Mata Hari was born Magaretha Gertrud Zelle of a middle-class Dutch family. That this bourgeois lifestyle was too restricting for this young girl became clear when she was expelled from school for having an affair with the headmaster. In order to escape the stultifying atmosphere of her home, she married a Dutch naval officer twenty years her senior who took her away to the Dutch East Indies. Not only did this allow her to escape her home but it also established a lifelong obsession which would ultimately lead to her downfall, a fascination for men in uniform, particularly officers. For a while, Margaretha accepted married life, giving birth to two children, one of which died mysteriously in infancy. She soon she found domesticity unbearable and headed for Paris. Magaretha changed her name to Mata Hari, assumed the identity of a Javanese princess, and became an exotic dancer. This new persona revitalized her and allowed her to live a life unusually free for a woman of that period, particularly a divorced one. Over the next decade, until her death in 1917, she travelled throughout Europe, initiating affairs with several officers. One of her most fervent affairs was with a Russian pilot serving in the French army, Vadim Maslov. When he was wounded during the war, she longed to visit him at the front. The French would only agree to this if she used her wiles to spy for them. Naively, she agreed. During the war her special passes allowed her to move from country to country. While in Spain she began an affair with a German military attache who many believe implicated her in a plot to spy against her employers, the French. When she returned to Paris, she was arrested and tried with very little evidence. She was convicted and executed before a firing squad. With typical elegance and panache, legend has it that Mata blew the firing squad kisses as they raised their rifles. She died resignedly, without fuss and with great dignity, refusing both blindfold and restraints. Mata Hari was executed as much for being a strong, independent, sexually free woman as for being a supposed spy. She was a threat to the patriarchy of that period. She acted too freely, too much like a man. Her bravery, her daring, her sexual adventurousness needed to be repressed, and repress they did, although in many ways Mata Hari had the last laugh. While most of the officers who convicted her are forgotten, she has passed into legend			I