MATA HARPS LAST LOVER.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 16846, 23 September 1922, Page 3

MATA HARPS LAST LOVER.

NOW IN A SPANISH MONASTERY, That the last of the long series of lovers of Mata Hari, the beautiful dancer and spy for the Germans, who met her death facing a firing party at Vincennes, near Paris, is now expatiating his love intrigue under the guise ol a Carthusian monk in a monastery at Cartuja de Miraflores, in Spain, is the statement made with considerable corroborative details in the well-known political “ Mercure de France." The paper gives a remarkable new version of the romantic and tragic life of the beautiful spy from the age of fourteen to her meeting with her last, lover, who, before the death of Mata -Hari, was a well-known man in Parisian society, and whose name is given as M . Mata Hari. whose real name was Marguerite Gertrude Zell, was a daughter of a rich Dutch planter in Java and of a Javanese woman. Her father died when she was a child, and her mother, knowing the unfortunate iate of so many Eurasian girls, placed her at the age of fourten as a sacred dancer in a Buddhist temple. She was only fifteen years old when a Scottish officer, visiting the island and falling desperately in love with the beautiful dancer, carried her off to India and married her. Mata Hari had two children in jndia. The eldest, a boy. fell suddenly ill and died. Mata Hari was convinced that he had been poisoned by a native servant, and, taking the law into hor own hands, shot the supposed murderer while he lay asleep. Then, fearful of the consequences of her crime, she fled the country and came to Europe, where slie settled down in Paris. Her husband, after many months of painful searching, located her there. He came to Paris, bringing with him his surviving child, and found his wife living in a sumptuout flat under the protection of a German officer of high rank who, under civilian guise, was really working for the German secret service. Mata Hari refused to return to her husband, who finally returned, broken-hearted, to Scotland shortly before the war. Tn the course of her intrusion into society and political circles the beautiful dancer made the acquaintance of her last lover. M ~ then at the height of social brilliance. When her intrigues were revealed during the war and she was sentenced to death her lover did everything possible to save her from execution. A week later, after her death, her lover disappeared, and it is only now that he has been traced to the monastery. Efforts have been made to get in touch with him at the monastery, but the superior scoffs at the idea that such a, man is a member of his order, and says he has never heard of Mata Hari or of her lover. Once a man joins the Carthusian Order, however, and makes sincere vows of repentance and of a desire to expiate his sins, he is lost to the world. His name is neither asked nor revealed. and he passes his ]ife in prayer and fasting, never again to look back on the past.