Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Supersluts of History: First World War Spy Mata Hari

Episode Date: June 19, 2026

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, author of The Fatal Lover: Mata Hari and the Myth of Women in Espionage. Find out about her upcoming talk about Mata Hari here.This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.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/1WtevPqsQ9ecjK2BrXnbFsudhYHzJU6hBI’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/Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back to Betwicks 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. My adults, other adults, bad, adulty things in an adulty way. Covering an range of adults, a bricks, new to be an adult too. Do you feel safer? I certainly feel safer. right, let's crack on.

It's 1916 and Europe is at war. So I thought, why not a little interrailing? 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 luggagees 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, Matterhari. 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 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 Matter Harry 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. 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, matter harry. Was she really the mastermind secret agent who used her sexuality to gain intelligence like the authorities made her out to be? 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 and Professor Julie Wheelwright. Are we ready? Have I wetted

your appetites? Well, all right, let's do this. Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Professor Julie Wheelwright. How are you doing? I'm great. Thank you. And I'm always happy to talk about Matari because she's such an extraordinary and fascinating character. 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 rightly titled Super Sluts, 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 Matahari seems to fit right into that. Yeah, absolutely. You know, where to begin with this story. I mean, I think that one of the

things about Matari 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 was 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, you know, 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, a sort of a kind of dual symbol, I think. One of this sort of almost libertine woman who has stood up in a court in Paris and said, yes, I sleep with lots of different men. And so what?

It's a pleasure for me to sleep with different men of different. nations and even compare, even compare different nationalities. I mean, that was such a raucously outrageous thing to say. It would be today. If somebody said that in court today, that would grab a few headlines, wouldn't it? Absolutely. Absolutely. And she was really making an important point that she was Dutch. 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 it was a strategy of deflection because she actually was working for the Germans and she was a double agent. So that kind of image of her in sort of in all her splendor and 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. And, you know, she was very well known in the cellul. She was a real fashion icon and would be seen in all the right places at the La Choir races in the theatre. She had things specially designed for her. But at the same time, you know, this is a time of war. Men are dying, people are starving. There's mutis on the Western Front. And she's the absolute antithesis. of, for example, a figure like Edith Cavell, you know, the nurse who was working for the resistance in Belgium and was executed by the Germans. So you have this kind of, you know, slut Madonna, you know, and in fact, it's kind of fascinating if you look at the sort of propaganda around these two figures during the war because they were compared to each other.

So I found a lot of sources where either in newspapers or in Germany, I don't know whether it was propaganda department or war department or whoever it was, but they produced this 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 Matahari, photograph of Matahari. And on the other side was a photograph of Ed Caval. Oh my God. Yeah, so they were very much compared to each other. And so what happens with Matari's story is that she becomes this kind of iconic figure 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 which, you know, there's 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 Matahari is someone who's already living on the kind of edges, partly because, you know, her career on the state, but also

she's divorced. And, you know, she's quite open about, about, about, being a cortisan. So all of that sort of coeres around this idea of, you know, this is what women do. Women are betrayers of men. And there's so much anxiety 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, 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 Ladoux, who is 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 Matahari. He's a piece of work, isn't he? Yeah, and he also did this with another woman, a Frenchwoman named Martha Mischard, who he hired as well. 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 this idea gets out there and stays out there and is still with us. today is through George Ladu's writing about Matahari 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 Matari said about herself, although one of the problems we have with her is often she lies. But just sort of parsing through her own words and what. 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 so many women have to do. But understanding, you know, at that time, women has so few options to support themselves. As far as a bad woman in World War I goes, Matahari 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. Where does she start? She starts in a town called Leavardin in Friesla. In fact, Levard is the capital of Friesland. So that's the province in the very north of Holland.

And her father was a hat maker. And I have 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 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 so 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's quite flamboyant you know 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 her father goes bankrupt so you know all the the sort of wonderful special things she had like she had the goat cart that he had made for her. Oh, yes, I read that. Yes.

Yes. So all of those things had suddenly vanished after all this tremendous attention had been paid to her. Her mother, her father goes bankrupt. The parents separate. The mother dies of tuberculosis. And so by the age of 15, the family is broken up and the father's just disappeared. And she goes to live with relations.

What's her real name, by the way? Not Matter Harri, is it? It's not Matter Harri. Got to mention that. No, her real name was Margueretta Gertrude Zella. Not quite as glamorous, but that's still quite as crittiness. And a very, a very good Dutch name, good Frisian name. Yeah.

So she goes to live with relations. They don't know what to do with her. So they send her off to be trained to be a kindergarten teacher. at Leiden. And what happens at Leiden 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 sexual encounter between them. And we think, okay, now she's 15 years old.

And he's 50. 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 caring 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 money or reputation or something in order to affect a good respectable marriage. And she had very few options by this point.

She also left school at 14, so she's not got much education to fall back on. Did she have to leave school because of this encounter with the headmaster? Is that where she had to leave school? Well, she left the kindergarten school, yes, and of course was blamed for that. So what she does is she accepts a lonely hearts ad. That sounds very modern. Yes, it does, doesn't it? She swiped right.

She's wiped, right. Yes, this is her Tinder moment. So she goes to meet a man named Rudolf McLeod at the Hrakes Museum in Amsterdam. And, you know, it's kind of a whirlwind romance. They meet in February. They're engaged by March and by July they're married. Oh, you feel like you want to be there and go, slow down, slow down, Marguerite. Just come back for a second, calm down. Yes, yes, exactly. 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, 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. So she's thinking financial security, you know, and let's, I don't know, it's very easy to read father figure in there as well.

It is. And she needs security by the sounds of it. Her dad's gone back to her mom's died. She's left school. She doesn't have any security at this point. Absolutely. And also one of the things that's really fascinating about the letters that survive, there was a wonderful cache of letters that was published in 2017.

And she describes how she had the 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, you know, is glamorous and flamboyant and really attracted to an artistic life. So she meets McLeod, they whirlwind romance, they have a son, Norman, and then they head off to the Dutch East Indies, so to Java and Sumatra, which is where he is stationed. And 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 poor Norman who just at age I think he was only two dies. So this is another moment of horrendous tragedy for her. 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 Amdram Society but she's also very curious and very observant of the local culture. And in Javan Sumatra, she observes the temple dances. And, you know, street music. And I think that all of that becomes very, very influential in who she later becomes. I'll be back with Julie and Matahari after this short break. Why do you think that the children were poisoned?

What happened there? Well, we don't know, but we do know that there was a culture of indigenous women in Javan Sumatra. They were hired as what called Naya's. So they would be hired to look after the children. But there were also housekeepers. And sometimes what took place was that, 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. Sometimes they even had their own children who would live as part of that family. So it's very possible. I mean, again, we don't have common.

concrete evidence, but it is quite possible to believe that one of these women was taking revenge, perhaps. The other explanation that historians have discussed is that we know that Rudolph suffered from venereal disease and that she suggests, Matahari suggests in her letters to this relation of hers, much later on, that the children were being treated with mercury, which was one of the standard treatments for the treatment of venereal disease, and that Norman may have been poisoned through that treatment and not survived.

So Norman dies. Norman dies, so yet another terrible tragedy. And then Rudolph decides to retire in 1900, and then they come back to the Netherlands in 1902 with non, their surviving child. but it doesn't last. Is it a happy marriage? No, it's a miserable marriage.

He's very abusive. Oh, no. She recounts 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 probably was very abusive to her. So they come, back and she immediately leaves. The other driving thing for Matar to leave to go to Paris is money. She's always

short of money and this is something which is a motivation for her to do a lot of things in her life. She wants respectability, she wants stability, but she also needs cash. So they divorce and even though Dutch court awards her both the custody

of non and alimony McLeod pleads poverty and I think he gives her a bit of money at first but she has to make a living somehow because he's not going to support her so she says that's why she went to Paris so again I mentioned these letters that were published in

1917 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 women of the demi monde, women who wanted to be artist, who didn't have family support at that time. So what does she do? Well, she goes to Paris, sets herself up, puts in ads to newspapers to do things like teaching German lessons or piano lessons or she really wants to become a mannequin. So these are the early models.

first Catwalk in Paris is 1908 so she's really attracted to all of that and it doesn't happen where she does get work is as an artist's model in Montmart Okay, what about her daughter? Was she with her when she's doing this? So she's trying really hard 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 family friends at that point. She remains in Holland. And Matari doesn't have much contact with her. But, but, you know, if we go back to this idea that, you know, she's really two people. And again, we can see this so clearly in the letters. 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 the chances of getting non-back, you know, are pretty minuscule because, I mean, it's really interesting because she's sort of saying in these letters to, in fact, it's to Rudolph's relation, that she wants

respectability and she wants non to have respectability, she wants her to have a good and proper life, and she knows she can't provide that for her, partly because she doesn't have the money, but also if she, as she describes, it goes down the road to perdition, then that won't be acceptable. She doesn't want no one to have anything to do with that world. So the choices are pretty stark. God, they are, aren't they? And she does eventually end up on the stage.

And was it the film Gypsy Rosalie where they say, you've got to have a gimmick if you want to make it on the stage? And what's the gimmick that Marguerite comes up with and births of Matahari. So she is appearing at Salals in Paris. So she's meeting people. She's meeting the right people. And also 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. Oh, wow. So it was extraordinary when these letters were published in 2017, because I was actually in Leavarden because the Fritz Museum was having a big exhibition to mark the hundred,

the centenary since Mautari's execution in Paris. And it was just when, you know, all the stories about Me Too were beginning and Harvey Weinstein and I just couldn't believe how stark the parallels were between what Matari was describing in Paris in 1903. and what some of the victim survivors of Harry Weinstein.

What does she say happened to her then? 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. Wow. One of the artists that she sits for was named Ferdinand Cormor, who had a very significant atelier artist school in Montmart.

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 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, you know, at times she has no money, not just no money, but also in her mind, her choices are either going back to, Amsterdam and the humiliation of that and also being broke and what is she going to do there? Or staying in Paris and kind of following this dream. So she threw her contacts, through her artist's contact,

she meets a man, Monsieur Guillaume, 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 traveled all over Asia. And he traveled with an artist and the artist made all these drawings of dances that he had observed in India amongst other Asian countries. And so they together, they come up with this performance. And the performance was, you know, if she's going to appear as Matahar and she's going to educate 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

statue of Shiva. She's got her handmaidens around her. There's incense flowing. And Paris is just, wow, you know, it's a huge, she has a huge overnight success. 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 she would be slammed for it. But at the time, oh, it's terribly exotic. It was terribly exotic. And also

she was showing off her gorgeous body. I mean, that was part of it too. And she is gorgeous. You can Google pictures of her and you can see her in her full Matahari regalia and you can understand why that was a sensation at the time. Yeah. Well, you know, this is one of the things that I find so interesting about women of this period. So Matahari 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. Yes.

You have postcards made. You were 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 theater, a woman of the stage, you could go to a. a dress designer, for example, and make an arrangement that you would be seen in public wearing their design. So it was a form of advertising, really. Again, very modern. Absolutely, very modern. Very modern. And so she does have her moment in, you know, skipping the light fantastic. She's in that Belapac era of Paris, where it's like 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 Cancang Girls, Toulouse LaTrek is there, it's absent. And Matahari's right at the centre of that. And at that moment, she fits right in. That's exactly what's wanted at the time. It doesn't last. No, it doesn't last. It doesn't last. And 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. See, that's the... lesson is learn to save. Save your money, ladies. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that she's just someone who really is very bad at managing her life in that sense. And I sort of get this 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 happening at the moment. She doesn't plan. She's not strategic in any sense, except for, you know, this element. of being very good at managing her image.

And I'm sure there were a lot of other people around who were helpful in doing that. So she's kind of got top billing for a few years. And then things, you know, she falls down the play bill. 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 car. concept of the courtesan here. Kate, and I'm sure you know a lot about this, about this concept, too.

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 Matarro is 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. And 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. She manages to land some pretty big names as well if the stories are to be believed. Yes, Puccini being one of them. Yes. And also, she did seem to have a bit of a poncho 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 1914. So, you know, she was, she was also sort of moving amongst diplomats, but 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 McLeod, who knows. Oh, God, yeah. Oh, maybe it was. Maybe it was. So she's what would later become known as an international woman. She's traveling all over the place and she's meeting men from different backgrounds and different circumstances and it's all kind of, it's just sort of part of the course, but then the war arrives and suddenly that isn't okay anymore. Yeah, I mean, 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 the mistress of a very high-ranking German officer before the war. That relationship had ended, but she did spend a lot of time in Berlin. She spoke German very well. So she's in Berlin when the war breaks out. And she is, ironically, she's regarded as 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 really in a difficult position because the German government has frozen her bank account. She's in Berlin because she's meant to be staging this big comeback, which was called profane vision.

So she was booked in to do this long run at the Metropolitan Theater. And so none of that is happening, but she spent money on her costumes. And she's also spent, you know, she owes a lot of people a lot of money. and so her jeweler and her furrier just withhold. They say, well, you're not getting your things back until you've paid us. So she's got no money and where is 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. And there's one story 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 that there's a kind of madness, almost madness to their ability to invent and imagine. And it kind of gets the amount of a scrape, but it creates another much bigger scrape for them. Okay. So she goes, she finds herself in Amsterdam. She hasn't got any money. She knows people. And one of the men that she hooks up with is, so she goes into a church, 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 not Dutch, that, you know, she's a foreigner. And she tells them that she's Russian. The hustle. She sort of makes up this whole story. And anyway, 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, was a Dutch officer named, he was also a Baron van der Kapellen 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 Papellen

also to rehire Anna Lynchens her maid who also again, you know, digging back into this story recently, realized just how important a character she was. So she set herself up but again, you know, money, you know, she's got money from the Baron, but 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. And also, I think it's incredibly uncomfortable for her to be in a small country with her ex-husband. Oh, yes. I'd forgotten about him. Well, and also her daughter, who's now at school and who she doesn't see, I should not allow 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 Rudolph McLeod and a sort of failed Parisian performer, whatever you want attached to that. But it's not good. Her choices are very limited. I'll be back with Julie and Matahari after the short break.

How old she at this point? She's sort of in a late 30s, is she? Yeah. Not old by today's standards, but this is 1914 and she's on the stage. Yeah, exactly. So she's reaching that dangerous age of 40. Yeah. She's considered old by then. Yeah, so what is she going to do? And so one of the things that happens is that she's approached by the man who was 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 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 was living at the time, and it was suggested to her, and she agreed to provide information to the Germans about the French. Why did she do this, do you think? Money, money, money, money. That was the reason why she did it. I don't think she had strong patriotic feelings.

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. It is, isn't it? She is a hot mess, as they might say today. She is a hot mess, yeah. And one of the most revealing pieces of evidence I found about her life at that time

was an MI5. There's an MI5 file on Matari sort of opens after the war. And there's a little clipping of a sale of 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. Okay. But expensive, really expensive stuff. So again, you know, she's not, she's not looking after her pennies. She's spending beyond her means. She's a woman who is running out of options because she's made her career and her money on the stage and by attracting

men and she's now cruising towards 40. 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. So stupid though, you just want to grab her and just go, no, come on. So what does she agree to do? So she actually goes to Cologne and she's trained there. And there's, she's actually, one of her trainers was another woman, Dr. Elizabeth Schragmuller, who was much younger than Mautahari. And Schragmiller observes her. Shragmer 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 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 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 very, very good, she's very gregarious, she's very flamboyant, she's very charming. And all of those qualities could make a good agent. But she's a loose cannon. And she doesn't, so that she's given these, this secret ink, and she doesn't want to use it. She doesn't like it. It's all bit techy.

And, you know, she says that she threw them into the canal outside of her home in the Hague. And it's true, she never did use the secret inks. When she was asked by the French, when her prosecutors asked her why she agreed to spy for the Germans, 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. Oh, no. So she goes back to France,

thinking she's going to be a German spy and then ends up trying to spy for the French on the Germans as well. This isn't a sensible idea. None of this is a sensible idea. No, none of it is sensible. So, you know, she's someone who kind of wanders into this, My sense of her really is, you know, again, you know, it's grabbing on to something that's going to solve a problem for her, a financial problem. 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.

Yeah, and actually, I kind of understand it with her because I think that, you know, she went to Paris 1902, 1903. She had nothing. she wasn't even trained as a dancer. And then she's dancing at La Scala. I mean, you know, she was this huge start. And I think that maybe she thought she could do it again. She could pull off another big coup. And maybe in her mind, it was all part of the same thing. You know, these boundaries between performer, courtesan, maybe even wife, a spy.

They're all completely porous as far as she's concerned. How does she get busted because she does get busted and really busted? 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 Masloff. Say no more, we've got the picture. There's a young handsome Russian officer.

It's all going to go wrong now. Yes, again. Yeah, absolutely. and she wants to visit him. 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 Lardou, rather the police. But she goes to the police station and they introduce her to Georges Ladue, 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,

we understand that you've got these amazing contacts, obviously you're Dutch, so you could go to Belgium. And they concoct this kind of mission 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 not going to 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 onto 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, 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 was the way of the Western Front. 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 attach, which she does. And again, this is a, you know, her interrogation. sort of reveals, illuminates something about her, how she saw herself as a courtesan, how she saw herself as a seductress. And 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 those were sort of, that was code for, yeah, I'm up for it. And this German officer, Calais, does pay her, but actually at the same,

time, what we now know is that because she was a German agent, this exchange is much more murky. And what she's doing is she's giving him information that she wants him to send on to the Germans by Telegram. Julie, she is a crap spy. She's a crap spy. 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. No, no, and because she lies and she contradicts herself, that's even, you know, sending up red flax everywhere. Oh, no. And she might have gotten away with it, actually, if she hadn't. Well, there were two important things that happened. One is that the Germans are sending telegrams from Madrid to Berlin and the British and the French are intercepting them.

So they know that she's been to see. Calais, they know that she's in Madrid, giving the Germans information. So all of that is deeply problematic. And then the other thing that happens is that she decides that she's going to go back to Paris. Because she's writing letters to Ladu. And this is another thing. She writes letters 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 Ladue. Terrible spy. Terrible spy. So at the beginning of 1917, she arrives back in Paris. Laudeu refuses to see her. Vadim is nowhere in sight. She's running out of money.

She's seeing a lot of men because she's got to pay her hotel bills. And even then, it's not enough. And then in February 1917, she's picked up by the French. and is taken off to, well, she's taken off to prison. And a series of interrogations began. By Ladoo, was it? No, it wasn't Ladoo. It was a man named Captain Pierre Bouchardal.

Oh, that's right. And he hated her, didn't he? Yes. He loathed her. I've read his descriptions of her, and it is just vile. 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. No. But 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 yeah 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 and all of these things were kind of cool and edgy in the bellipok, but they're not now. It's like that, it's like when you get tone deaf influences in like when the economy is shut all to hell and people are using food banks and, you know, don't have jobs and they're there with their Gucci baghole 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 the excess and the

luxuriousness of her life does not play well during the First World War because people are really struggling. Yeah, and 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. Yeah, yeah, I hadn't even thought of it like that. Yeah. So she kind of is prepared to jump off the cliff. And she refuses a blindfold at the execution.

She blows kisses to the soldiers. Is that true? Did she really do that? Or is that like more of the mythology? 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 the execution. And so you can imagine some of the people who, the military officers who were allowed to attend, had, you know, 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 I think was just kind of an astonishing image. But then what happens is, 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. So it's donated to a medical school. But then there are all these rumors 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 kept finding stories from newspapers in the 1930s. I mean, a bit like Elvis, you know. she didn't die and she's living on an island in the South Seas. It's part of that mystique that she created all of her life, isn't it? It's part of the fantasy. Yeah. But she really was shot and her body really was donated to science, I suppose. Yes, it was.

Yeah. Was she ever buried anywhere? Was the body ever claimed? Does she have somewhere? Like, no, nothing? No. And there's something really tragic. Well, we've talked about the tragic.

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, you know, her dances, I think, have been sort of dismissed as musical nonsense. But I interviewed a French dance historian 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 music halls and in theaters in France, you know, ever since. I mean, in one way, what a dramatic exit, right? I mean, that her whole life was about theatre and drama and creating a scene. Maybe that was, maybe that, not the way that she would want to go, no one wants to go like that, but it seems like a fittingly dramatic ending to this life. Yes, and I think that she would be. probably be thrilled that we're still talking about her today. 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? I think she was guilty of what she was charged with. And let's face it, you know, 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. They didn't, didn't need to execute her. I mean, the French did execute other women, but 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 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. Well, they do, don't they? And so just to return briefly to the premise of this little miniseries, Super Sluts. She's a difficult one to deal with because she did seem to inhabit that. She seemed to revel in it and use it defensively. And she openly, yes, I've had lots of lovers, what of it? Yeah, yeah. But I think that also she had a kind of meaning for women because 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.

Because I found lots of women writing about her during the Second World War and saying, you know. Oh, that's interesting. So we could say Matahari, self-proclaimed super slut, crap spy. Yeah, I think that would work. I'd go with that. Julie, you've been wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? 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 can see details for my talk. Fabulous. Thank you so much for bringing her to life. You've just been wonderful.

Yeah, I've really enjoyed it. Thank you, Kate. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Julie. for joining us. And if you look what you heard, you know the drill. Don't forget to like review and follow along whatever 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 installment of this little mini-series on History's super slugs, 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 betwixt at historyhit.com. This podcast was edited by

Hannah Theodorov and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.