Born on August 7, 1876, in Leeuwarden, a small Frisian town, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle later turned into Mata Hari—an exotic dancer famous for her sensational nude performances. Many say she acted as a secret agent—maybe, a double agent for France and Germany during the First World War.

Margaretha had experienced hard times since her early adolescence. At first, her father made a good business in this predominantly “butter and cheese” town, but he soon turned into an alcoholic. Her mother died before Margaretha reached her blossoming age. Her pious godfather, Mr. Visser, took over her custody. Sensing really no place for her in the house, she felt actually relieved when Mr. Visser told her to enter a school at Leyden that trained kindergarten teachers, though she hardly liked the profession.

At eighteen, Margaretha answered an Amsterdam newspaper seeking a wife. The ad turned out a joke set up by one of officer friends. Nonetheless, the balding 39-year-old Rudolph MacLeod ended up marrying her. For the next two years they lived in Holland, where she bore their son, Norman. When assigned to the Dutch East Indies, MacLeod took his family with him.

There Margaretha had another child, Jeanne. Flirted with young officers and planters—so MacLeod claimed with burning jealousy—she behaved like a queen surrounded by her cooing admirers. She loved to watch Javanese temple dancers, who inspired her future career. MacLeod drank, became unfaithful, and beat her. Once he threatened her with a loaded gun. One story goes, a native soldier poisoned their son, angered over MacLeod’s seduction of his girl friend—the boy's nurse.

As soon as the MacLeods returned to Holland, they separated. In 1904, Margaretha stayed in Paris, without husband or child. At her debut as a dancer, she met Emile Etienne Guimet, the owner of an Oriental art museum, where she soon gave an electrifying performance of mysterious dance. Theater critic Edouard Lepage, a theater critic, described her appearance:

Hypnotized by the snake charmer’s flute, she dances like a naiad in India. Her flexible body at times becomes one with the undulating flames, to stiffen suddenly in the middle of her contortions with a brutal gesture. Mata Hari rips off her jewels, throws away the ornaments that cover her breasts, and, naked, her body seems to lengthen way up into the shadows. She beats the air with her shattered arms, whips the imperturbable night with her long heavy hair.

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However, some admirers insisted that she had never danced completely nude, but always concealed her breasts, which had been bitten and thus permanently disfigured by MacLeod.

Mata Hari (Malay for “eye of the dawn”) created her own story. A 14-year-old Indian temple dancer gave birth to a girl and died. Raised by temple priests, the girl mastered her dances sacred to the Hindu god Siva. She danced nude for the first time at thirteen before the altar of a Hindu temple.

Her career skyrocketed. Tall, dark, strong-featured, Mata Hari became a sensation in most of the major capitals of Europe. Wherever she went, Mata Hari created a whirlwind of scandal. The authorities forced her to wear a piece of red flannel, diaper-fashion, at her crotch.

When the war broke out, Mata Hari stayed in Berlin, riding through the streets of the capital with a police official. Her spy story went around in high drama. Code-naming her as H21, the Germans gave her a bottle of invisible ink. (She claimed, she had thrown it into a canal soon afterward.) She seduced high-ranking German officers. She agreed to spy for the French for a million francs because she needed to impress the father of her lover—Vadime de Massloff, a Russian captain. Young officers flocked around her. So did wealthy noblemen, who fought for her through jealousy, greed, and lust. The French spies tailed her in Madrid, one disguised as an old man on a bicycle, and they witnessed that Mata Hari contacted the German spy master in a villa in the affluent district.

In February 1917, the French police arrested Mata Hari. Some say she greeted the arresting officers naked on a couch in her hotel room. The rumor went around in those days that she took milk baths while Parisian children starved. Later, people gossiped that she had danced nude in her cell at Saint-Lazare Prison.

The file on her grew six-inch thick, but the evidence became inconclusive. To an interrogator, she answered: “I love officers. I have loved them all my life. I prefer to be the mistress of a poor officer than a rich banker. It is my greatest pleasure to sleep with them without having to think of money. And moreover I like to make comparisons between the various nationalities. I have said yes to them with all my heart. They left thoroughly satisfied, without ever having mentioned the war, and neither did I ask them anything that was indiscreet. I've only kept on seeing Vadime de Massloff because I adore him.”

A tube of “secret ink” in her possession turned out a vial of oxycyanide of mercury, which she injected into herself as a birth-control method after making love. Her aged lover Maitre Clunet defended her at her trial, and another lover, Jules Cambon of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, testified in her behalf. A third lover, old and amiable General Messimy, sent a letter, written by his wife, which asked that the general be excused from testifying since he didn’t know the defendant. At that, Mata Hari laughed, “Ah! He never knew me. Oh, well. He has a nerve!” The jury laughed with her, but humor did not save her from her awful sentence—death by a firing squad.

On the way of her execution, the prison warden asked her whether she carried a fetus in her womb. According to French law, the state could not execute a pregnant woman. As a last-ditch attempt, Maitre Clunet tried to save her by claiming to be the father of her unborn child.

She stood before the firing squad at the polygon of Vincennes, on October 15, 1917—at her own request—without a blindfold. Some say that she pulled open her coat to reveal her naked body so the astounding squad could not squeeze a trigger. Others want to believe that her aviator boyfriend strafed the field. Yet others, inspired by the plot of the opera Tosca, suggest that her defense lawyer bribed the firing squad to use blanks, to put her in a ventilated coffin, and to bury her in a shallow grave so that he could spirit her away.

What actually happened? Mata Hari didn’t strip naked. Nor did her boyfriend strafe the field. Her defense layer only shed his tears. No one claimed her body. So, the authorities contributed it to a medical school for dissection. Was she guilty? That remains a mystery.

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Born Emma Elizabeth Crouch in 1835 to a family of sixteen children in Devonshire, England, Cora Pearl grew into the most popular courtesan in the Paris of Napoleon III, despite her poor manners, incomprehensible French, and penchant for cruel practical jokes.

Her father, working as a musical director, composed Kathleen Mavourneen—a popular ballad of the time, which he sold for twenty pounds to a publisher who earned 15,000 pounds from it. Unlike her father, Cora turned into a clever woman who sold her favors of a single night for as much as 10,000 francs.

Her clients turned out the wealthiest and most powerful men of her day, whom she collectively called her “Golden Chain” of lovers. Later in her life, Cora wrote her memoirs and sent excerpts to her former clients, offering to delete certain parts in exchange for money. The extortion scheme turned into a success, for the published version made dull reading.

One day in her teens while she chatted with her friend, a wealthy merchant lured Cora into a low-class pub by promises of sweets. There, he gave the naive girl her first taste of gin. When she woke up in his bed the following morning, he compensated her with a five-pound note. Thus, she inadvertently begun her career. That same day she left home and soon began an apprenticeship in a London brothel.

Cora arrived in Paris in 1858 with the proprietor of the Argyle Rooms, a seedy London brothel where she had perfected her bedroom skills. Originally, they both went for pleasure rather than business, but duty eventually called and Cora’s patron returned to England without her. She took up with a sailor for a while. When he shipped out, Cora remained alone in Paris again, but luck didn’t leave the young woman, who met a mysterious man known as “Roubisse”, who procured for her as the first in her golden chain of clients.

Then Cora met Victor Massena, and for six years remained his mistress. The staid aristocrat indulged her every whim, yet Cora later described Massena as “the man who received the least in return”. Throughout their relationship, which ended in 1869 when Massena drifted out of her life, she had many other lovers. As the third patron came Duc de Rivoli. Cora then came across with 17-year-old Prince Achille Murat—a grandnephew of Napoleon I. While the young man remained with moderate means, Cora helped him run through what money he did have. He fought and won a duel over Cora’s bills once. However, he went so badly into debt that Emperor Napoleon III sent him to Africa.

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Once Cora herself fought a duel, with Marthe de Vere, a fellow courtesan, over a good-looking Serbian prince. Riding whips turned into weapons. After the fight, both Cora and Marthe hid themselves in seclusion for a week to let the wounds on their faces heal. The prince, in the meanwhile, disappeared.

After Murat came William, Prince of Orange—heir to the throne of the Netherlands. The Prince of Orange had little to his credit besides money, and Cora found him tiresome. However, Core, who would bathe nude in a champagne-filled silver tub in front of her dinner guests, might easily find many men tiresome.

Cora loved practical jokes. She once invited a prominent Parisian into a compromising position in her bedroom, only to throw open the closet doors and reveal a contingent of his friends. At another time, Cora hosted a dinner party at which she presented herself naked on a silver platter to win a bet. She wagered that she could serve “a meat nobody could cut.”

One day, Cora went ice-skating and happened to meet the Duc de Morny—the second most powerful man in France and the emperor’s half brother.
      “Cora on the ice?” he said to her. “What a wet blanket!”
      She replied, “Well, since I’m as wet as your blanket, take me for a drink.”
      De Morny turned out a stepping-stone to Prince Napoleon—“Plon-Plon” to his friends—who fell madly in love with Cora. The prince installed her in a grand house and gave her a monthly allowance of 12,000 francs. But her barnyard manners and cockney-accented French annoyed the prince at times, as did her habit of entertaining hordes of men. During one party, when Cora—the only woman at a table full of male admirers—coyly remarked, “I’m an eternal virgin, but there is only one man among you, who has never broken my cherry.”

Although nobody has a concrete evidence that Plon-Plon’s cousin, Napoleon III, stood among Cora’s lovers, the emperor might hardly have overlooked her, since Cora became a sexual common denominator—a conversation piece when men talked among themselves.

For a time all Paris buzzed with the tragic story of one of Cora’s lovers, Alexandre Duval, a gentleman with a fortune of ten million francs. Duval showered Cora with gifts of carriages, horses, jewelry, furnishings, and other expensive items. He once gave her a book, which she contemptuously tossed aside, not realizing that its 100 pages consisted of 1,000-franc bank notes. Despite the lavish presents, Cora treated Duval with disdain. When he eventually shot himself in her house, Cora coldly remarked, “Oh, gosh, what a dirty pig! He fxxked up my beautiful rug!”

Duval recovered at length from both the bullet wound and his near fatal devotion to Cora.

Cora’s spurned lovers might have gloated over her later years—hungry, homeless, hustling cheap tricks in the slums. An English journalist, Julian B. Arnold, stumbled upon Cora in Monte Carlo, where she sat weeping on a curbstone. Taking pity on her, Arnold took her to his villa. That night as Arnold sat reading in his study, Cora entered in a dressing gown. She let the gown fall to the floor and stood naked before him.
      Agape, he stared at her for a while. “what ... what do you think you’re doing?”
      “A woman’s vanity,” she said, “should be my sufficient excuse. I find it difficult to rest until I’ve shown you that, if Cora Pearl has lost all else, she still retains that famous form.”
      “Famous form?”
      “Yes, a form of loveliness.”
      Indeed, he observed a perfect form of her nakedness even after going miserable.
      “Tell me, Cora, if you have any regret.”
      “Regret? Oh, I’ve never thought about it. I've been happy with those men—handsome, young, and amiable—who loyally offered me their arms, their love, and their money. Every one of them has every right to think and call himself my favorite lover—my lover for an hour, my escort for a month, and my friend forever. That is how I understand the business, and I loved my business."

Her face might look plain, but she had beautiful skin and hair and her body turned out one of the most perfect in France. With it she earned a vast fortune. But alas! on July 8, 1886, Cora died of cancer, penniless and alone, at the age of fifty-one.

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In 1898, the youngest 29-year-old daughter of a Scottish retired admiral emerged from obscurity to become the publicly acknowledged mistress of Bertie—the portly, fun-loving, 58-year-old Prince of Wales, later crowned Edward VII. Hailed as one of the beauties of the “naughty nineties”, the Honorable Mrs. George Keppel became a leader of the fashionable high society or, at least, one of the best-known society hostesses of the Edwardian era—an age of aristocratic adultery and mindless pleasure-seeking—with the the backdrop of tempestuous world events and a racy royal court.

She turned out a great-grandmother of Camilla Parker-Bowles, who became a close friend of the current Prince of Wales. Alice’s ancestors and relatives have been close to the Royal Family for centuries, beginning with Arnold Joost Van Keppel, a Dutch nobleman who accompanied the Prince of Orange to Britain in 1688, and the king made him the first Earl of Albemarle in 1696. Both Alice and Camilla Parker Bowles descend from him.

During the long years of waiting before Prince Edward could assume the British Throne, he had long lasting love affairs with several women of the London bourgeoisie. As one of the first well-known lovers came out Lillie Langtry, a famous actress from the Island of Jersey (1853-1929), by whom he had a daughter, Jeanne, born 1881. Bertie then slipped into a love affair with Frances (Daisy) Brooke (1861-1938), who, in the late 1890s, turned to socialism, which became fatal for her relationship to Bertie.

Through all his affairs, Alice Keppel kept the latest and lasting love affair with him. Indeed, their relationship lasted until Bertie’s death in 1910. Mrs. Keppel became the only one of his amorous ladies who had ever showed up on a stamp, together with her daughter Violet. The stamp went public for sale in 1995.

In 1992 Princess Diana and her husband separated. Diana found it unacceptable, however exalted his rank, for her husband to be the lover of another woman while married to her. Though troubled with Bertie’s affairs, Princess Alexandra would not have sympathized. For the women in the nineteenth century, it was not how things were that mattered but how they appeared. Before anything else, Alexandra thought about the eyes of the high society: discretion, manners, and propriety. The proper appearance of civilized marriage became as imperative as a hat at Ascot, pearls and furs at party.

In this sense, Alice Keppel remained clever and thoughtful. She knew her art of being a royal mistress and behaved as Bertie’s prudent boudoir belle while he remained Prince of Wales then King. She did not allow jealousy and sexual possession to blur her manners or her style. On December 10, 1936, Bertie’s grandson, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, a divorcee. At that night, Mrs. Keppel dined at the Ritz and muttered to her friend, “Things were done much better in my day.”

In her day Alice both shared a bed with the king and advised him on presents for his wife, Alexandra, who collected pieces by Faberge. At Mrs. Keppel’s suggestion Bertie commissioned jewelled, gold models of all the Sandringham animals for his Queen. Artists sent from St. Petersburg made wax models for the stonecutters. The Faberge workshops produced a glittering farmyard of heifers, goats, cocks and pigs, accompanied by Persimmon—Bertie’s Derby-winning horse—as well as Caesar, his Norfolk terrier, with rubies for eyes, a gold bell and a collar inscribed “I belong to the King”.

After all, a myriad of hypocrisies preserved the relationship between Mrs. Keppel and the King. Marriage vows and even the Coronation Oath turned into rituals that preserved the status quo. An indiscretion of dress or etiquette mattered more than adultery. “Noblesse oblige” became the norm. Divorce remained unthinkable because of loss of status, however compromised the relationship between husband and wife.

Group photographs of huge shooting parties commemorate Mrs. Keppel’s weekends with Bertie. He sits at the centre, portly and assured, hands folded on his walking stick, flanked by ladies in ankle-length gowns, their hats like nesting birds. All look inscrutably at the camera. Nothing reveals the secret relationships between other women's husbands and other men’s wives, of the elaborate games of adultery decorously conducted at these country-house weekends.

Those days turned into the Edwardian heyday for Bertie, Alice and the high society when taxes remained low and servants cheap. Strict ceremony regulated their lives. Mrs. Keppel, as the King’s Lady, would change four times a day. She required two maids to iron and lay out her clothes, to curl her hair, to scent her bath water, and to wind her watches.

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As a superb hostess, Alice Keppel attended to the “disposition of bedrooms”. She remained tactful and at the same time discreet. She wrote the name of each guest neatly on a card slipped into a tiny brass frame on the bedroom door so that male guests would not blunder into the wrong rooms while going to their mistresses during the night. Lord Robert Gore had to stay in the Red Silk Room while Mrs. Levison just across the passage. The housekeeper, maids and valets all understood the careful coding of the cards that hung beside the bell indicator outside the pantry and “the recurrence of certain adjustments and coincidences”. At times scandal surfaced—out of jealousy, betrayal, or broken hearts. In general, however, the people succumbed to the Edwardian norm—discretion, manners, and propriety—at least, on the surface.

Mrs. Keppel turned adultery into an art. Her demeanor and poise countered whispers, taints and horrible noxious suspicions. Prosperity and status in her mind, she challenged none of the proprieties of her class. She treated even her enemies kindly, and invariably knew the choicest scandal, the price of stocks, and the latest political move. No one could better amuse the Prince during the tedium of the long dinner.

In her later years, Mrs. Keppel displayed a large signed photograph of Queen Alexandra in her drawing room to show how far approval reigned. The Queen, too, had to appear not to mind her husband carrying on with a woman twenty-four years younger than herself.

Dressed in gowns by Worth, with collars of diamonds and ropes of pearls, Mrs. Keppel stayed at the King’s left hand for racing at Ascot, sailing at Cowes, grouse shoots at Sandringham, sea air and casinos at Biarritz and Monte Carlo. Alice became, more than the crowned queen, the queen of the high society—the heroine of fairy tales. Her alabaster skin, blue eyes, chestnut hair, large breasts, kindness and charm so overwhelmed the King that he gave her love and great riches.

She particularly excelled in making King Edward VII happy. He for his part excelled in making her rich. They became lovers for the last twelve years of his life and feted as principal guests by most of the owners of the great Edwardian country houses. However, some nobles hated Mrs. Keppel, who became an unwelcome guest for the Duke of Portland at Welbeck Abbey near Sherwood Forest where life remained “enshrined in a hyper-aristocratic niche”. The Duke of Norfolk at Arundel remained cold toward the royal mistress, so did the Marquess of Salisbury at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire where they offered segregated prayers in the private chapel every morning before breakfast and every evening after tea.

Despite such rebuffs, Bertie openly escorted Alice at Chatsworth and Sandringham, where tea turned out a full-dress meal—ladies in gowns, lords and gentlemen in short black jackets and black ties—and dinner a banquet where the guests bedecked themselves in tiaras, ribands and Orders of the Empire. Both became friends of Lord and Lady Alington of Crichel, Lord and Lady Howe of Gopsall, Lord and Lady Iveagh of Elvedon.

Alice took holidays with Bertie in Paris, Marienbad, Biarritz, sailed with him on the Royal Yacht, dined with him at Buckingham Palace, entertained him for “tea” at her house at 30 Portman Square.

Queen Alexandra remained such an understanding wife that she summoned Mrs. Keppel to the king’s deathbed in 1910. If the queen ever suffered jealousy or anguish over her husband’s behavior, she apparently never told anyone or showed it in any way.

When the King died, Mrs. Keppel discreetly dropped out of sight for a year by taking a trip to Ceylon with her daughters.

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Born Emilie Charlotte Le Breton on October 13, 1853, Lillie Langtry became the most celebrated “professional beauty” of Queen Victoria’s London—as a pinup girl, an artist's model, an actress, and the mistress of princes and millionaires. A daughter of a clergyman, she spent her childhood on the British Isle of Jersey, and turned into a tomboy, but by the time she turned sixteen, her father had to repulse several suitors. To console the girl, he allowed her a trip to London. Dazzled by city life, she vowed to live there one day. Her escape from Jersey came in the form of Edward Langtry, a moderately well-to-do yachtsman whom she married when she turned twenty-one. Edward provided her with a passport into London society.

With a five-foot-eight statuesque figure, Lillie had masses of red-gold hair and a flawless complexion. At the height of her fame, she appeared in advertisements for Pears soap. One of the first celebrities to endorse a commercial product, Lillie earned 132 pounds—a sum equal to her weight. She maintained her shapely figure through jogging.

Lillie posed for the most famous artists of her day, including James Whistler, John Millais, and Edward Burne-Jones. Her image, reproduced on postcards, decorated the walls of army barracks, student dormitories, and ships’ cabins, thus beginning the pinup picture vogue.

The famous 78-year-old French author Victor Hugo once toasted her, “Madame, I can celebrate your beauty in only one way.”       “Oh, how?”       “By wishing I were three years younger.”

She made her theatrical debut in 1881. Although her acting talents turned out uneven, she nevertheless became the toast of both England and America, playing opposite such leading men as Lionel Atwill and the young Alfred Lunt. In Texas, the infamous Judge Roy Bean renamed his saloon the Jersey Lily and moved it to the town of Langtry. After the judge’s death, the executor of his will gave her his revolver, which she had reputedly used several times to defend her honor.

Lillie enjoyed sex, but it became rather the serious business in her life and set up a ladder for her to the top. She believed that scandal could turn into the best form of publicity and provided ample fodder for Victorian gossips.

In Lillie's heyday, London’s most ambitious hostesses entered her name on any guest list that included her obese lover, Bertie (Prince of Wales, later to become King Edward VII). She also got romantically involved with Yankee millionaire Freddie Gebhard and George Alexander Baird, one of the wealthiest men in England. Lillie parlayed these relationships into a fortune in diamonds, town houses, a racing stable, and plenty of ready cash.

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Lillie’s men tended to be rich, ineffectual, and easily dominated. “Men are born to be slaves,” she once remarked. Edward Langtry turned out a sexual dud and a drunkard. When his fortune dwindled, he became nothing but a burden to her. Freddie Gebhard catered to her every whim, while tolerating her peccadilloes with dog-like loyalty. George Baird delighted in beating Lillie, but every time he did so, she made him pay her 5,000 pounds.

Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria-Hungary once gave her an emerald ring. Angered by an argument with him, she yanked off the ring and threw it into the fireplace. The crown prince fell to his knees, desperate to retrieve the emerald from the burning coals. Disgusted, Lillie told her friends, “I couldn’t love him after that.”

Lillie’s dominant nature and open disregard for Victorian morality enthralled Bertie. Both would meet regularly at the homes of friends, ostensibly for tea, and were given adjoining accommodations during weekend retreats. The intimate details of their affair remained discreetly hidden, although their being lovers became a public secret. When Bertie once complained, “I’ve spent enough on you to buy a battleship,” Lillie snapped back, “And you’ve spent enough in me to float one!” Meanwhile, Edward Langtry, bribed into silence, felt reasonably happy with his replenished coffer. Lillie remained Bertie’s mistress until she playfully dropped a piece of ice down his back at a party. Not amused at all, Bertie abruptly ended the affair.

In 1897, while Lillie enjoyed international acclaim, her hapless husband died broke in an insane asylum. Two years later she married Hugo de Bathe, who succeeded to a baronetcy in 1907, making Lillie Lady de Bathe. Using 55,000 pounds of her own money, she remodeled a derelict London playhouse, the Imperial Theater, and spent the next two decades amusing herself with acting, baccarat, and occasional visits to her friend Queen Mary. When she turned into a sixty-four-old grandmother, most of her admirers had fallen away.

On a visit to New York, she visited public dance halls where she paid gigolos fifty cents to dance with her. Yet, some vestige of her beauty remained. Hugo de Bathe took a role of an official escort after her retirement to Monaco in 1918, but for the most part he occupied himself with chorus girls and debutantes in Nice. Lillie died, wealthy and alone, in Monaco on February 12, 1929. Oscar Wilde had once predicted she would be a beauty even at eighty-five. Indeed, she remained so upon her death at seventy-four.

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