My curiously constructed nature, however, called for sentiment. Mata Hari was the one exception she was handsome as a queen, fascinating, intelligent, beautiful. In my unusual career I met many so-called “bad women,” but although it may sound an extraordinary thing to say, I believe I can truthfully state that I never met a “bad woman” who had not some redeeming feature of self-sacrifice, love, or affection that ran like a golden cord through her life. The only reason I escaped falling a victim to her toils, as far better and cleverer men had done, was simply and solely because as a beautiful woman-she had no heart. Of all the remarkable women my profession caused me to meet, I must give an unique place to Mata Hari, and I think if I cannot class her as the most beautiful, I can claim that she was the most bewitching, the most fascinating, and the most dangerous. I knew her under her many names of Madame Zelle, Mata Hari, Baroness von Mingen, and in the latter stage of her life when during the War she posed as a neutral under the name of Madame van Hontin. I met this extraordinary woman several times. Today we hear from that popular society palm-reader and seer “ Cheiro” about his observations of that lady and the prediction of her death he claimed to have made when she first moved to Paris in the early 1900s. Was she really a highly effective German spy or merely a fantasist who spun tales of espionage along with her exotic origin story?
It is the death-anniversary of the endlessly fascinating Mata Hari.
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