Mata Hari

Abstract

Vienna, December 1906. The Indian dancer Mata Hari, ‘the Eye of the Sun’, also known as Lady MacLeod, has arrived in town and is staying at the Hotel Bristol, today a five-star Westin hotel. She has dedicated time to receive reporters in the hotel’s elegant, wood-panelled salon before her Vienna debut at the Secession. Mata Hari’s male callers drink in her dark beauty, admiring her ivory forehead, classically formed nose, large almond-shaped eyes and full rosy lips. When she greets her guests, adroitly rising from a sofa or walking into the room, heads turn. Reporters admire her ‘up-to-date’ Parisian sense of style and her graceful gait. They are charmed by her coquettish laugh, unselfconscious use of the informal second-person pronoun du, quick shifts between studied German and gushing French, with recourse to the occasional English phrase. Inevitably Baudelaire’s dark goddess comes to mind: ‘Bizarre déité, brune comme les nuits […]. Même quand elle marche on croirait qu’elle danse […]¹

Possession by a god, enthusiasm, is not the irrational, but the end of the solitary […] or inward thought, the beginning of a true experience of the new.

Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 2007: 50