"Mata Hari to Be Rehabilitated. She Was not a Spy in the Germans’ Pay”. With this title papers announced the initiative of a Dutch foundation that believes in Mata Hari’s innocence. It has asked for the rehearing of the trial that, in 1917, closed by sentencing the woman to death. According to the promoters, Mata Hari was a victim of cold statecraft. As early as in 1996 the thesis upholding her innocence had been brought up in the book written by a journalist, Russel Warren Howe, who had had the opportunity to consult the no longer secret documentation of the French military archives. We shall try to give a portrait, as comprehensive as possible, of Mata Hari, starting from a stay of hers in Italy which most are unfamiliar with. In 1912 at the Scala Theatre, ”Armide” by Gluck (1714-1787) was staged, a drama freely based on Torquato Tasso’s poem “Jerusalem Delivered”. Well then, Mata Hari danced as the Princess. This was not the only exhibition of the woman who was to become, in collective imagery, a spy “par excellence”, the very symbol of the woman plotting secretly for the intelligence service. Again in 1912, and again at the Scala Theatre, Mata Hari took part in five performances of “Bacchus and Gambrinus”, a ballet based on the rivalry between the god of wine, Bacchus, and the god of bear, Gambrinus, both aspiring to Venus’ embrace. The longed for goddess was Mata Hari, who circulated a fanciful biography of hers, which ascribed to her princely origins in the Island of Java, were she said she had lost her parents at the age of twelve and had subsequently left, to receive a refined education in Europe. The critics did not believe in this genealogy hovering between exoticism and blue blood. Besides, Mata Hari was not a dancer in the classical sense of the word. Her fame was related to eastern dances and the erotic charge she was able to express. In an interview she attempted to deny this limit, by quoting an Indian maxim: “When it is properly performed, a dance dampens the desires it appears to stimulate”. To which the interviewer replied: “In India, maybe”. From the books and from the thousands of articles which have been dedicated to her over the years, we learn that Mata Hari was many different things: a mythomaniac, a liar, a mediocre artist, a courtesan who slept with an endless number of lovers, a parasite who ran through fortunes, a specialist in not paying her bills, a very bad wife, a very bad mother, all this and more, but maybe she was not the spy that the trial “in camera” sentenced on the basis of four hundred accusation documents. Mata Hari flirted with the secret services, also the French ones, but she was too superficial to guarantee the smartness and the secrecy which espionage requires; so why, with a trial that lasted only two days (24 and 25 July 1917), the judges who sentenced her to be shot claimed that Mata Hari was the German spy enrolled with number H21? The French political and military establishments saw in this woman the “typical exponent of the abhorred Belle Epoque, which had contributed to softening the morals of the country”. Mata Hari’s real name was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle; she was the daughter of a hatter and was born in Leenwarden, a Dutch village, on 7 August 1876. At the age of 19 she married Rudolf MacLeod, captain of the Indian army. Her husband was twenty years older than she was. They left for Java together and subsequently moved to Sumatra. They had two children, Norman and Juana Luisa. Norman died for having eaten poisoned rice. The girl always remained with her father after her parents parted in 1903, and Margaretha left the Dutch Indies for Paris. Margaretha had learnt the movements of the dancers, the slow gestures that show through the transparency of the veils. She was too high to be mistaken for a real Oriental, but she had dark hair and olive complexion. At this point, even though it may seem unchivalrous, we must mention her breasts. Margaretha accepted to appear naked, dropping veil after veil, but, regarding her breasts, she was inflexible: they had to remain concealed behind two metal dome-shaped covers studded with precious stones. None of her lovers could claim to have ever seen them. Margaretha cloaked that secret of hers with a shattering story. Hiding her face behind her hands in shame, she confessed that her husband, in a fit of erotic fury accentuated by alcohol, had bitten off her nipples. When she arrived in Paris, Margaretha Geertruda Zelle became Mata Hari, words that in the Malayan language mean “eye of the morning”, poetical synonym for “dawn”. The show that launched her was held at the Guimet museum in March 1903, when she dropped her veils in front of a four-armed statue of the god Shiva. Years later, the writer Colette commented that show with the following words: “She could not dance, but she could strip”. Attempting to draw up a list of Mata Hari’s lovers is to attempt the impossible. There was talk of a brief romance with the by then elderly composer Jules Massenet, author of famous grand operas such as “Manon” and “Werther”. She was also attributed an affair with the lieutenant Wilhelm Canaris, who over the period 1935 – 1944, while he was admiral, became the head of the German secret services, took part in the unsuccessful plot against Hitler in 1944, following which he was hanged; but her real and only love was Captain Wladimir de Maslov, known as Vadim, a Russian who was almost twenty years younger than Mata Hari and with whom the woman dreamt of an impossible future. Mata Hari was shot on 15 October 1917, at 6.12 a.m., in Vincennes. Raising her hands towards her mouth, the woman blew with her lips a goodbye kiss, a silent farewell. And we cannot but see, through our memory’s eyes, Greta Garbo’s face in the last scenes of the film produced by George Fitzmaurice, released in 1931, whose cast also included Ramon Navarro, Lionel Barrymore and Lewis Stone. “Garbo’s face is an idea”, wrote the great French essayist Roland Barthes. And indeed we recall, with unchanged emotion, the close-up of Garbo/Mata Hari advancing slowly among judges and soldiers, wonderful femme fatale even with the tragic approach of death. Nobody claimed back the body of the dancer after the execution. Her remains pierced by the firing squad ended up at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris, and that was when, in the cold desolation of an anatomy school, the disquieting legend of Mata Hari started, and still continues to fascinate us and makes us write, as if it wanted to stay alive.