Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Supersluts of History: First World War Spy Mata Hari About this episode Mata Hari was a dancer and courtesan who was executed in 1917 for being a spy during the First World War.
How did she get involved in such dangerous business? Was she really a mastermind spy who used her sexuality to gain intelligence? Or a scapegoat whose sexuality was used against her?
In our new mini-series, Supersluts of History, we're exploring and celebrating women whose sexuality was used to define them.
Joining Kate today is Professor Julie Wheelwright https://www.juliewheelwright.com/, author of The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage. Find out about her upcoming talk about Mata Hari here https://www.intelligencehistory.org/2026conferencedetails.
This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.
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All music from Epidemic Sounds.
Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.
Around 18 minutes says "letters published in 1917" which is wrong, it's 2017.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WtevPqsQ9ecjK2BrXnbFsudhYHzJU6hB
I’ll be speaking about Mata Hari at the Society for Intelligence History conference at King's College, London, in October.
And about Martha McKenna, the Spy Who Fooled Churchill at Bletchley Park in October.
https://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/nihc/
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:19 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back to Betwix the Sheets. Hello, how fabulous it is to see you once again, you little historical pervert. Yeah, I know, I know what you really are. I know why you're here. It's why I'm here as well. But before we can go any further together, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast book about adults, other adults, bad adult things and adults away, covering a range of subjects, you should be an adult too. Do you feel safer? I certainly feel safer. Right, let's crack on.
1:52 Kate Lister? It's 1916 and Europe is at war. So I thought, why not a little interailing?
1:59 Kate Lister? We're on board a train that's crawling into yet another tedious checkpoint and the French soldiers are making their way very carefully through the carriages, searching luggages and checking passports. Well, of course they are. We are at war, you know. Well, amongst the passengers sits one of the most famous women in Europe. Actually, one of the most famous women in the world. And it's not me. It's absolutely not me. It's none other than the famous dancer Mata Hari. She's crossed the borders with ease for years, charming aristocrats, diplomats and military officers wherever she goes. I mean, why wouldn't she? She's an absolute stonking hottie. But in a continent gripped
2:39 Kate Lister? by fear and paranoia, with governments obsessed with spies, her beauty, her connections, her freedom of movement and her sexuality no longer look glamorous. They look quite dangerous. But just what is Mata Hari caught up in? Was she really one of the most dangerous spies of the First World War? Really? Or was she just a chick who liked dancing and got caught up with the wrong bloke? Well, I'm ready to find out if you are.
3:32 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Today is the third episode in our little limited series which celebrates and explores the so-called super sluts of history. Who called them super sluts? Well, we did. We did. But other people have definitely done that as well. And we wanted to ask, is that a title well deserved? Or one fiercely resisted? These are the women who were defined by their sexuality, for better or for worse. And in today's episode, we are going back to the height of the First World War to meet the notorious dancer slash spy slash rubbish spy, to be completely honest. Completely honest, Mata Hari. Was she really the mastermind secret agent who used her sexuality to gain intelligence like the authorities made her out to be?
4:17 Kate Lister? Or was she a scapegoat for something more sinister? Well, taking us back to the beginning of the 20th century to find out about this remarkable woman is the marvellous author and historian Professor Julie Wheelwright. Are we ready? Have I whetted your appetites? Well, all right, let's do this.
4:39 Kate Lister? Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Professor Julie Wheelwright. How are you doing?
4:47 Speaker 02 I'm great, thank you. And I'm, you know, I'm always happy to talk about Mata Hari because she's such an extraordinary and fascinating character.
4:54 Kate Lister? Thank goodness you are, because I'm desperate to know about this woman. This is part of our little mini-series that we have rather wryly titled, "Supersluts", the super slut edition, really trying to quest, look at women who have been titled such, or perhaps not in those terms, but pretty damn close, and asking the question, why? Who were they? And did they deserve such condemnation? And Mata Hari seems to fit right into that.
5:21 Speaker 02 Yeah, absolutely. You know, where to begin with this story? I mean, I think that one of the things about Mata Hari is that she sort of lives out her dream. She is someone who undergoes this extraordinary transformation. And her story is all about her body. And it's about sexuality and it's about how women can take control of that. But at the same time, she's also someone who is very much exploited by men and abused by men. And she also becomes a symbol after, well, actually during the First World War, because she's executed by the French on espionage charges in 1917. And...
6:05 Speaker 02 You know, she's she's executed by a firing squad in Paris. There's no body. Rumors fly around the city about what happened to her. And she becomes this symbol, um, a sort of a kind of dual symbol, I think. One of this sort of almost libertine woman who
6:26 Kate Lister? Yeah.
6:26 Speaker 02 has stood up in a court in Paris and said, yes, I sleep with lots of different men. And so what? It it's a pleasure for me to sleep with different men of different nations and even compare. Um, even compare different nationalities. I mean, that was such a raucously outrageous thing to say.
6:43 Kate Lister? It would be today. Like that, if somebody said that in court today, that would grab a few headlines, wouldn't it?
6:49 Speaker 02 Absolutely, absolutely. And she was really making an important point that she was Dutch. Um, so she came from a country that was neutral during the war. And what she was doing was not illegal. It was also a kind of strategy because i- it was a strategy of deflection because she actually was working for the Germans. And she was, and she was a double agent. So that kind of image of her in sort of in all her splendor. And what, of course, what comes before that is, you know, she was very well known in Paris because she had been on the stage. She'd invented this new form of dancing, which was very risque, which involved taking off her clothes. Um, and, you know, she was very well known in the cell.
7:32 Speaker 02 She was a real fashion icon and would be seen in all the right places, at the Longchamp races, in the theater. Uh, she had things specially designed for her. But at the same time, you know, this is a time of war. Uh, men are dying, people are starving. Um, there's muties on the western front and she's the, she's the absolute antithesis of, for example, a, a figure like Edith Cavell. You know, the nurse who was working for the resistance in, in Belgium and was executed um by the Germans. So you have this kind of, you know, slut, uh, Madonna, you know? And in fact, it is kind of fascinating if you, if you look at the sort of propaganda around these two figures during the war.
8:17 Speaker 02 Because they were compared to each other. So I found a lot of sources where either in newspapers or. Uh, in Germany, the, the, I don't know whether it was propaganda department or war department or whoever it was, but they produced this, um, what was called a magic wallet. And it was given out to women, sort of, you know, to put their money in. And on one side was Mata Hari, a photograph of Mata Hari. And on the other side was a photograph of Ed Cavell. Oh, my god. Yeah, so they were very much compared to each other. And so what happens with Mata Hari's story is that she becomes this kind of iconic figure
8:57 Speaker 02 for the woman who betrays men by sleeping with them and stealing information from them. And this is like an ancient idea. I mean, we can go back to Samson and Delilah, but it takes on this new currency during the war because there's all this fear and anxiety about espionage anyway, which is a sort of relatively new thing. There's this popular figure in French culture and also in British culture of, uh, watch, you know, there's a, a French historian, a Margaret Darrow, who's described this as in France, the woman with the hat, you know, this sort of mysterious figure. And, and Mata Hari is someone who's already living on the kind of edges, partly because,
9:40 Speaker 02 you know, her career on the stage, but also she's divorced. Um, and, you know, she's quite, uh, open about, uh, about being a courtesan. So all of that sort of coheres around this idea of, you know, this is what women do. Women are betrayers of men. This is a bad woman. So much anxiety about, about women's sexuality, but also about women as this sort of unstable, untrustworthy figures during the war. And in fact, during the First World War, that's when we have the beginning of, really the beginning of women's involvement in espionage in a sort of administrative capacity,
10:20 Speaker 02 in an intelligence capacity, but also we have these figures who are, and it's often quite murky, are they sleeping with men for money? I think a lot of that is wildly exaggerated. And we know now that a lot of that. Fantasy can be traced back to Georges Laddoux, who was the head of one of the spy bureaus in France, who actually came up with this idea. He was the one that had proposed this arrangement with Mata Hari.
10:49 Kate Lister? He's a piece of work, isn't he?
10:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, and he also did this with another woman, a Frenchwoman named Martha Richard, who he hired as well. So there's a, so something that's really important about this story is not only that, you know, this fantasy grows up, but how the fantasy grows up. And one of the ways in which that this idea gets out there and stays out there and is still with us today is through Georges Laddoux's writing about Mata Hari and Martha Richard after the war. So there's all these men, sort of ex-agents and spy writers, who really control this narrative. So we have very little from the women themselves. And so, you know, I think that we have to look at what Mata Hari said about herself.
11:36 Speaker 02 Although, one of the problems we have with her is often she lies. But just sort of parsing through her own words and what she understood was going on in terms of what she was doing with men, how she felt about her sexuality, but also how she used it as a sort of vehicle.
11:55 Speaker 02 So women, so many women have to do. But understanding, you know, at that time, women have so few options to support themselves.
12:05 Kate Lister? As far as a bad woman in World War One goes, Mata Hari is ticking a lot of boxes. She is a courtesan. She's a dancer. She's openly promiscuous. She's divorced. She's foreign, if you're French. She is a spy and she becomes iconic of all of these things. They were never going to let her get away with it. But her origin story is considerably humbler than that. So that's where she ends up.
12:35 Kate Lister? Where does she start?
12:36 Speaker 02 Uh, she starts in um a town called Leavarden in Frisland. Uh, in fact, Leavarden is the capital of Frisland, so that's the province in the in the very north of Holland. And her father was a hat maker. And I had this idea that she probably, you know, spent time in his shop and could look at magazines about Paris. And of course, he was importing hats. And so I think that idea of fashion and Paris as well sort of were embedded really early on. And we know from some sort of letters and interviews that were done with her schoolmates that she was she was described as the orchid among the buttercups.
13:16 Speaker 02 So she her father had special clothes made for her, probably made her a lot of, you know, paid her a lot of attention. So she was she was quite flamboyant, you know, wouldn't wear red, for example, sort of quite early on. And then there's a sort of just a series of terrible tragedies that follow. So um her father goes bankrupt, so you know, all the the sort of wonderful special things she had, like she had a goat cart that he had made for her.
13:43 Kate Lister? Oh, yes, I read that. Yes.
13:45 Speaker 02 Yes. Um. So all of those things have suddenly vanished after all this tremendous attention had been paid to her. Um. Her mother, uh, her father goes bankrupt, um, the parents separate, the mother dies of tuberculosis. And so by the age of uh fifteen, um, the family is broken up and the father's just disappeared. And she goes to live with relations.
14:10 Kate Lister? What's her real name, by the way? Not Mata Hari, is it? It's not Mata Hari.
14:16 Speaker 02 Got to mention that. No, her real name was Magretha Gertrude Zella.
14:21 Kate Lister? Not quite as glamorous, but that's.
14:23 Speaker 02 Not quite as glamorous and and a very, a very, um, a very, uh, good, uh, good Dutch name, good Frisian name.
14:30 Kate Lister? Yeah.
14:30 Speaker 02 So she goes to live with um relations. They don't know what to do with her. So they send her off to be um trained to be a kindergarten teacher at Leyden. And what happens at Leyden is there is this sort of rumor, there's a scandal around the headmaster at the school who was recently widowed. There's a scandal that there was some sort of uh sexual encounter between them. And we think, okay, now she's fifteen years old and he's fifty. Um. So we think now, you know, obviously, we would look at that and think, well, you know, there's some sort of sexual exploitation that's gone on. But anyway, I think that's sort of the beginning, the beginning of this sense of kind of carrying
15:13 Speaker 02 on for her father's bankruptcy and the loss of her mother. And also, you know, this is still a time when women were expected to bring, you know, if not a formal dowry, but some sort of uh money or reputation or something in order to affect a a good respectable marriage.
15:34 Kate Lister? Yeah.
15:34 Speaker 02 And and she had very few options by this point. Um. She also left school at fourteen, so you know, she's not got much education to fall back on.
15:44 Kate Lister? Did she have to leave school because of this encounter with the headmaster? Is that why she
15:48 Speaker 02 Well, she she left the kindergarten school, yes, and of course was blamed for that. Um. So what she does is she she um accepts a lonely hearts ad um.
16:01 Kate Lister? That sounds very modern.
16:04 Speaker 02 Yes, it does, doesn't it?
16:06 Kate Lister? She swiped right.
16:07 Speaker 02 Uh. She swiped right. Yes, this is her. This is her Tinder moment. Um. So she goes to meet a a man named Rudolph MacLeod at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. And um, you know, it's kind of a whirlwind romance. They meet in February, they're engaged by March, and by July they're married. Um.
16:27 Kate Lister? Oh, you feel like you want to be there and go, slow down, slow down, Marguerite, just come back for a second, calm down.
16:32 Speaker 02 Yes, yes, exactly. But I but I think there's, you know, I mean, perhaps they really did fall madly in love, but it's also convenient for both of them because he's uh he's an officer in the Dutch army, he's home on leave, he's twice her age as well, and you know, she's beautiful. Um.
16:52 Speaker 02 So she's thinking financial security, um, you know, and let's.
16:56 Kate Lister? I can understand that.
16:57 Speaker 02 It's very easy to read father figure in there as well.
17:00 Kate Lister? It is. And she needs security by the sounds of it. Her dad's gone bankrupt, her mum's died, she's left school. She doesn't have any security at this point.
17:10 Speaker 02 Absolutely. And also, one of the things that's um really fascinating about the letters um that survive, uh there was a wonderful cache of letters that was published in twenty seventeen. Um, and they, she describes how she had this sense of losing her respectability and she wanted to get that back. She wanted to be a respectable woman. But she's kind of two people because there's also this part of her that wants to go on the stage and um, you know, is glamorous and flamboyant and really attracted to an artistic life. So she meets uh MacLeod, they whirlwind romance, they have a uh son Norman.
17:52 Speaker 02 And then they head off to the Dutch East Indies, um so to Java and Sumatra, which is where he is stationed. And um that's a really, really important period in her life, partly because she has another child. And both of those children are poisoned. We don't quite know what happened. But uh poor Norman, who just at at age, I think he was only two, dies. So this is another moment of horrendous tragedy for her. Um, but I think that this is a moment where, I mean, she's obviously, she's very interested in amateur dramatic. She joins a local am drum society.
18:35 Speaker 02 Um, but she's also very curious and very observant of the local culture and in Java and Sumatra, she observes the temple, the temple dances. Um, and uh, you know, your street music, and I think that all of that comes very, very influential in who she later becomes.
19:06 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Julie and Mata Hari after this short break.
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19:55 Kate Lister? Why do you think that the children were poisoned? What, what happened there?
20:00 Speaker 02 Well, we don't know, but we, we do know that there was a culture of indigenous women in Javan Sumatra. They were known as, they were hired as what called naias. So they were, would, would be hired to look after the children. But they were also housekeepers and sometimes what would, what took place was that there were sexual relationships between the Dutch officers and these women who after time would come to live as their wives. But if they went home on leave and they brought a wife back, a Dutch wife back, who obviously had much greater status, then these women would be sort of relegated back to the role of housekeeper.
20:41 Speaker 02 Sometimes they even had their own children who would live as part of that family.
20:46 Kate Lister? God.
20:46 Speaker 02 So it's very possible, I mean, again, we don't have concrete evidence, but it is quite possible to believe that one of these women was. Taking revenge, perhaps. Um. The other explanation that that has historians have discussed is that we know that um Rudolf suffered from venereal disease.
21:07 Kate Lister? Um.
21:08 Speaker 02 And that she suggests, Mata Hari suggests in her letters to this relation of hers much later on, uh, that the children were being treated with mercury, which was one of the sort of standard treatments for the treatment of venereal disease. And that um that Norman may have been poisoned through that treatment and not survived.
21:30 Kate Lister? So Norman dies.
21:31 Speaker 02 Norman dies, so yet another terrible tragedy. Um. And then Rudolf decides to retire in nineteen hundred and then they come back to the Netherlands in nineteen O two with Non, their surviving child. Um. But it doesn't last.
21:46 Kate Lister? Is it a happy marriage?
21:47 Speaker 02 No, it's a miserable marriage and he's very, he's very abusive.
21:52 Kate Lister? Oh, no.
21:54 Speaker 02 Um. She recounts uh many instances of domestic abuse. I mean, this is from her point of view, so we don't have his point of view. But I think that things happen later in terms of their story that suggests that, yeah, he he probably was very abusive to her. So they come back and she immediately leaves. The other uh driving thing for Mata Hari to leave um to go to Paris is money. Um. She's always short of money and this is something which is a a motivation for her to do a lot of things in her life. She wants respectability, she wants stability,
22:34 Speaker 02 but she also needs cash. So they divorce and even though a a Dutch court awards her both the custody of Non and alimony, uh, MacLeod pleads poverty and um I think he gives her a bit of money at first, but you know, she she has to make a living somehow because he's not going to support her. So she says, uh, that's why she went to Paris. So again, I mentioned these letters that were published in nineteen seventeen and they're so revealing. About so many different aspects, not just of her story, but they tell us a lot about what it was like for women on the stage, um, women uh of the demi monde, women who wanted to be artists, who didn't have
23:18 Speaker 02 family support at that time. Uh, so she, so what, what does she do? Well, she goes to Paris, sets herself up, um, puts in ads to newspapers to do things like teaching German lessons or
23:32 Kate Lister? Okay.
23:33 Speaker 02 piano lessons, or she's really wants to become a mannequin, so these are the early models. Um, first catwalk in Paris is nineteen, nineteen oh eight, so she's really attracted to all of that. And it doesn't happen, what she, but where she does get work is as an artist model in Monart.
23:51 Kate Lister? Okay. What about her daughter? Did, was she with her when she's doing this?
23:55 Speaker 02 So she's trying really hard um to make a living because she wants to have her daughter with her. Her daughter is sort of farmed out to live with relations and
24:07 Kate Lister? Right.
24:07 Speaker 02 family friends at that point. Um, she remains in Holland and and Mata doesn't have much contact with her. And but, but you know, if we go back to this idea that, you know, she's really two people.
24:20 Kate Lister? Hmm.
24:21 Speaker 02 And again, we can see this so clearly in the letters. Um, she knows that if she goes on the stage, she will lose any chance of being ever regarded as a respectable woman. And she also realizes that um the chances of getting Non back, you know, are, are, are pretty miniscule because, I mean, it's, it's really interesting because she said, she's sort of saying i- i- in these letters to, to, in fact, it's to Rudolf's relation. Um, that she wants respectability and she wants Non to have respectability. She wants her to have a good and proper life. Um, and she knows she can't provide that for her, partly because she doesn't have the money.
25:06 Speaker 02 But also if, if she, as she describes, goes down the road to perdition, then that won't be acceptable. She doesn't want Non to have any. Anything to do with that world. So the choices are pretty stark.
25:18 Kate Lister? God, they are, aren't they? And she does eventually end up on the stage. And was it the film Gypsy Rosely where they say you've got to have a gimmick if you wanna make it on the stage? And what's the gimmick that Marguerite comes up with and and births Mata Hari?
25:37 Speaker 02 So she is appearing at salons in Paris. So she's meeting people, she's meeting the right people. And also she she made a lot of contacts through her work as an artist model. And she was also going for auditions. So just before I get to the gimmick, I just wanted to mention that one of the things she talks about is a casting couch.
25:59 Kate Lister? Oh, wow.
26:00 Speaker 02 So it was extraordinary when these letters were published in twenty seventeen because I was actually in Leaverton because the Fries Museum is having a big exhibition to mark the hundred, the other centenary since Mata Hari's execution in Paris. And it was just when, you know, all the stories about Me Too were beginning and Harvey Weinstein and and I just couldn't believe how stark the parallels were between what Mata Hari was describing in Paris in nineteen oh three and what some of the the victim survivors of Harvey Weinstein.
26:39 Kate Lister? What what does she say happened to her then?
26:42 Speaker 02 She would go to auditions and they'd say, well, you know, you've got a very pretty voice. But, you know, I expect something in return. It was very blatant. And one of the the artists that she sits for was named Ferdinand Cormor, who had a very significant atelier artist school in Montr. And he tells her as well, you know, this is what I'll pay you for sitting as an artist model, but I'll pay you a whole lot more. And you can make a lot of money, you know, if you do these little favors for for me and for my clients. So again, you know, it's very clear that this is a transactional relationship. And she kind of holds out, but.
27:24 Speaker 02 You know, at times she has no money, um not just no money, but also her uh in her mind, her choices are either going back to Amsterdam and the humiliation of that and also being broke. And what is she, what is she going to do there?
27:41 Kate Lister? Yeah.
27:41 Speaker 02 Or staying in Paris and kind of following this dream. So she through her contacts, through her artist's contacts, she meets a man, Monsieur Guimay, who is an industrialist and he has a museum, which is devoted to Asiatic art. And he regards himself as an educationalist and he's travelled all over Asia. And he travelled with an artist, um and the artist made all these drawings of dances that he had observed um in in uh India, um amongst other Asian countries. And so they together, they come up with this performance. And the performance was, you know, she's going to appear as Mata Hari and she's going to educate
28:25 Speaker 02 the Parisian elite about Asiatic religion and art. And so he lends her these beautiful costumes and the jewels and she dances in the sort of marble, on the marble floor with its marble pillars and a and a statue of Shiva and she's got her hand maidens around her, there's incense flowing. And Paris is just, wow, you know, it's a huge, she's a huge overnight success.
28:54 Kate Lister? You'd never ever get away with it today. A white woman from Amsterdam pretending to be a temple dancer from Indonesia. You'd never get away with it. That was, you would be slammed for it. But at the time, oh, it's terribly exotic. Oh.
29:08 Speaker 02 It was terribly exotic and also she was showing off her gorgeous body. I mean, that was, that was part of it too.
29:15 Kate Lister? And she is gorgeous. You can Google pictures of her and you can see her in her full Mata Hari regalia. And you can understand why that was a sensation at the time.
29:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, well, you know, this is one of the things that I find so interesting about women of this period. Um, so Mata Hari was so aware of how to promote herself. I mean, she was really good at it. You know, she understood that you get good studio photographs. Um, you have postcards made, uh, you're seen in all the right places. And so there was a kind of system at the time where, you know, if you were a woman of the theatre, a woman of the stage, uh, you could go to a dress designer, for example, and, you know, make an arrangement that you would be seen in public wearing their design. So it was a form of advertising, really.
30:07 Kate Lister? Again, very modern.
30:08 Speaker 02 Absolutely, very modern, very modern. And so she does have her moment in, you know, skipping the light fantastic and.
30:16 Kate Lister? She's in that, that Belle Époque era of Paris where it's like the, the good times are with us. It's a time of sexual liberation, the courtesans, the Moulin Rouge, the Prince of Wales is over admiring the Can Can Girls, Talos Latrek is there, it's absinthe. And Mata Hari is right at the centre of that. And at that moment, she fits right in. That's exactly what's wanted at the time. Doesn't last.
30:42 Speaker 02 No, it doesn't last. It doesn't last. And, uh, so what is also going on is that she's making a lot of money for a short period of time. And then she's spending a lot of money.
30:56 Kate Lister? See, that's the lesson is learn to save, save your money, ladies.
31:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. Well, I, I think that she's just someone who really is very bad at managing her life in that sense. And I, and I, I sort of get the sense as well of her character, that she's someone who lives in this kind of fantasy world and she just goes with the flow and she just kind of does whatever is, is happening at the moment. She doesn't plan. She's not strategic in any sense, um, except for, you know, this element of being very good at managing her image. Um, and I'm sure there were a lot of other people around who were helpful in doing that. Um. So she's kind of got top billing for a few years and then things, things, you know, she falls, she, she falls down the playbill.
31:44 Speaker 02 And when she has these periods where her debts are mounting up and the money's not coming in, that is when she is operating as a courtesan. So I think, you know, we need to kind of open up the concept of the courtesan here. Um, Kate, and I'm sure you know a lot about this, about this concept too. Um, so these were women who were not, they were not working in a brothel, they were not walking the streets, but they were their own managers, I guess, if you will. And my sense with Mata is it's quite casual. And really what she was after was she was after a man who was going to pay for a nice flat and pay for her clothes and take her out.
32:25 Speaker 02 And, you know, there was that culture, you know, it was an entire entitlement of elite men at the time, that they could be seen in public and certainly engage in private with mistresses. And that's what happened to her.
32:38 Kate Lister? She manages to land some pretty big names as well, if the stories are to be believed.
32:43 Speaker 02 Yes, uh, Potini being one of them. Yes. And also, uh, she did seem to have a bit of a penchant for officers. So one of her former lovers had been the minister of war. So the minister of war before the war had begun in nineteen fourteen. So, you know, she was, she was also sort of moving amongst diplomats, um, but a lot, a lot of men in uniform for some reason. And yeah, I mean, I don't know, maybe it was a bit of a cocking the snoot at, at McLeod, who knows?
33:17 Kate Lister? Oh God, yeah. Oh, maybe it was. Maybe it was. So she's, she's what would later become known as an international woman. She, um, she's traveling all over the place and she's meeting men from different backgrounds and, uh, different circumstances. And it's all kind of, it's just sort of part of, part of the course. But then the war arrives and suddenly that isn't okay anymore.
33:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, uh, one of the things I was sort of looking into recently was just how much time she spent in Austria and Germany before the war. I mean, she was, she was the mistress of a very um high ranking German officer before the war, that that relationship had ended, but she did spend a lot of time in Berlin. She spoke, uh, she spoke German very well. So she's in Berlin when the war breaks out, uh, and she is ironically, she's regarded as um a foreign enemy because she has spent so much time in France and she's listed Paris as her residence, which indeed it was at the time. So she's, she's really in a difficult position because the German government has frozen her bank account.
34:30 Speaker 02 She's in Berlin because she's meant to be staging this big comeback, um, which was called Profane Vision. So she was booked in to do this long run at, at the Metropolitan Theatre. And so none of that is happening, but she spent money uh on her costumes and she's also spent, you know, she owes a lot of people a lot of money. Hmm. And so her, her jeweler and her um furrier just withhold, you know, they say, well, you're not getting your, your things back until you've paid us. So she's got no money and where's she going to go? The other thing is she, obviously she can't go back to Paris, that suddenly has become incredibly complicated. So she goes back to Holland.
35:14 Speaker 02 And there's one story which, which sort of illustrates just, I don't know, I mean, maybe you've come across this Kate, like, women who are, they're just so ingenious. There's a kind of madness, almost madness to their ability to invent and imagine and it kind of gets them out of a scrape, but it creates another. Oh, yeah. Which is great for them. Okay, so she goes, she goes, she finds herself in Amsterdam, she hasn't got any money. She knows people and one of the the men that she hooks up with is uh so she she goes into a church um probably because there's nowhere else to go and she's trying to figure out what the hell to do and this man comes up to her and says assumes for some reason that she's she's
35:59 Speaker 02 not Dutch that you know she's a foreigner and she tells him that she's Russian and um
36:06 Kate Lister? The hustle, the hustle is spectacular.
36:08 Speaker 02 This whole story and anyway they they they develop a relationship and she gets enough money from that relationship to sort of set herself up in Amsterdam but the person who was really important to her during that period uh was um a Dutch officer named uh he was also a Baron van der Capellen and he sets her up in a little flat in the Hague and she's got enough money through the support of Baron van der Capellen also to to rehire Anna Lynchens her her maid who also again you know digging back into this story recently realized just how important a character she was um so she set herself up uh but again you know money you
36:50 Speaker 02 know she's got money from the Baron but um there's a lot of different things going on for her partly she doesn't really want to be in the Netherlands she finds it quite dull she's tried to stage a bit of a comeback that's not worked um and also it's I think it's incredibly uncomfortable for her to be in a small country with her ex-husband.
37:10 Kate Lister? Oh yes, I'd forgotten about him.
37:12 Speaker 02 Well and also her daughter who's now at school and who she doesn't see as she's not allowed to see there's been a very strange relationship and also there's a lot of people who know her and they're all living very close by and so it's very difficult for her to be anyone other than the divorced wife of Rudolf MacLeod and a sort of a failed Parisian performer whatever whatever you want to attach to that but it's not it's not good and her choices are very limited.
37:54 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Julie and Mata Hari after this short break.
38:02 Kate Lister? Hello Betwixters, I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixter Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that.
38:31 Kate Lister? Right, let's get on with it.
38:44 Kate Lister? How old is she at this point? She's sort of in her late 30s, is she?
38:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
38:48 Kate Lister? Not old by today's standards, but this is 1914 and she's on the stage.
38:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly. So she's reaching that, that dangerous age of 40.
38:59 Kate Lister? Yeah.
38:59 Speaker 02 Considered old by then. Yeah, so what is she going to do? And so one of the things that, that happens is that she's approached by the man who was the, one of the German consuls. He meets her and says, well, we know that you're planning on going to Paris again. So she'd, she'd done a trip in 1915, just going back in 1916. And I have to sort of caveat all of this by saying there's different versions of this story. But she was approached by the Germans, probably through this consul in The Hague, which is where she's living at the time. And it was suggested to her or, and she agreed to provide information to the Germans.
39:44 Speaker 02 About the French.
39:45 Kate Lister? Why did she do this, do you think?
39:48 Speaker 02 Money, money, money, money. That was the reason why she did it. I don't think she had strong patriotic feelings. Um, I think that she was a woman who lived in the moment. She didn't sort of see beyond how she's going to pay the bills for the next month, let alone the next year. And her life is chaotic.
40:06 Kate Lister? It is, isn't it? It's, she is a hot mess, as they might say today.
40:09 Speaker 02 She is a hot mess, yeah. And one of the, one of the most revealing um pieces of evidence I found about her life at that time was um an MI5. There's an MI5 file on Matahari, sort of opens after the war. And there's a little clipping of a sale of her her furniture from this flat she had in The Hague. And it's really gaudy. I mean, well, that's my opinion. But sort of French furniture, sort of 18th century French furniture, all heavy stuff. The kind of thing that you might find in a boudoir.
40:47 Kate Lister? Okay.
40:49 Speaker 02 But expensive, really expensive stuff. So game, you know, she's not, she's not looking after her pennies.
40:55 Kate Lister? She's spending beyond her means. She, she's a woman who is running out of options because she, she's made her career and her money on the stage and by attracting men. And she's now cruising towards 40. And as we've said, that's not old, but at the time, that was certainly regarded as old. And now she's got an update. It's so stupid, though. You just want to grab her and just go, no, come on. So what does she agree to do?
41:22 Speaker 02 So she actually um goes to Cologne, um and she's trained there. And um there's, she's actually, one of her trainers was another woman, uh Dr Elizabeth Schragmuller, who was much younger than Matahari. And uh Schragmuller observes her. Schragmuller is very serious. She has a, she's one of the first women to get her PhD in Germany. She has a PhD in political science. And she has volunteered for this gig. She's actually running uh an espionage bureau in Antwerp. So she's a very serious, very important person, very important intelligence officer. And they're both staying at the Dom Hotel
42:03 Speaker 02 in Cologne. I don't know whether they were sharing a room or not, but wow, the pajama party element would be great, wouldn't it? So she's observing her and actually says, you know, she's, she's very, very good. Uh, she's very gregarious, she's very flamboyant, she's very charming. And all of those qualities could make a good agent. Um, but she's a loose cannon and she doesn't, so that she's given these, the secret ink and she doesn't wanna use it. She doesn't like it, it's all a bit techie and, you know, she says that she threw them into the canal outside of her home in The Hague. Um, and it's true, she never did use the secret inks. When she was um, asked by the French, when her prosecutors asked her why she agreed to spy for the Germans.
42:48 Speaker 02 Because of course they do find out eventually, she agreed to spy for the Germans for the money. But then she agreed to spy for the French because the Germans never repaid her for the money that they owed her.
43:00 Kate Lister? Oh, no. So she goes back to France thinking she's gonna be a German spy and then ends up go- trying to spy for the French on the Germans as well. This isn't a sensible idea. None of this is a sensible idea.
43:14 Speaker 02 No, none of it is sensible. So, you know, she's someone who kind of wanders into this. My, my sense of her really is, you know, again, you know, it's, it's grabbing on to something that's going to, that's going to solve a problem for her, a financial problem.
43:29 Kate Lister? She just does stuff, doesn't she? She just sort of wanders around just accepting things and just, yeah, yeah, I'll do that, I'll do that, I'll do that. There isn't a lot of forethoughts in this.
43:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, and actually, I kind of understand it with her because I think that, you know, she went to Paris nineteen oh two, nineteen oh three. She had nothing, she wasn't even trained as a dancer. And she made, like, and then she's dancing at La Scala. I mean, you know, she was this huge star. And I think that maybe she thought she could do it again, she could pull off another big coup.
44:01 Kate Lister? Yeah.
44:02 Speaker 02 And maybe in her mind, it was all part of the same thing, you know, these, these boundaries between performer, courtesan, maybe even wife, a spy, they're all completely porous as far as she's concerned.
44:17 Kate Lister? How does she get busted? Because she does get busted and really busted.
44:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a very long and complicated story, her involved with espionage, but I'll try and make it really simple. When she goes to Paris in 1916, she falls in love with a young Russian officer named Vadim Maslov.
44:39 Kate Lister? Say no more. We've got the picture. There's a young handsome Russian officer. It's all gonna go wrong now.
44:44 Speaker 02 Yep, absolutely. And she wants to visit him. He, he's been injured. He's sort of given some time off. He's on leave in a place called Vitelle. She wants to go and visit him, but because it's near the war zone, near the frontier, she has to get a special pass from Georges Ladoux, rather the police, but she goes to the police station and they introduce her to Georges Ladoux, who we will remember is this key figure in terms of, he's running one of the spy bureaus, the French spy bureaus. So he sits her down and says, hmm, we understand that, you know, you've got these amazing contacts. Obviously, you're Dutch, so you could go to Belgium. And they concoct this kind of mission
45:29 Speaker 02 where she's going to go to Brussels and seduce the Crown Prince of Germany. And for that, she's going to be paid a million francs. It's never gonna happen. This is a crazy idea. But her eyes light up at the idea of a million francs. And so in order to get back to Holland and start this mission so that she can get to Belgium, she has to go via the UK. And the British are already on to her. I mean, they've been on to her since 1915. They consider her very suspicious. She's picked up, she's interrogated, she contradicts herself. Then instead of sending her back to Holland, allowing her to proceed back to Holland,
46:09 Speaker 02 they send her to Spain. So this would be the normal wartime route. If you were going back to France, you'd have to go via Spain so that you could take the train from Madrid. It sounds crazy, but that's, that was the way of, of the Western Front. Um. So she finds herself in Madrid and she thinks, well, I'm going to capitalize on the fact that I'm here and I'm going to seek out the German military attache, which she does. Um. And again, this is a, you know, her, her interrogation sort of reveals, illuminates something about her, how she saw herself as a courtesan, how she saw herself as a seductress.
46:49 Speaker 02 Um. And it, it sounds quite comical to us now, but what she did was she says she played with her feet and she accepted a cigarette. And that, those, those were sort of, that was code for, yeah, I'm up for it. Um. And this German officer, Calais, uh, does pay her, but actu- actually at the same time, what we now know is that because she was a German agent, this, this exchange is much more murky. And what she's doing is she's giving him information that he, she wants him to send on to the Germans by telegram.
47:25 Kate Lister? Julie, she, she is a crap spy. This, she's like the one.
47:29 Speaker 02 She's a crap spy.
47:30 Kate Lister? She's, this isn't, this is not good spying. This is awful spying. She's spying for anyone who asks her and then telling everybody if this is not good spying.
47:39 Speaker 02 No, no. And she, and because she lies and she contradicts herself, that's even, you know, sending up red flags everywhere.
47:47 Kate Lister? Oh, no.
47:48 Speaker 02 But, and she might have gotten away with it, actually, if, if, um, she hadn't, well, there were two important things that happened. One is that, uh, the, the Germans are sending telegrams from Madrid to Berlin and the British and the, and the French are intercepting them. So they know that she's been to see, um, Calais, they know that she's in Madrid, giving the Germans information. So all of that is deeply problematic. Um. And then the other thing that happens is that she decides that she's going to go back to Paris and, because she's writing letters to Ladoux, she's, and, and this is another thing, she writes letters
48:29 Speaker 02 in what was called plain ink, so not secret ink, puts them in the post at the hotel where she's staying. The hotel is full of spies. Of course, they read the correspondence. All that gets back to Ladoux.
48:41 Kate Lister? Terrible spy.
48:43 Speaker 02 A terrible spy. So at the beginning of nineteen seventeen, she arrives back in Paris. Ledoux refuses to see her. Vadim is nowhere in sight. She's running out of money. She's seeing a lot of men. Uh, because she's got to pay her hotel bills and even then it's not enough. And then in February nineteen seventeen, she's picked up. Uh, by the French and is taken off to, um, well, she's taken off to prison. And a series of interrogations begin.
49:15 Kate Lister? By Ledoux, was it?
49:17 Speaker 02 And. No, it wasn't Ledoux. It was, um, a man named Captain Pierre Bouchardon.
49:23 Kate Lister? Oh, that's, and he hated her, didn't he?
49:26 Speaker 02 Yes.
49:27 Kate Lister? He loathed her. He's just, I've read his descriptions of her and it is just vile.
49:34 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. He had also just recently found out that his wife was having an affair, so. He wasn't well disposed to women in general, I think.
49:43 Kate Lister? No.
49:44 Speaker 02 But, but it, but the, the case is so interesting because, well, it's interesting on lots of different levels, but. Yeah, she was, as we've been discussing, she was a pretty crap spy. I mean, they had enough to prosecute her. But what tended to happen in these cases is, I mean, she could well have been prosecuted and found guilty and spent. The rest of the war in prison and then let, been let go, but she was such, um, a potent scapegoat.
50:14 Kate Lister? Yeah.
50:15 Speaker 02 So we kind of return to the beginning of our conversation where, you know, we're thinking about this woman who is divorced. She's, uh, been a courtesan, she's been on the stage, she's standing up in a court and talking about how she likes to compare. You know, the sexual prowess of different.
50:33 Kate Lister? And and all of these things were kind of cool and edgy in the Belle Epoque, but they're not now. It's like that. It's like when you get tone deaf influencers in like when the economy is shut all to hell and people lose. Are using food banks and, you know, don't have jobs and they're there with their Gucci bag haul going like, hi, I've just been. I've just been picked up a Birkin and people are watching it like, what on earth are you doing? That's kind of where she is now is is the excess and the luxuriousness of her life does not play well during the First World War. Cause people are really struggling.
51:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I think I think that, you know, she was also such a fantasist that I think that right up until the end, she thought she was going to get pardoned. And so that's one way of thinking about this, but also I think the other possibility is that she kind of knew. She had nowhere to go. I mean, it's a Thelma and Louise moment. There's nowhere to go.
51:29 Kate Lister? Yeah, I hadn't even thought of it like that. Yeah.
51:32 Speaker 02 So she kind of is prepared to jump off the cliff and she refuses a blindfold at the at the execution. She blows kisses to the soldiers.
51:41 Kate Lister? Is that true? Did she really do that? Because or is that like more of the mythology?
51:45 Speaker 02 I think so. I mean, with this story, one of the things that's always really difficult to get at is what actually happened? Because we have to rely on the report of sometimes unreliable witnesses. So the press were not allowed to attend that the execution. And so you can imagine some of the people who the the military officers who were allowed to attend um had. You know, they're they're the ones that got their story out and that's one of the stories that came out. And the officer who'd written this, he describes her falling into nothing more harmful than a heap of petticoats. Which um I think was just kind of an astonishing image.
52:28 Speaker 02 But then what happens is, you know, nobody comes forward to claim the body because it's just too dangerous. They don't want to be associated with this enemy of the state. Um so it's it's donated to a medical school, but then there are all these rumours flying around Paris that, you know, she was actually rescued by a man on a white charger, I mean, literally a man on a white charger coming through the woods. Or that, you know, I I kept finding stories from newspapers in the nineteen thirties, a bit like Elvis, you know. Um she didn't die and she's living on an island in the South Seas and.
53:02 Kate Lister? It's part just part of that mystique that she created all of her life, isn't it? Is it's part of the the fantasy? But she rea- but she really was shot and her body really was donated to science, I suppose.
53:14 Speaker 02 Yes, it was, yeah.
53:16 Kate Lister? Was she ever buried? Anywhere was the body ever claimed? Does she have somewhere? Like, no, nothing?
53:21 Speaker 02 No, and there's something really tragic. Well, we've talked about the tragedy of her early life, but, you know, I just feel she's such a tragic figure because she could have been, she really was an extraordinary. She had something. I think she was an extraordinarily courageous woman in some ways. I think that, um. You know, her dances, I think, have been sort of dismissed as mu- musical nonsense, but um I interviewed a a French dance historian and said, no, in fact, the dances that she invented, you know, have even taken on a new life quite recently and they continue to be performed in in in music halls and in theatres in France, you know, ever since, so.
54:04 Kate Lister? I mean, in in one way, what a dramatic exit, right? I mean, that's that that her whole life was about theatre and drama and creating a scene.
54:16 Kate Lister? Maybe that was, maybe that, not the way that she would wanna go, no one wants to go like that, but it seems like a fittingly dramatic ending to this life.
54:24 Speaker 02 Yes, and, and I think that she would probably be thrilled that we're still talking about her today.
54:29 Kate Lister? She would be, she absolutely would be. So for your money is a final question, because I have heard people arguing the toss about this, is was she a spy? Was she guilty of what she was charged with?
54:40 Speaker 02 I think she was guilty of what she was charged with, and let's face it, you know, she's, she's tried by court martial, she didn't, they didn't need a whole great heap of evidence for that. But I think that the punishment, there's a big question about the punishment, why was she executed? They didn't need to execute her. I mean, the French did execute other women, but you know, it's quite late on in the war, they tended to stop executing women later on in the war. So I think that we cannot get away from the fact that she was such a potent political figure, and that was exploited.
55:14 Kate Lister? Yeah.
55:15 Speaker 02 And continued to be exploited for, well, I don't know, maybe it's still being exploited now. Because it's really hard to get the truth about this story out there. I mean, people want to believe in the fiction.
55:26 Kate Lister? Well, they do, don't they? And so just to return briefly to, to the premise of this little mini-series, super sluts. She's a difficult one to deal with because she did seem to inhabit that. She seemed to, to revel in it and use it defensively and she openly, yes, I've had lots of lovers, what of it?
55:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, but, but I think that also she had a kind of meaning for women, because I, I think that men and women have read this story differently. I mean, if you want to sort of think about these sort of big gender categories, and I think that she was really inspirational to other women later on. Um, because I found lots of women writing about her during the Second World War and saying, you know.
56:12 Kate Lister? Oh, that's interesting. So we could say Mata Hari, self-proclaimed super slut, crap spy.
56:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that would work. I'd go with that.
56:22 Kate Lister? Julie, you've been wonderful to talk to. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
56:29 Speaker 02 Well, I have a website. You can visit me there. And I'm also going to be talking at Bletchley Park in October. And you can go to the Bletchley Park website and see details for my talk.
56:41 Kate Lister? Fabulous. Thank you so much for bringing her to life. You've just been wonderful.
56:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, I've really enjoyed it. Thank you, Kate.
56:52 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Julie for joining us. And if you like what you heard, you know the drill. Don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is you get your podcasts. If you've already done it, just unlike it and then re-like it again. So you know, you've done your bit. Coming up, we've got episodes on sex work in Alaska and the final instalment of this little mini series on history's super sluts, all coming your way. And if you'd like us to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodorov and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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