“Almost everyone here knew that she got famous through exotic dancing, and people here didn’t like that,” said Klaas Zandberg, the coordinator of the Leeuwarden Historical Center, an archive in the city where Zelle was born in 1876 and lived until she was 18. He said many locals “still think that she’s some kind of whore who still gets too much attention.” Mr. Brandsen said that she still commands fascination: “Ninety-eight to ninety-nine percent of the seats” for each performance of the ballet were sold in 2016, he said. Although her childhood was spent in a prosperous household, her father, a hat merchant and speculator, lost all his money when she was 14. A series of tragic events followed: Her parents divorced, her mother died, her father left her with relatives and that didn’t go well. At 18, she answered a newspaper ad from a 39-year-old captain in the Dutch colonial army, met him for a date and married him five months later. Zelle’s husband, Rudolph MacLeod, took her with him to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), where she learned some Javanese dance and had two children. Her son died suddenly at age 3, possibly from mercury poisoning by a nanny. The couple divorced; when her husband refused to pay alimony, she left her daughter with him and found ways to support herself. In 1903, she moved to Paris. Later, when asked why, she is reported to have said, “I thought all women who ran away from their husbands went there.” She was equally saucy and vague about her personal history once she transformed herself into Mata Hari. Although today’s exotic dancers are associated with grimy clubs, Mata Hari’s sensational premiere took place at the Musée Guimet in Paris, an art institution where it was seen by upper-crust socialites, and her enormous and immediate success thrust her into their ranks. “She was at least a millionaire at one point,” said Hans Groeneweg, the curator of the Museum of Friesland exhibition.