Her life became an unending performance, both on stage and off. Her success seemed unstoppable and the money came rolling in. But she still managed to spend more than she earned as she travelled Europe, picking up lovers, dropping some, keeping others. "Tonight I dine with Count A and tomorrow with Duke B. If I don't have to dance, I make a trip with Marquis C. I avoid serious liaisons. I satisfy all my caprices," she said. All too soon she was suffering from over-exposure in another sense. By 1908 anyone who was anyone in Europe had seen her dance at least once, while the lesser theatres were overrun with imitators doing Oriental dances. The dance work was now more irregular and increasingly she would have to rely on her men friends for her livelihood. One, a stockbroker, provided her with a chateau in the Loire and another house on the Seine - until he went bankrupt. Still she refused to cut her prodigious spending or alter her outrageous lifestyle. When she was frantic for money, some said, she would ply her trade at Paris's maisons de rendez-vous, one step up from ordinary brothels. Her financial problems seemed eased when in May 1914 she signed a contract to dance for six months at the Metropol in Berlin, starting in September. But the political situation overtook her. When war broke out in August that year, though Holland was neutral, she was stuck in a now belligerent and increasingly jingoistic German capital with no money and no job. Her fur coats and money had been seized. She charmed a Dutch businessman to pay her train fare to Amsterdam. Back in Holland, she took up again with a former lover. Aristocratic and wealthy, he was just her type. There she was visited by Karl Kroemer, the German consul, who told her he was recruiting spies. He gave her 20,000 francs and a code name, H21. She took his money but she didn't take him seriously. She told herself the cash was compensation for the furs taken from her in Berlin and threw away the invisible ink he gave her. "As she never had the slightest intention of spying for Germany, she felt no guilt or obligation to do anything for the money she had accepted. She had always taken money from men because she needed it and they had it; she always felt she deserved it," says Shipman. Others, ominously, would not agree.