WWI Figure. Born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, the only daughter of Antje van der Meulen and Adam Zelle, a prosperous hatter. Her childhood was privileged, she attended the best schools and was apparently spoiled by her father. When he went bankrupt in 1889, however, her parents divorced, followed by the death of her mother in 1891. She was fostered with relatives and enrolled in a teacher training college. When it was rumored she was having an affair with the headmaster, she was dismissed. At 18, she answered a lonely-hearts ad from a soldier of the Dutch East India Company. She became engaged six days after meeting 39-year-old Rudolf MacLeod in 1895. Marriage elevated her social and financial position, and produced two children. From 1897 to 1902 the couple lived in Java and Sumatra, but the marriage was rocky; MacLeod was apparently an abusive, profligate alcoholic, who allegedly infected his wife and son with syphilis. When the boy died, the marriage fell apart, and they divorced in 1902. To provide for herself, she began to dance professionally in Paris under the name Mata Hari, a Malay phrase meaning "eye of the day." Tall, attractive, familiar with East Indian dance, and willing to appear all but nude on stage, Mata Hari was an instant success. Eager to reinvent herself, she told journalists that she had been born in Java to European parents, while others were told that she was the daughter of an Indian temple dancer. After ten years, however, her dancing career began a decline, while she also served as a popular courtesan to numerous men of means, including government officials and army officers. After war broke out, while she was in The Hague in late 1915, a German consul allegedly offered to pay her for whatever information she could obtain on her next trip to France. In France, Georges Ladoux, head of the French counter-espionage bureau proposed that she spy for France, and she accepted. Modern scholarship asserts that her continuous efforts to reinvent herself in order to please and survive left her dangerously naïve as to the stakes of this last reinvention; she sent uncoded letters to Ladoux through the ordinary mail; she telegraphed him openly, she called at his office repeatedly. She did, in fact, so little in the way of real espionage that many scholars doubt she should be classified as a spy at all. On 13 February 1917, she was arrested and imprisoned in Paris. French authorities had almost no evidence against her, but wartime losses were such somebody had to be blamed and punished, if only for the sake of morale. Her prosecutor in the following court martial focused not on her deeds, but on her character: she was licentious, prone to rewriting her past, had a disregard for societal norms, and passed frequently over national boarders in the company of men. The military court found her guilty and sentenced her to death. She was executed by a firing squad some three months later. The German government publicly exculpated her in 1930. Her life and career have inspired at least two dozen motion pictures, several plays and popular songs, and scores of novels and biographies, including "Femme Fatale: Love, Lies, and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari" by Pat Shipman (2007).