Chapter Four

The Paris début of Mata Hari had a ludicrous termination. Light upon this stage of her life has been wanting, so that these few scant details will be interesting since they are new. Finding all havens closed to her in Amsterdam, Margaret decided to admit failure and returned to the parental home in The Hague. But the prosperous and highly respected burgher-father killed no fatted calf for the wanderer. Instead, he was ready enough to provide the means of removing his daughter from the neighbourhood. Furnished with the necessary funds, Margaret made for Paris, determined to make her début as a dancer. But since she had no professional training and had to find a means of livelihood until her act was ready, she did what so many other young stage people do—she posed as a model for painters.

“On the purple granite altar of the Kanda Swany....”

But between the coasts of Malabar and La Rotonde many waters flow. Margaret was twenty-seven when she knocked one morning at a studio door in the Montparnasse district.

26“I am seeking employment as a model,” she explained to the artist.

“Very good,” he replied. “Let me see your figure.”

“Oh no! I want to pose only for the head,” was her horrified response. “I am the widow of a colonel who died in the Indies and left me with two sons. I am trying to educate them but have no resources.”

“In that case your beauty ought to secure you some sittings for the head, but you will be paid much less than if you will pose for the full figure, for, from what I can gather, you must have a pretty figure. At any rate, I don’t insist.”

Margaret lamented the immolation of her modesty, the outrage to her distinguished family, and, generally, made use of the familiar arguments, but when the painter told her abruptly that she could do just whatever she pleased she began to undress.

To this man and to other artists we owe the explosion of another portion of the bubble of her legendary life. Artists who saw her have all borne testimony to the beauty of Mata Hari’s figure, several declaring that they had never seen such lovely shaped arms. But for the employment as a model she had one grave defect—her bust was pendulous and ugly. During her dances she never bared her 27breasts, although this was the only part of her body which was covered. Invariably she wore a jewelled covering for her bosom. The Red Dancer had her own explanation to offer for this and it reflected more to the type of credit she coveted.

“My husband,” she used to say, “often threatened to disfigure me so that no other man would desire me.”

She claimed that in one of his fits of erotic dementia the man had attacked her in such a ferocious fashion that she was mutilated. “That is why,” she would conclude the story, “I have not cared to exhibit my complete torso.”

However, to return to her application for employment. The disappointment of the artist that such a promising model was not satisfactory for his purpose caused him to remark that, after all, she had better pose for the head alone. Either she felt her modesty was outraged by this, or, what is more likely, her vanity was shocked, but the innocent statement produced what the French call a crise de nerfs, in which the artist had to call for his wife’s assistance and, to soothe Margaret’s injured modesty (or vanity), the painter did make use of her in a poster which occupied him at the time. She was in the grimly appropriate character of Messalina! Thus the poster of the Gaîté’s production 28of Isador de Lara’s “Messalina” was posed by Mata Hari, and no one has yet commented on the grim symbolism of the combination.

In 1903 she made her début as a dancer, less than a year after the inhospitable doors of her virtuous relations had closed upon her. What success she had or might have reaped from this initial appearance is only a matter of speculation, because the outraged Scottish husband clamoured for protection against anyone bearing the honoured name of his puritanical ancestors consecrating herself to the art of the dance in the modern Babylon. In the first flush of his outraged pride he wrote an indignant letter to his wife, threatening to have her enclosed in a convent if she did not conduct herself with more modesty and dignity.

This unexpected document afflicted Margaret with a mingling of tears, fear, and revolt. She demanded telegraphic counsel of her relatives, and as a result of their replies she voluntarily returned to Holland and went into seclusion amid the austere rusticity of Nimegue, in order to escape the mediæval vengeance of her irate husband. To the enthusiastic admirers of Mata Hari this period of her life has been likened to the Agony in the Garden. The crazy, muddled drug addicts whose celestial system centres round the more obscure 29night haunts of Paris and extends only to the other bank of the Seine, picture life in this little Dutch town as refined torture for the soul that sought the unbounded liberty of the stars, the unmeasured spaces of love, and the unplumbed depths of Siva’s paradise. But they are a little in advance of time. The constellation of the Three Goddesses was not yet reported to have appeared in the firmament. None the less, Margaret hated the place.

“Am I to remain here for the rest of my days?” she wails in January of 1904. Truly one who has known the joys of Parisian life will understand that the innocent festivities of Nimegue are a poor substitute. It was doubtless the repression of this period which caused her to fly to the other extreme when she escaped. In place of the glaring footlights which she coveted was the pale reflection of the sun in the copper dishes on the walls; the only audience were the curious housewives who peered from behind discreetly drawn curtains as the woman of the dance-halls flitted down the silent street; and for music, the joyous music her heart loved, there was only the metallic clank of the municipal belfry when the bell-ringers practised their ingenuous hobby. The grey little town which dwells in the almost perpetual shadow of sea mists must have seemed as remote from the delights of 30the City of Light as was Benjoe-Biroe in the Javanese jungle.

“I shall triumph sooner or later,” she cries defiantly from the enveloping fog.

And then one day she summons her courage and descends upon the gay Paris like a thunderclap. Margaret Gertrude Zelle is no more, the curtain rises definitely on the Red Dancer.

31