She was not content to remain at home and succumb to the mores of bourgeois existence. As she said, ” I wanted away, to live life like a colourful butterfly in the sun.”

Mata Hari in full garb

In 1895, when she was aged just 19, she married a Dutch army officer 21 years her senior, a man she had met through a lonely hearts ad. When he was assigned to Java in the Dutch East Indies in 1897, Margeretha went with him. Little is known of her time there though she did give birth to two children, one of whom died in mysterious circumstances. It was obvious, however, that she must have drunk deep of the local culture. Her marriage though was not a happy one. On her return to the Netherlands in 1902, they were divorced with her husband taking custody of their surviving daughter. Travelling to Paris, Margarethe now reinvented herself. Despite having little money she trained as an exotic dancer paying her way by means of prostitution. She very soon became an expert in the erotic and seductive dancing of the Far East. She adopted the stage name Mata-Hari (the eye of the day, though she liked to translate it as the sunrise of the day). She created and choreographed her own dance routines which she described as her Sacred Dances. She wasn’t afraid to push the acceptable boundaries of the day, and her routines would invariably end in her naked (accept for her bra, not out of modesty but because she was self-conscious at being a little flat-chested) and sprawled out upon the floor. She excused all this as being necessary for the sake of her art, and dressed it all up with a fake religious mysticism. She very quickly became a sensation, touring the capital cities of Europe with her one woman show captivating the public and seducing her audience as she went; and she did quite literally seduce her audience procuring a string of lovers, often more than one at a time. As she remarked, “I satisfy all my caprices. I can sleep with a Duke, wake with a Count, and then dine with a General.” She claimed to be a Javanese Princess and with her dark, flirtatious eyes, long dark hair, and tanned olive skin she could easily have been of the ethnic extraction of those she now portrayed, though at 5ft 10in she was tall even for a woman from Holland. A witness to her dancing described her as, “feline, trembling in a thousand rhythms, and exotic yet deeply austere, slender and supple like a a sacred serpent.” She also had a childlike charm that appears to have been genuine. She enjoyed playing to the gallery.

In World War One Holland was neutral, and this allowed Mata Hari to easily move from one country to another. Indeed, the outbreak of hostilities did not seem to disturb her comfortable life at all. She still performed in Berlin and Paris and her fame continued to grow. It did though make her a candidate for recruitment by the various intelligence services of the combatants. She only slept with the most prominent people and the value of her pillow talk could be priceless, she would make the perfect spy. In November, 1914, the German Consul in Holland, Karl Kroemer, believed he had recruited her for just such a role. He paid her 20,000 francs to spy for Germany, issued her with a code name, and provided her with invisible ink. She took the money, forgot her code name, and threw away the invisible ink. Mata Hari was motivated by sex and what it could provide for her, not politics, and certainly not war. She was later recruited by French Intelligence as a double-agent. Again she took the money but she didn’t seem to have any clear idea of what all this meant or the perillous position in which it placed her. She also didn’t realise how many people hated her and were disgusted by her activities. What to her was fun was to others degrading and vile. For many she was little more than an infamous courtesan, a harlot, a thief, and a liar. There was nothing she would not do to feather her own nest.

In January, 1917, the French Intelligence Services intercepted a radio transmission from the German Consulate in Madrid praising the work of an agent code-named H-21. This was known to be the code-name for Mata Hari. Having received no information of any value from Mata Hari themselves they now assumed that she must be working for the Germans after all. On 13 February, 1917, Mata Hari was arrested in Paris and charged with espionage. She did little to defend herself against the charges and throughout her trial was coquettish, coy and flirtatious with the Court, seemingly unaware of the seriousness of the charges she was facing.

Everything now was against her. A supposedly worldly woman she showed herself to be tremendously naive. She never truly grasped the fact that a guilty verdict would cost her her life, or perhaps she didn’t want to. She struggled to understand that her amusements, or caprices as she put it, could be despised and feared by others. A guilty verdict was inevitable.

On the morning of 15 October, 1917, Mata Hari was awoked from a deep sleep and informed that her personal appeal to the French President had been rejected and that she was to be executed post-haste. She said little but did request that she be able to write a couple of letters, she was allowed to do so. she did so quickly before dressing. Never one to miss an opportunity she dressed to impress. Wearing high-heels and stockings, she draped a long black fur lined cape over her silk kimono, and placed a wide-brimmed black velvet hat at a flirtatious angle upon her head. She then calmly said, “I am ready.”

Standing before the firing squad she requested to be neither bound nor blindfolded. This was surprisingly agreed to, so there she stood before her executioners erect and nerveless, staring them directly in the eye. As the order to fire was given and the shots rang out she fell slowly to her knees before falling back her face turned towards the sky. An officer then walked forward to administer the coup de grace, placing a revolver to her temple and shooting her through the head.

Was Mata Hari a spy? It is highly unlikely. She was as much a victim of her reputation as her activities. She had no interest in politics, she was an entertainer, she made love not war.