An American auction house is auctioning off 10 letters by Margharete Zelle, better known as Mata Hari, who was executed in 1917 by the French for her role as an alleged double agent.

Undated and assumed to have been written between late 1914 and early 1915, the letters are addressed to painter and political cartoonist Piet van der Hem who, like Zelle, grew up in Leeuwarden.

The two were friends bound by their love for Paris and all things French but it is unclear whether they were lovers as well. The young artist, who painted various portraits of Mata Hari, ‘fell for her charms’, and it was assumed ‘they were on the verge of a relationship’.

Seven of Zelle’s letters to Van der Hem, who died in 1961, are in French and three in Dutch. All were written from the the Victoria Hotel in Amsterdam, where Zelle lived after leaving Berlin for neutral Holland.

Most concern her performances and the costumes Van der Hem is designing for her, and the not very great success she is having in the Netherlands. She writes to him about ‘journalist pigs’ who slate her dancing.

Disdain

Zelle’s disdain for the lack of sophistication of some of the audiences jumps from the page. In an unfinished letter she writes:

‘Yesterday I danced in Arnhem with great success, but the audience is very aristocratic there and loves those serious, graceful dances. Here is different. They are people who have never seen anything. They all think ugly things come from abroad.

‘Fortunately for me, I dance here out of amusement and to maintain suppleness. I am not looking for money here and also don’t have to make a name for myself. When you have Paris and Vienna etc. like me, then the Dutch cannot do me much harm.

And then, people are so jealous here, and so angry – in Arnhem that is completely different. I dance again Sunday in The Hague and Tuesday in Amsterdam.  Yes. I had a faux pas in The Hague. The carpet was laid very nice over a hole, in which the decor is usually fixed. And I just put my foot on it. It was a ‘second’ but the angry journalists took it as true to write about. Foul people. Go away!’

Spy?

Over the years’ Zelles’s frequent movements and contacts in military circles in Berlin were beginning to draw the attention of the French authorities and eventually Zelle was accused of spying for the Germans.

It didn’t help that her Mata Hari persona portrayed her as a femme fatale who could get any army official to divulge military secrets at the drop of a veil. Zelle always denied her travels were anything other than artistic engagements and some of the French charges against her were later shown to be trumped up. But later documents confirm she started working for the Germans in 1915 under code name H-21.

Marghareta Zelle was executed in Vincennes in 1917. Reactions at time show she was condemned as much for being a spy as for being a ‘loose’ woman. ‘Mata Hari lived and died an adventurer. The world of pleasure that she sought in a rush of sensuous madness became her downfall’, one paper wrote.’

The letters, which come from Van der Hem’s estate, have a reserve price of $12,000.