Page 67 of The Velvet Hours
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In the elevator, Marthe looked pensive.
“I should add one more to the list of men who have enabled me to stay in my apartment as long as I have. And that is—without a doubt—Gérard’s father, Pierre.”
33.
Marthe
Paris 1917
The morning they executed Mata Hari, Marthe had risen early. She lay in bed, the first rays of sunlight stretching across her silken coverlet like golden branches. Her slender calves peeked out from her peignoir. Her auburn hair, which she now maintained with the help of henna, flowed over her shoulders. A woman of fifty-three, she looked at least ten years younger.
She did not know about the execution until Giselle had brought in her breakfast tray. The newspaper was ironed and placed next to her pot of coffee. Giselle always took such care with her morning service. The porcelain cup and saucer painted with birds, and, on a plate no larger than her palm, a single croissant.
The headlines blared Mata Hari’s crime as treason, accusing her of spying for the Germans. Her death had taken place at sunrise, an execution by firing squad. Marthe shuddered, recalling all those yearsbefore when Boldini had taken her to one of the dance clubs to see Mata Hari perform.
She had been enthralled when she first saw the dancer. They sat at small tables, she, Boldini, and his coterie of artist friends, their faces illuminated by the flickering votive candles. Those were the years when she was still gay and beautiful herself. Boldini had accepted the fact they would never be lovers and had pretended not to notice when one of his wealthy friends flirted with her. She never knew how he came to learn about the bouquets that were sent to her apartment in the days that followed. A select few, she took to her bed over the years. But they were never long-term lovers like Charles had been. And she always sold the rings and bracelets she received as gifts from those men. They were a form of currency that in the end brought her a source of well-needed funds.
When Marthe had performed as a dancer during her early courtship with Charles, she wore black taffeta and silk stockings, her petticoat sometimes edged in red. But in 1905, Mata Hari cultivated her own sensation, dressing and dancing to evoke the Oriental fantasy of the day. Her blue-black hair was coiled above her head and threaded with pearls. Her breasts were covered by a brassiere sewn with glass beads, her midriff was bare, and her legs were encased in silken pantaloons that were slit up to her thigh. She undulated like moving water as she danced. She hid and emerged through a sea of colorful veils.
Mata Hari was a girl after Marthe’s own heart, a woman of reinvention. She had created a glamorous life for herself by harnessing her beauty and imagination. At the time, Boldini told Marthe that Paris’s most fashionable dancer did not, in fact, come from some exotic land, but had instead been born in a rather bleak village in Holland. Just as Marthe had shed her name so many years before and stepped into another world of fantasy, so too had the mysterious “Mata Hari.”
However, a decade later, Mata Hari had suffered the fate of every other dancer in Paris. She began to age. Her body softened and her face became feathered with lines. Even as her income decreased, her appetite for beautiful clothes and glittering baubles never waned. Marthe wondered if Mata Hari had been drawn into the world of espionage as a means of digging herself out of debt or whether she had fallen in love with the wrong man, perhaps a German officer who led her down a treacherous and treasonous path.
The description of Mata Hari preparing for her execution felt eerily familiar for Marthe. She prepared herself for death just as a courtesan did when meeting a lover. After the guards woke her, she rose from the prison bed and slipped on a silk kimono, tied the satin ribbons of her shoes around her ankles, and put on a long black velvet cape trimmed at the collar and hem in ermine fur.
She next adjusted a felt hat on her head, wiggled her fingers into kidskin gloves, and looked straight ahead as she was led away by the guards who took her to the Caserne de Vincennes, where twelve waiting soldiers formed a firing squad.
For a woman who had always danced with a veil, Mata Hari defiantly refused a blindfold. She fell backward from the impact of the gunfire, her eyes directed toward the sky.
***
Marthe no longer had a stomach for breakfast after reading of the dancer’s execution.
She was grateful that she had the security of her apartment. Paris had become a labyrinth of suspicion and fear. The war was now in its fourth year with no end in sight, and already a generation of young men had been left wounded or dead. Certain parts of Parisian society were still in denial, these places where under a veil of cigarette smoke, one could pretend the war was far away rather than only one hundred miles to the west. But one now had to seek these places out, and Marthe nolonger had much interest in going to the cafés or the nightclubs like Musée Cuvée, where she had first seen Mata Hari perform. After Charles died, she had enjoyed those nightly distractions with her friend Boldini, but now she preferred to spend nearly all her time at home.
***
“You love art and you love collecting. Why don’t I invite a few of my friends over to your place and we start our own salon?” Boldini had suggested. “It will give me the chance to show off my portrait of you, and also allow you to meet some new people.”
The thought of entertaining in the comfort and privacy of her home intrigued Marthe, and she soon agreed.
The guests were handpicked by the artist and predominantly male. Most of them were married, and every one of them was happy to share a few hours of escape in her parlor.
At first she had been skeptical, thinking no one would attend. But she sat down at her rosewood desk and handwrote the invitations anyway.
She used her stationery embossed with the gold-leaf butterfly, and she wrote in her best scripted hand. A few days later, Marthe was proven wrong when her apartment on the Square La Bruyère was filled with guests.
***
They ranged from Boldini’s wealthy patrons to his fellow artists, and even the occasional politician looking to lose himself for a few hours under the haze of candlelight and canapés.
She even invited the Japanese painter Foujita, through her connections with Ichiro, who brought his cat and sat on her divan as though he were an emperor holding court.
She always kept the gatherings small. She spent the days before creating the menu and selecting the flowers she would place aroundthe apartment to create just the right ambience. She did not serve the most expensive food or the best wine and champagne. Instead, she watched her bank account as best she could. On her small painted plates, she served things people could pick up with their fingers. Smoked salmon on rounds of toasts, oeufs mimosa, and chicken legs roasted in rosemary and thyme.
She never knew how Boldini managed to charge an admission fee for her parties. But, at the end of the evening, the large Chinese urn she had on her sideboard in the vestibule was always filled with envelopes of money. With the night air filling the hallway, the banknotes strewn on the table fluttered like a hundred paper birds.
