Chapter Five

Mata Hari established her reputation in Paris; she achieved the highest flights of her fame in that city, and her other conquests, in Berlin, Rome, Vienna, London, were but reflections of her Parisian success. Her first efforts were in public, on the vaudeville stage, where she speedily gained a sympathetic reception by the novelty of her dancing. But it was not as a dancer that she coveted a reputation. Of one thing about her dancing we may be certain: as an art such as Isadora Duncan conceived it or as Loie Fuller imagined it, Mata Hari had no conception. Dancing to her was nothing more than a means of attracting attention, of displaying the splendour of her beauty, with the ultimate object of captivating her lovers. Like many another artist who has imagined herself greater than her art, Mata loved the adulation offered to a popular favourite, but better than a large audience in a theatre she loved the intimacy afforded by private engagements in some luxurious apartment where, before a select audience of refined profligates, and brilliant, wealthy, dilettantes she could explain with greater freedom 32the sensuous rites of the fantastic cult to which she had promoted herself the high-priestess.

Her ideal was to become a famous—the most famous—courtesan, and to achieve it she invented her sacred origin and improvised an art. The opportunity she sought was to exhibit her lovely amber body among gold and precious stones, to pose rhythmically among sumptuous transparencies. The rest was only decoration to conceal, justify, and stimulate the underlying sensual debauch.

“When in my infancy I danced before rajahs on the shores of the sacred Ganges....”

In point of fact, Mata Hari’s knowledge of the orgies practised in Brahmanist temples and sanctuaries was derived exclusively from books. The most she had ever seen were the dances of the tiny Javanese bayas in those villages she had visited while her husband was with the Dutch colonial forces. Between these diminutive little creatures (more like automatic toys than flesh and blood) and the apsaras of the Brahman temples there is a huge gulf. One is the incarnation of some abstract ancestral rite grown ghostly by its tenuous prolongation through the ages; the other is the realization of a morbid drug-distorted vision of bestiality, thinly veiled behind a religious significance.

33There may have been moments when she took her charlatanry seriously, but that Mata Hari’s dances had any religious meaning is the fantasy of minds not less distorted than her own. As the shadows closed around her in the prison of Saint-Lazare she gratefully accepted the ministrations of two Catholic nuns, and on the morning of her execution actually received the rite of baptism from the hands of an Anabaptist pastor. Two days after her sentence she begged the prison doctor to obtain for her some books to beguile the weary hours. Doubtful about her tastes, the doctor begged for some guidance in the selection, suggesting the works of such popular writers as Marcel Prévost, Bourget, and Rosny. She rejected these suggestions with scorn.

“Stories about the middle classes never interested me,” she declared. “To you I can confess that I have never been able to read through one of those works which are called comedies of manners. What I do like is poetry which has mystery, religion, legend, and magic. I firmly believe that the only means of living in beauty consists in avoiding the thousand and one daily annoyances which interfere with an existence in the full ideal. That is why I cannot tolerate European things, not even the religion.” At which declaration she shook an 34admonitory finger at the doctor and continued, “Now do not go and tell that to the poor religious who are trying so hard to convert me. Those unhappy people do not understand what the word religion means on my lips and they would certainly cross themselves piously if they knew that I mingled dances and caresses in my liturgy.... For I am a Hindu, although born in Holland. Hindu? Yes, certainly. You who are an intelligent man will say that there must be something European in me. No, there is not. I am absolutely Oriental.

“Further, the Orient alone interests me deeply. When one speaks of motherlands my soul turns to a distant country where a golden pagoda is mirrored in a winding stream. I do not know exactly what I am or where I am from. From Benares, from Golconda, from Gwalior, from Madura, what does it matter? There is a secret in my origin, in my blood. It will be known sometime later, but, for my own part, I have barely penetrated the fringe of the secret.”

The doctor said that at this point of the invocation of her illusory cradle a look of great sadness came over her eyes. This man, who knew little of her imaginary birth and life, declares that he was baffled by the complexity of her nature. He maintains that she possessed nothing of the nature, type, 35character, culture, mind, or appearance of the women of Europe; there was something of the primitive savage and at the same time something sacerdotal and refined about her. Concerning the fuller development of her studies she continued:

“Formerly, my favourite reading was that which informed me how to love life and savour voluptuous delights with a passionate, Sybaritical enjoyment. In the Prem Sagar there are chapters which make the senses reel as though one was intoxicated with sensuous drugs. And the works of Kalidasa and his disciples, with their tenderness and picturesque subtlety, have furnished me with entire days of ecstasy. I smile when I hear people say that scenic art reaches its apogee in Paris. Yonder, in India, each passion has its perfume and colour. Thus, love is blue, pleasure white, tenderness rose, and heroism red. As a new sentiment is about to dominate a drama the decoration changes tints and the atmosphere changes its aroma.... The lovers really love, actually engage in the love embrace on the stage in full view of the audience. They hate just as truly. The pursuit and attack is real. I have seen blood on the hands of some of the actors. Ah, those legends of chivalry! those stories of Rajput warriors who, with a saffron tunic over their coat of mail, went forth seeking marvellous 36adventures.... And the romances of proud Brahmanist daughters enamoured of their pages, imprisoned in a citadel for years because of their love, without renouncing the hope of escape which would enable them to flee some day and join the faithful lovers who awaited them at the door of the pagoda.

“Nothing is more poetic, nobler, or greater than what remains to us of ancient India.”

Instead of the Imitation of Christ, which appears to be the favoured study of condemned prisoners, Mata Hari chose the Lotus of Faith, a Buddhist book of instruction which teaches a contempt for everything in life. Even under the shadow of the broad wings of hovering death this extraordinary woman could command her imagination to furnish the ecstasies she had formerly been able to realize through the flesh. It is needless to say that in these confidences her recollections were mere flights of fancy and not efforts of memory. That artistic touch of the actors with blood-reeking hands was sheer imagination—the poetic licence of the story-teller, like so much else in her autobiography. For Mata Hari’s heart found sustenance in two things—imagination and love of the carnal kind.

So much, then, for her religion—it was art and 37love. Yet, to those who suffered from her deception, she insisted upon the religious significance of her art. To one admirer she wrote: “As you know, every true temple dance (not those of the street and the public places) is a theological treatise and should explain in pose and gesture the rules of the Vedas, the sacred books.”

Since these sacred books contain the most complete description of the joys of sensual love, of the arts to be practised by the courtesan who desires to become successful, and the captivating graces to be employed in retaining the affections of a lover, they were appropriately chosen to form the basis of her art. That they were religious treatises was an accident. Not only in her public appearances, but in the intimacy of her boudoir she tried to invoke the vision of the divine Brahma in the halflights of an ancient sanctuary; of mysterious flowers, exotic, luscious, stupefying; of the undulating coils of the writhing serpent interlaced with rich foliage. The beautiful amber-tinted body glides with infinite grace among the illusive disorder of diaphanous, floating veils, and the intoxication of subtly penetrating perfumes.

For her “Sacred Flower Dance,” a favourite with her, based upon the legend of the goddess with the power of embodying herself within the 38petals of a flower, she writes in several letters to one of her associates, ordering the musical accompaniment just as a banker’s wife orders a gown for a special occasion.

The music of “The Flowing Waters” will serve as an overture to convey the impression that the temple is in a forest with a murmuring cascade within hearing. A prince comes to plead before the goddess, seated like a bronze statue on her altar. He enters the temple bearing exquisite orchids, the incarnation of the divinity, whose place on the altar has been taken for this rite by a priestess. As the prince makes intercession to the goddess before her altar he burns the blossoms in sacrifice. To him the priestess makes this terrible prediction: “You will die as everything must die. Make your life a succession of delicious and glorious moments. Better that you pass on this earth through moments of intense sensation and then depart, than drag your body through an old age that is without beauty and satisfaction.”

As the ecstatic fumes from the burning flowers intoxicate the prince, the priestess (which shall be me) rises and dances, explaining in pose and gesture the rules of the Veda, the holy books of the Brahma. The music must express the pose of the incarnation, the apparition of the flower, its unfolding into blossom, the closing of its petals, all typifying the powers of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva—that is to say, creation, fruitfulness, decay. The whole fades into obscurity; prince, goddess, and high-priestess disappear.

39This, then, is the rôle she has chosen. She adds a point of exclamation in one of her letters in which she says that Siva is the god of sin; he “must have a power of destruction which equals, if it does not surpass, the good of Brahma.” Siva was her favourite god; she became the symbol of his cult and she recruited many worshippers.

No such weird fantasy could ever have become an accepted doctrine if preached from the stage of a vaudeville theatre, and well Mata Hari knew it. In the sepulchral solitude of Nimegue the idea was developed until in 1905, when she returned to Paris, Mata Hari did not seek engagements immediately on the stage. Her campaign was more subtle once the opportunity had suggested itself, and the suggestion came from a most unexpected source. She proposed to give a performance of Javanese dances in the Guimet Museum, which is devoted to the collection of Oriental curiosities. Here, beneath the enigmatic smile of a great golden Buddha, she danced in the discreet costume of saffron-coloured veils before a specially invited audience, never suspecting the possibilities of the display until a grave and learned scholar gave her the clue. All Orientalists are distinguished for their gravity. A bearded scholar of Eastern lore rose and explained to the awed audience 40the meaning of the rhythmic ceremony they were about to witness. Having completed his discourse, Mata Hari was called on to appear in her saffron veilings and, with her face glowing from the excitement of the scholar’s suggestions, she danced her “Black Pearl” dance.

Needless to say that at this stage of her career (1905–06) Mata Hari was almost wholly ignorant of the Brahman religion and its ceremonial dances. All she proposed to do was to give a romantic version of the stiff and mechanical movements of the little Javanese dancers. But the grave old Oriental scholar had put an idea into her receptive brain and she nourished it with care. Next morning the Paris newspapers were filled with the novelty of this extraordinary performance in a museum of serious studies, and she decided to reap the full benefit of her sudden fame.

“On the purple granite altar of the Kanda Swany I danced for the first time....”

In reality, then, the first step on the ladder was not on the coasts of Malabar, but on the Paris boulevards. From the museum of Oriental art to the salon of the Chilean minister was the next step, but this was not a resting-place; it was no more than a breathing space on the rapid rise to ascendency. Besides, she had not yet reached the 41stage of complete nudity which she was to favour. That only came when the Princess Murat invited her to perform before an exclusive assembly in her city palace. Later the Prince del Drago placed her on the topmost pinnacle of notoriety when he gave a celebration which was designed to revolve around the central figure of a bayadère—Mata Hari. It was these evenings among the socially elect which gave her most delight, not the public performances at the Olympia or in the chill scholastic atmosphere of the Guimet Museum. Besides, they were infinitely more profitable in the outcome. High though her earnings as a dancer were, much more money was required to indulge her extravagant tastes and the indiscriminate charity which she dispensed. The effect of these displays can best be understood with the aid of a spectator’s recollections.

“You can scarcely credit the mystic frenzy produced by her lascivious attitudes,” he said. “Her nervous tremors, her violent contortions, were terribly impressive. There was in the performance something of the solemnity of an idol, something of the loathsome horror of a writhing reptile. From her great sombre eyes, half closed in sensuous ecstasy, there gleamed an uncanny light, like phosphorescent flames. She seemed to embrace an 42invisible being in her long shapely arms. Her braceleted legs were glossy and well moulded, they so quivered through excessive effort that it seemed the tendons must burst through the enveloping skin. To witness the spectacle was to receive the impression that one had actually been present at the metamorphosis of a serpent taking a woman’s form.”

A serpent, always a serpent!

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