Mata Hari,
the oriental dancer spy

Her name was Margaretha Geertruida Zelle but that is not important as it is not her real history that pales confronted to the most artistic of her representations: the fiction about her own life.

Prior to become an espionage legend, Mata Hari presented herself as a Hindu dancer, but

really she was just a needy adventurer,
a pretender with enough intuition and sensitivity
to take advantage of the Parisian orientalist fantasies at the beginning of the XX Century.
There, her frozzy costumes and her scantly dress was enough to cover her enormous lacks as a dancer.

She never was genuine oriental dance representative but, avant la lettre, an exotic dancer. When the firing squadron shot against Mata Hari in October the 15th 1917, they killed the worst spy of the History but at the same time the romantic myth of the femme fatal was born and still today lives among us.

Firing squad