2023-07-21 19:00:00
HISTORY OBJECTS. His pseudonym devoured his identity. Mata Hari cross-dressed Margaretha Geertruida Zelle then Lady MacLeod as Javanese jewelry sometimes transformed men into deities.
By Marielle Brie The extraordinary jewels of Mata Hari, here in an undated photo, have contributed to forging her legend. © STR / AFP Published on 07/21/2023 at 7:00 p.m.
In 1905, on the boards of Ernest Molier’s circus, Lady MacLeod peels off her memories like her veils as a Hindu dancer. Recently divorced, penniless, she is almost entirely stripped, in life as on stage. It is the memories of her former life in the Dutch colonies of Indonesia, alongside her husband, that will make her famous.
Fortunately, the traditional Javanese dances, of a refinement and a delicate slowness beyond the ordinary, of which each movement conceals a profound discourse, do not require any special skills to imitate them roughly.
READ ALSO“Objects of History”: find all the episodes of our seriesThe future Mata Hari observed this complex language and, for any restitution, actually produced abominable rumblings that her Parisian public took for the purest of transcriptions. The renewed taste for orientalism, the irruption of this delicious young girl with dark skin and thick brown hair are more than Paris asked for to satisfy her appetite for novelties. Because the newcomer has the good taste to pass off her stripping for a Hindu religious practice. The offering is so alluring that it convinces of its authenticity even to the proponents of oriental scholarship.
worldly coronation
Praise be to Shiva, the so-called scholars are not really. Thus, Émile Guimet, collector and founder of the homonymous museum, was dazzled by this lady who soon became the sun – Mata Hari in Indonesian. He arranges the rotunda of the museum library for her. She says she dances to honor Shiva, he arranges an altar for her on which is placed a bronze of the god in his form of Nataraja, king of dance.
Beneath his feet, he destroys and recreates the universe ad infinitum. Under those of Mata Hari, it is a place in society that is being built and which collapses twelve years later. For this show, which dubs the bayadere in the eyes of high society, Guimet preceded the “Brahmanic dances” with a conference on the subject and Mata Hari is adorned with jewels from the museum’s collections.
Souvenirs or gifts, we will never see again the headdresses, the bracelets and the bras which constituted a curious getup for a dancer claiming the rites of Java. Because if the kejawen defines, still today, Javanese culture by intermingling Hinduism, Buddhism, animism and Islam, it is inconceivable that Mata Hari attended dances or theater involving women as naked as her on the improvised stage of the Guimet museum.
READ ALSOWhat happened to the ball touched by Maradona’s “hand of God”? Moreover, the jewels are no more “Brahmanic” than Indonesian, but all come under the sumptuary conventions of Southeast Asia, influenced by Hinduism. The public is seduced, everyone believes in it. By a reversal of civilization, it is also precisely the role of Javanese jewelry to support belief and sometimes act as a spiritual guide.
Jewelery is a sacred art involving forces associated with the sun, fire and gold. The goldsmith touches on the esoteric and the fruit of his creation is gorged with a power of which he is no longer the master. The imperishable jewels are then part of a cosmology and can prove to be as beneficial as harmful for their wearers. For the moment, Mata Hari seems to benefit from it.
L’indispensable chaos
The day after this evening, the whole of Paris acclaimed him. Her fees fly away, she refines her stage costume with jewelers and Marguerite Cadolle, daughter of Herminie who invented the bra. For her, the Cadolle house creates metal adornments richly adorned with filigree cones and sprinkled with precious stones.
Her freedom reached new heights: freedom of movement, intellectual and financial, single, she even freed herself from her own history. Mata Hari has a hundred lives, but none include Margaretha Geertruida Zelle and, like Indonesian dance and theater characters, the strangeness of this personality with plural origins and curious movements sets her apart from all that exists on earth. What happened to the shoe lost by Marie-Antoinette on the scaffold? Adorning herself with ornaments impregnated with a kejawen fantasized, Mata Hari replays, without suspecting it, the disproportionate wandering of Free of Centhini, a 19th century Javanese classic whose heroes wander and get lost in a moving and chaotic world, magnified by the spiritual and erudite scrolls of Javanese knowledge. Shot for espionage in 1917, Margaretha dies but her jewels scattered at auction still dress the mythical Mata Hari, a polymorphic creature perfectly cut for the Javanese pantheon.
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