It was a compulsion she inherited from her father, Adam Zelle, a hat-shop owner in the Dutch town of Leeuwardne, who rejoiced in his grandiose nickname: The Baron. He encouraged his daughter Margaretha to be as flamboyant as he was, but her spoilt childhood ended abruptly in her early teens, when her parents divorced and her mother died. Lodging with relatives, Margaretha enrolled in a teacher-training college, but was rumoured to be having an affair with the headmaster. She was thrown out; the headmaster kept his job.

Sex sells

In need of money and respectability, she answered a newspaper lonely-hearts ad from a soldier who was home on leave from the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia). Aged 18, Margaretha met the 39-year-old Rudolf MacLeod at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1895. They announced their engagement six days later. But the role of obedient wife was one she found impossible to play. After the couple moved to the island of Java, where MacLeod resumed his military duties, he fumed about his bride’s interest in fashion and gossip – even though marriage hadn’t curtailed his own habitual drinking and womanising. He doted on their son, Norman, and their daughter, Non, but he abused Margaretha, verbally and physically. When Norman died, their short marriage effectively died with him.