Neutral Netherlands commiserates with its invaded, war-battered neighbor Belgium. One of a series of 1916 postcards on neutral nations by Em. Dupuis.
Pauvre petite Voisine va!. . .Poor little Neighbour.HollandeEm. Dupuis, 1916Signed: Em. Dupuis 1916Reverse:Visé Paris. No. 109Logo: Paris Color 152 Quai de Jemmapes
"— The 13th. At Gheusi's. It was to-day they shot the lovely Mata-Hari. General Vialon, who came to see Gheusi during the interval, brought the news. Germany offered to liberate from ten to twenty French officers, prisoners of war, if they would spare this woman. Her counsel, Clunet, an old man touched by her beauty, pleaded her case movingly, invoking the memory of his own son killed at the front. Some officials, said to have been her lovers, also made appeals on her behalf."
Beginning of the entry for October 13, 1917 from the diary of Michel Corday, French senior civil servant. Mata Hari, a self-made performer and dancer who had been derided for not knowing how to dance, was originally Margaretha Zelle from the Netherlands, and moved to Indonesia with her husband. She left him, moved to Paris, and achieved some success as a performer. At the time of her arrest as a German spy, her career had been in decline for some time. Gheusi was presumably Pierre-Barthélemy Gheusi (pseudonym Norbert Lorédan), a theater director, writer, and librettist. Corday's literary friends included French novelist Anatole France.
The Paris Front: an Unpublished Diary: 1914-1918 by Michel Corday, page 281, copyright © 1934, by E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publisher: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., publication date: 1934
1917-10-13, October, 1917, Mata-Hari, Mata Hari, spy,
