Madame Tussaud

hands him the letter with an exaggerated flourish.

He passes it to me. “You should open it.”

It is better paper than any I have ever seen, and the king’s seal is on it. I am trembling; I can barely break open the wax. When I’ve finished reading the letter, I turn to my uncle. “They want to come,” I say breathlessly. “In January, they wish to visit the Salon!” I look up, and the entire table has gone silent.

The Duc is the first to speak. “What? L’Autrichienne doesn’t have enough entertainment at Versailles?”

“Thank you,” I say to the courtier quickly, and my uncle is already tipping the man handsomely so that none of what has passed beneath this roof will make its way back to the palace. As soon as he is gone, everyone begins speaking at once.

“We should be here when they come!” Camille says. “We should challenge the king—”

“And let him know what his people are thinking!” Lucile adds.

“Do you wish to ruin Curtius and his Salon?” Henri demands.

Camille looks shamefacedly at my uncle. “Perhaps we could hand him a p-p-petition.”

“He’s had dozens of petitions,” Henri says logically. “He could paper the walls of Versailles with them. You want a voice? Become a representative in the Estates-General.”

The Duc snorts into his brandy as my mother serves him a large helping of cabbage. “The king will never listen until the people rise up.”

“That may be,” Curtius says, “but the place to rise up is not here.”

The rest of our dinner is eaten in silence. Afterward, when everyone is leaving and the Duc is so drunk he requires assistance to make his way down the stairs, Henri takes my uncle and me aside. We stand together in the window embrasure, next to a sign advertising Madame du Barry. “Do you know when the royal family is coming?” he asks.

“Yes,” I tell him. “After the new year.”

His eyes are troubled. There’s no hint of the kind smile he normally reserves for me. “It may not bring the kind of publicity you want.”

“This is the queen,” I protest.

“Who is buried by half a dozen scandals. This is not the only salon proposing radical changes. Men like Camille and Robespierre are all across Paris.”

I turn to Curtius. He has never bothered with a wig, and his hair is copper in the evening light. For a man in his fifties, he is still handsome. “It is something to consider,” he says.

“But only good can come of this!” I exclaim, unable to believe I am hearing this from my uncle, the man who taught me that publicity, above all things, drives a business. I have been working toward this for a year. “Everyone will want to see what the queen has seen. Who cares about the Affair of the Diamond Necklace and whether she placed an order for two million livres of jewels or not?”

“The people might,” Henri says. He measures his words, like an experiment. Five years ago, he and his brother launched the first hydrogen balloon, and since then they have been working to prove Franklin’s experiments in electricity. Unlike my uncle, Henri is a scientist first and a showman second. “There is some publicity that isn’t worth the risk.”

But that is nonsense. “Not everyone may love the queen,” I say, “but they will always respect her.”

Chapter 3

JANUARY

16, 1789

[We brought the Cardinal] the famous necklace. He told us that Her Majesty the Queen was going to acquire the jewel, and he showed us that the proposals we had accepted were signed by Marie Antoinette of France.

—MEMORANDUM TO HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN

CONCERNING THE DIAMOND NECKLACE AFFAIR

I HAVE MODELED DOZENS OF FAMOUS MEN AND WOMEN, BUT NO one like Rose Bertin. She sweeps into the entrance hall of the Salon de Cire, and a train of servants follows behind her, each girl carrying two baskets filled with silks and lace and gauzy bows to decorate Rose’s wax figure. Curtius directs the young women to the back of the workshop while I lead Rose to the first room of the museum.

“It is crowded,” she says, and I can hear the surprise in her voice.

“We do good business,” I reply. “Tourists from all over Europe come here.”

We begin to walk, and her eyes are drawn to the high, vaulted ceilings. The Salon de Cire takes up ten of the eleven graciously proportioned rooms on the first floor of our house. “I don’t remember it being so grand,” she admits. “When did this happen?”

It is as if she is asking when an ugly child suddenly grew into a pretty adult. “We have been working toward this for years,” I say, a little tartly.

“Your exhibition in the Palais-Royal was not so big.”

“And that is one of the reasons we moved.” I explain how each room has been decorated to complement each tableau. Around the figure of Benjamin Franklin, for instance, Henri and Curtius built a mock laboratory. It is filled with images of the American’s inventions: a metal stove to replace the fireplace, an odometer to track the distances traveled by carriage, and a rod to protect buildings from lightning damage. Rose nods at the descriptions as we pass. I don’t know if she has understood any of this, or if only scientists like Henri and Curtius find it fascinating.

“And where is the new wax model of the queen?” she asks. We go to the tableau of Marie Antoinette in her nightdress, and Rose stands transfixed. The room has been decorated to look like the queen’s bedchamber. It is based on a painting I purchased in the Palais-Royal, and the artist swore it was an exact representation. I watch Rose’s face as she studies the chamber. A gilded chandelier hangs from the ceiling, and the manufacturer of the king’s own wallpaper—a merchant named Reveillon—sold us the pink floral design for the walls. “This is good,” she says. She circles the model of the queen like a vulture. “You’ve gotten the color of her eyes just right.”

“Thank you,” I say, but she isn’t listening.

“What is this?” She points to the chair on which the queen’s First Lady of the Bedchamber is sitting. “This chair should not have arms. No one except the king and queen is allowed a chair with arms. Even the king’s brother is not allowed this privilege!” Rose looks at me, aghast. “This must be changed. I want to see the rest of the royal models,” she announces.

We go from room to room, and I am forced to send for ink and paper to write down all of the ways in which we have erred. And there are many. In a tableau of the royal family at dinner, the king should be seated to the queen’s right, not to her left. And apparently, Her Majesty is no longer wearing white chemise gowns or feathered poufs.

“She is thirty-three years old,” Rose declares. “She has returned to her robes a la francaise.”

“But she hated those robes. Every woman in Paris has adopted her chemises.”

“And if she dares to wear the fashion that she made popular,” Rose replies, “the papers write that she is disrespecting her exalted station.”

Now we will have to search through storage to find the robes a la francaise we purchased from Le Grand Mogol years ago. There are more errors Rose points out. I write in shorthand what will need to be fixed. I cannot abide inaccuracies. Although Rose’s tone of superiority annoys me, I must be grateful for her knowledge. The public comes to our Salon to see royalty as they are, not as they were, and everything must be correct. Especially when Their Majesties arrive.

When we finally make our way into the workshop, I am nervous. I, who have taken the measurements of the Hapsburg emperor and chatted amiably with Benjamin Franklin, can feel a flutter in my stomach. But for once, the queen’s formidable marchande is silent. Her ladies watch while I use my caliper to take