acquittal, I asked Clemenceau—in a letter which was without a doubt sharp—what type of reparations he proposed to give me, he responded to me through one of the officers of headquarters, the commandant H——: “Say to Ladoux that he will stay in the service and that he will await his dirty turn for his fourth stripe and his cross.” But my comrade confided, he had added in a voice less rude, “Ladoux has been punished to the end, but it is not [right for] an officer to cover himself in shit. If he is finally splashed [by it], too bad for him!”

  Clemenceau’s dismissal was bitter because Ladoux felt he had done a superb job as head of the Deuxième Bureau. He bragged that under his leadership they had arrested five hundred spies, “most of which were shot, the others condemned to various punishments.” If Ladoux really managed to convict most of those he arrested, then he had far surpassed the general conviction rate for spies, which at the time was only about 10 percent. How was this possible? Either French jurors had an astonishing willingness to convict on thin evidence—which might have been true in those jingoistic times—or Ladoux routinely enhanced the evidence against his suspects.

  After his acquittal, Ladoux waited four long years to become a major, at which point he retired from the service. He felt himself ill used, but he was not convicted and shot as Mata Hari and Lenoir were. Was Ladoux truly a double agent, working within the French intelligence service for German advantage? Or was he simply a buffoon trying to draw attention from his own errors by using Mata Hari as a scapegoat?

  Though Ladoux probably manufactured evidence against Mata Hari, even without the telegrams it seems likely that she would have been convicted. The august judges at the tribunal “heard” Mata Hari’s guilt from Bouchardon and Mornet and never really entertained the idea that she might be innocent of espionage—because she was surely not innocent of immorality.

  Rudolf MacLeod was told of Mata Hari’s execution by reporters in Arnhem on the day of her death. He reportedly remarked, “Whatever she’s done in life, she did not deserve that.” It was a very fair assessment.

  Rudolf hoped she had left a will that would make their daughter, Nonnie, rich. He pursued the matter through the Dutch legation in Paris, fruitlessly. He found she had no will and many unpaid debts and that many of Mata Hari’s valuable possessions were still in the prison warehouse. These were sold at auction in Paris on January 30, 1918. Rudolf tried diligently to find out how much money was raised by the sale of her possessions, but the French authorities were evasive. The auction of her possessions yielded 14,251.65 francs (almost $33,000 today), a sum far in excess of the tally of trial costs (335.56 francs, or about $775). The excess never reached Non. There was more than a suspicion of wrongdoing that revived in 1924, when the French newspapers announced an auction of items that had belonged to Mata Hari, especially jewels coming from the clerk of the prisons and the clerk of the Council of War.

  Furnishings left in her house in The Hague were auctioned off on January 9 and 10, 1918, because the owners of the house were owed rent. Baron van der Capellan did not attend the auction. Non received nothing from the sale of her mother’s possessions.

  Non’s only inheritance from her famous, infamous mother was congenital syphilis. On August 10, 1919, at the age of twenty-one, she died abruptly mere days before she was supposed to leave to become a schoolteacher in the Dutch East Indies. She had been examined and declared in perfect health very recently. The cause of death was said to be a cerebral hemorrhage or aneurysm, which can be a consequence of congenital syphilis. She was buried in Worth-Rheden, in a grave marked simply our non. Rudolf did not want the tombstone to identify himself and Mata Hari as her parents, though such notations were common on Dutch graves.

  Years later, after the Second World War, the prosecutor André Mornet spoke to a writer, Paul Guimard, about Mata Hari. Guimard wrote: “He did not confide in me to the fundamental basis of the [Mata Hari] affair, but he told me with a supreme indifference, ‘Between you and me, there wasn’t enough [evidence] to flog a cat.’”

  It is chilling that the prosecutor knew the evidence was insubstantial and yet did not desist. Being seen to convict spies, and being seen to punish them harshly, was more important than determining whether a suspect actually was a spy—except, of course, to the falsely accused spy herself.

  MATA HARI’S ONLY OTHER LEGACY WAS a rich mélange of myth and legend that still persist. The iconic female spy—beautiful, seductive, utterly duplicitous—owes much to Mata Hari. Numerous rumors and fictional or grossly inaccurate treatments of her life, some written by purported eyewitnesses, have sprung up. The most lurid involve a fictional out-of-wedlock daughter, “Banda MacLeod,” who followed her mother into espionage, or a last-minute salvation from the firing squad by a lover. Something about Mata Hari’s exotic beauty and elusiveness fostered inventions and lies, during and after her life.

  She also left a social legacy, more apparent today than in her own time, as a pioneering self-made and independent woman. She created Mata Hari, deliberately abandoning Margaretha Zelle MacLeod, and shaped her persona out of a talent—and a need—for pleasing men. She had no other way to live. A settled married life was a role for which she was completely unsuited. Even a husband fundamentally different from Rudolf MacLeod would have found her an impossible wife. She traded on her wits, her looks, her artistic talents, and her tremendous intuition about others to become a symbol of sexuality and pleasure that in some ways epitomized the Belle Époque. When the more puritanical and xenophobic times of the Great War arrived suddenly, Mata Hari knew no other way to behave, to think, to be. The traits that brought her fame and glory were the ones that condemned her to death.

  If indeed she was a spy, Mata Hari surely ranks among the world’s most inept agents. Her ability to uncover secrets was questionable. Even before the police set tails on her, she was recognized everywhere, known everywhere, and was inevitably the center of attention. Her comings and goings, with whom she dined or danced, were the subject of newspaper gossip columns. She could not be clandestine, unnoticed, ordinary. Wherever she went, she attracted admiration from men and jealous glances from women. She knew what men wanted and needed, and she enjoyed giving it to them. While pillow talk might be seen as an effective means of learning secrets, her lovers were in universal agreement that she did not talk with them about the war. Indeed, it was a large part of her charm that she made them forget the war, the planned offensives, the numbers of men or planes or tanks to be sent to this battle or that. When she gathered a tidbit of information, her attempts at communicating it to her spymaster were the stuff of comedy. She sent uncoded letters to Ladoux through the ordinary mail; she telegraphed
him openly; she called at his office repeatedly. She even sent intelligence to Ladoux by confiding it to a French diplomat she met by chance. What chance had such a woman of being a successful spy, much less a double agent?

  She was convicted not for espionage but for her lack of shame, her frank admission of loving many men and preferring officers; this was the behavior that so damned her in the eyes of men like Bouchardon, Mornet, and the tribunal judges of the Third Council of War. Most of them were undoubtedly attracted to her themselves. Many may have indulged themselves with chic mistresses in the pleasure-loving years before the war. But having a mistress oneself and condemning a woman for being one were two different things. Officially, not one of the men at the tribunal had the courage to be less than rigidly moralistic.

  During the hard days of the Great War, the politicians and military men of France cast Mata Hari in a larger role than that of the irresistible mistress. They demanded she play the femme fatale: a wicked and very sexual woman who brought men to their downfall. Unwittingly and unwillingly, she played the role to perfection.

  Though she was unjustly put to death, there was only ever one possible ending to the story of Mata Hari. She was not a woman who could have grown old, lost her looks, and lived a quiet domestic life. Butterflies who live in the sun must die young.

  References