Each time I recall this myth, I wonder: Are we never to be able to see the true face of love? And I understand what the Greeks meant by this: Love is an act of faith and its face should always be covered in mystery. Every moment should be lived with feeling and emotion because if we try to decipher it and understand it, the magic disappears. We follow its winding and luminous paths, we let ourselves go to the highest peak or the deepest seas, but we trust in the hand that leads us. If we do not allow ourselves to be frightened, we will always awaken in a palace; if we fear the steps that will be required by love and want it to reveal everything to us, the result is that we will be left with nothing.
And I think, my beloved Mata Hari, that that was your mistake. After years on the icy mountain, you ended up totally disbelieving in love and decided to turn it into your servant. Love does not obey anyone and will betray those who try to decipher its mystery.
Today you are a prisoner of the French people, but as soon as the sun rises, you will be free. Your accusers will need ever-increasing strength to drag the fetters they forged at your feet in order to justify your death. The Greeks have a word full of contradictory meanings: metanoia. Sometimes it means repentance, contrition, confession of sins, the promise not to repeat what we did wrong.
At other times it means going beyond what we know, to stand face-to-face with the unknown, without recollection or memory, without understanding how it will be to take the next step. We are bound to our lives, to our pasts, to the laws of what we consider right or wrong, and suddenly, everything changes. We walk the streets without fear and greet our neighbors, but moments later they are no longer our neighbors--they put up fences and barbed wire so we can no longer see things as they were before. So it will be with me, with the Germans, but above all, with men who decided to find it easier to let an innocent woman die than to recognize their own mistakes.
It is a shame that what happens today already happened yesterday, and will happen again tomorrow; it will continue to happen until the end of time, or until man finds out he is not only what he thinks, but mostly what he feels. The body tires easily, but the spirit is always free and will help us get out, one day, from this infernal cycle of repeating the same mistakes every generation. Although thoughts always remain the same, there is something stronger, and this is called Love.
Because when we truly love, we know others and ourselves better. We do not need words, documents, minutes, statements, accusations, or defenses. We need only what Ecclesiastes says:
"Instead of justice there was wickedness, instead of righteousness, there was yet more wickedness....But God will judge them all, both the righteous and the wicked, God will judge them both, for there is a time for every intention, a time for every deed."
So be it. Go with God, my beloved.
Epilogue
On October 19, four days after the execution of Mata Hari, her primary accuser, Captain Georges Ladoux, was accused of spying for the Germans and imprisoned. Despite pleading innocence, he was repeatedly questioned by French counterespionage services, although government censorship--legalized during the period of conflict--prevented that fact from being leaked to newspapers. He claimed in his defense that the information had been planted by the enemy:
"It is not my fault that my work left me exposed to any and all sorts of intrigue, while the Germans were collecting data that were essential to the country's invasion." Ladoux was eventually released in 1919, one year after the end of the war, but his reputation as a double agent followed him to the grave.
Mata Hari's body was buried in a shallow grave, which has never been located. According to habits of that time, her head was cut off and handed over to government representatives. For years it was kept in the Anatomy Museum on Rue des Saints-Peres in Paris, until, on an unknown date, it disappeared from the institution. Museum officials only noticed it was missing in the year 2000, although it is believed that Mata Hari's head was stolen well before then.
In 1947, prosecutor Andre Mornet, by then publicly indicted as one of the lawyers who founded proceedings to revoke the "hasty naturalizations" of Jews in 1940, and largely responsible for the death sentence of the woman he claimed was "the modern-day Salome, whose sole objective is to deliver the heads of our soldiers to the Germans," confided to journalist and writer Paul Guimard that the entire proceedings were based on deductions, extrapolations, and assumptions, concluding with
:
"Between us, the evidence we had was so poor that it wouldn't have been fit to punish a cat."