"Mrs. McLeod" 1903-1904 (Mata Hari)

"Mrs. McLeod"
aka the freshly divorced, disgraced, and discarded mid life crisis who would one day rebrand herself as Mata Hari.
After her divorce from her disastrous husband Rudolf McLeod- a Dutch officer who was posted in the Dutch East Indies, the desperate and "Mrs. McLeod" waded to Paris in 1903 like a soulless stray. The year 1903 would be dominated by desperation and degradation.
Within this crucible and ravine, the last shred of modesty would be sold out in pieces.
It was also her that here wounded pride would blaze anew into the Eye of Dawn.

After all she was always a creature of vanity, and would embellish both her life as well as her death with much art.
Though she would sign many autographs with her (culturally appropriated) exotic moniker, in many official documents she stilled signed with "M g. Zelle MacLeod."

I chose to go after a fresh faced stranger version of her~ rather than the stereotypical bombshell version that many are familiar with her because that version is pretty much overdone. Aside from those many of the other version of her are either showing off expensive clothing, paired with fancy hats and conservative dresses or her final frumpy overweight photos after her arrest. However in those photos there's practically no facial expression from her, just PC and boring portraitures. But there's almost never a sort of a picture out there that sort of covers her...emotional landscape of the darkest ravines of her early life before her dramatic transformation which would defined her for the rest of her life and for all time beyond. A portrait of a mistake-wracked woman still in the last days of her larval stage, the picture of enough innocence on the precipice of a cliff, sort of a Jimmy McGill before he became Saul Goodman. So here she is in the year 1903, perhaps putting on a reassuring smile either to a friend, client, or her own reflection, as if thinking that by working up a smile again she would be able to work up the charms to fake her way through life. Here she is, still human enough, approachable enough, vulnerable enough, before the grand act begans, consumed by an actress that the world would not allow to be anything else.

6 Hours.

Music while bashing:
Path to Nowhere: DC for Infinity [Quixotic Troupe]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmpHlopCoJ0