The letter reached him about one month after the execution, delivered by a circuitous route to the hospital in Taverny. It arrived on a Wednesday, and by the following Tuesday Gray had slipped over the walls and disappeared.

At first there were a few half-hearted attempts to find him, and the British expressed a passing interest in reports that he had gone to Spain. It was not until years later, however, that journalists began to search for him on the heights of Montserrat.

There were nearly as many rumors about Nicholas Gray as there were about Mata Hari. Some claimed that he finally went mad with grief, while others said that the grief turned to rage and he died attempting to kill Charles Dunbar in London. Only rumors.

But what of those rumors of Zelle?

All through the 1920s and 1930s there were those who claimed that she had somehow survived to join her English painter on a windswept Spanish plateau. A few even claimed to have seen her dance in some nameless Castilian cafe.

Finally, it seems that there is little we can really know for certain: except that if one man honestly loved her, then she probably lived forever.

Author’s Afterword

Author's Afterword

The Man Who Loved Mata Hari is fiction extending from a core of truth. Mata Hari was, of course, executed at dawn, on October 15, 1917, for crimes against France. The remains were lost in a municipal dissecting room, and her personal effects were sold in order to cover the court costs. More importantly, however, the whole affair did in fact rest upon a handful of telegrams, which the author firmly believes were forged.

In short, Nicholas Gray's revelations concerning those telegrams are correct: the dates were wrong. That is, the woman was convicted on the basis of a cable that could not have been written simply because it described an event that did not take place until after it was sent. There were other subtler discrepancies involving money, and no case officer would ever include—then or now—such a detailed description of an agent in a message of this kind.

Also essentially accurate are the portrayals of Georges Ladoux, Bouchardon, Cramer, Sir Basil Thomson, and most of the other "riinor" characters. There was a man named Vadime de Massloff, though his betrayal of Zelle was less obvious.

On the whole the greatest departures from fact involve the basic plot-line. Charles Dunbar, Martin Southerland, and Rudolph Spangler were invented. I believe, though, that a man like Dunbar may very well have existed, but his story is pure fiction. The dancer's early involvement with Rolland Michard is likewise a fiction, as are the events that took place at Fontainebleau.

And finally—as much as I hate to admit it—there was, to my knowledge, no man who ever loved her quite so selflessly as the painter Nicholas Gray.

—D.S.

Montreal, 1985