Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers. He died in 1823 at seventy-six years old and is credited with the law of volumes now called Charles’s Law.
JOSEPH AND FRANCIS TUSSAUD
Fifteen years before her death, Marie and her sons moved their traveling exhibition into a permanent location on Baker Street in London. From here, the small family worked to promote and improve what would eventually become the world’s most famous wax museum, Madame Tussauds. In addition to curiosities such as the shirt the French king Henry IV was wearing when he was murdered, Marie and her sons purchased King George IV’s coronation robes, adding authenticity to what would already have been a very realistic exhibit. After their mother’s death, Joseph and Francis Tussaud continued working at her trade. In 1884, when rent became too high at Baker Street, Marie’s grandson moved the exhibition to its current location, on Marylebone Road. Today, Madame Tussauds has expanded across the globe, with museums in Berlin, Los Angeles, and Shanghai, among other locations.
H
ISTORICAL
N
OTE
IT IS HARD TO RELATE JUST HOW TURBULENT AND BLOODY THE years of the French Revolution really were. The fall of the monarchy and the subsequent rise of a far worse, far deadlier tyranny make for what can be a challenging read, simply because so many innocent people perished in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Although estimates differ, up to forty thousand people may have met their end by guillotine. And contrary to popular belief, more than eighty percent of those victims were commoners.
What began as an earnest desire for freedom ended in a bloodbath that would eventually claim the lives of up to half a million citizens all across France. The highest casualities came during the war in the Vendee, where entire villages were wiped out in what some have considered the first modern genocide. The National Convention approved of this slaughter, and their captain, Charles-Philippe Ronsin, suggested deporting the unruly Vendeans and replacing them with patriots who knew what it meant to believe in “liberty.” Soon, the Convention began looking into ways of achieving mass extermination. Gassing was considered by General Rossignol, while General Cordellier dispatched enemies of the
Yet Madame Tussaud did not let the horrors of the Terror define her. Marie’s life before the Revolution was filled with the richness and variety of being a show-woman on the Boulevard du Temple as well as a tutor to the king’s sister. Few women from this period are remembered as having straddled both worlds and lived to tell the tale. And just as fascinating as Marie’s time at court was her time in England, when she transformed herself into the famous wax artist Madame Tussaud. While much of her memoirs is fabricated (including what should be obvious facts, such as her place of birth), we are fortunate to know a great deal about Marie’s life. Her fixation with money and the fact that she was one of the only women in her time to draw up a prenuptial agreement speak volumes about the woman behind the wax masks. Marie was Curtius’s daughter through and through, if not literally (and there is some debate on that), then at the very least in spirit. In a critique written by Monsieur de Bersaucourt, Curtius was described as a man willing to take advantage of any situation. Bersaucourt wrote:
He is wily, this German! He changes all the time according to the wind, the situation, the government, the people in power. He removes “the King at Dinner,” and replaces it with figures of the deputies of the Gironde. He is successively Feuillant, Girondin, Jacobin, Maratiste, Hebertiste, Robespierriste, Thermidorien. He goes with what is in fashion, Curtius. He is a follower of the on-going government, whatever that may be, both supporting and applauding their success. One does not have a strong opinion if one is Curtius, the “Vanquisher of the Bastille.”
The same critique may be made of Marie, whose opinion of the Revolution is never made clear. When Curtius died, he bequeathed to his niece nearly all of his possessions. Yet what she chose to take with her to England is telling. She left behind a sword commemorating her uncle’s participation in the storming of the Bastille, his Bastille rock (with its certificate of authenticity), and the wax bust of him in his National Guardsman’s uniform, which now resides in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris. Perhaps this was the politic thing to do when sailing for the land of King George III. Or perhaps her true sympathies lay with the royalists. While we may never know, one of the greatest joys in being a writer of historical fiction is the ability to include little gems from history within the novel.
The chamber pot, for instance, with Benjamin Franklin’s face on the bottom, really was a gift from King Louis to one of the women at court. And a planisphere clock that could mark the phases of Jupiter’s moon was first built in 1745 and can be seen today in California’s J. Paul Getty Museum. It may come as a surprise that France at this time was rife with competing newspapers, from the
But perhaps the most intriguing bit of history I came across was the importance of cafes in the Revolution. The choice of cafe indicated a person’s politics to the world. From the time they were first established in Paris, in 1669, coffeehouses were places to meet, drink, play chess or draughts, and talk over politics. The Cafe le Procope served luminaries such as Danton, Marat, Robespierre, and Napoleon. And it was at the Cafe de Foy that the course of Camille Desmoulins’s life was changed forever. According to the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874), just before the Revolution,
Paris became one vast cafe. Conversation in France was at its zenith. There were less eloquence and rhetoric than in ’89. With the exception of Rousseau, there was no orator to cite. The intangible flow of wit was as spontaneous as possible. For this sparkling outburst there is no doubt that honor should be ascribed in part to the auspicious Revolution of the times, to the great event which created new customs, and even modified human temperament—the advent of coffee. Its effect was immeasurable.… The reign of coffee is that of temperance. Coffee, the beverage of sobriety, a powerful mental stimulant, which, unlike spirituous liquors, increases clearness and lucidity; coffee, which suppresses the vague, heavy fantasies of the imagination, which from the perception of reality brings forth the sparkle and sunlight of truth.
And as the Revolution began, the English traveler Arthur Young (1741–1820) had this to say:
The coffee houses present yet more singular and astounding spectacles; they are not only crowded within, but other expectant crowds are at the doors and windows, listening
In a time when politics were changing as rapidly as fashion, Marie Grosholtz was there to chronicle it all. The Salon de Cire became almost as important a news source as the dozens of papers being printed daily across France. And her uncanny talent for memorizing facial features and replicating them later, first in clay, then in wax, made her exhibition one of the most popular in Paris. Of course, it helped that her uncle knew all of the important men of the time—including Voltaire, Rousseau, Robespierre, Marat, Desmoulins, and the Duc d’Orleans—and invited them to his salon.
Yet Marie’s family was in the precarious position of straddling two worlds. Despite her past as a tutor to Madame Elisabeth in Montreuil, she was given the task of making death masks on behalf of the National Convention. Philip Astley, a neighbor on the Boulevard du Temple whose circus was so famous that it earned a mention in Jane Austen’s
Curtius was not at the Salon de Cire when the mob rampaged up the hill to 20 boulevard du Temple, bearing on pikes the heads of M. de Launay and M. de Flesselles. Delighted with their bloody trophies they demanded that Marie take casts of the heads to commemorate the actions of the day, which she did reluctantly, insisting on working outside on the pavement, for she refused to let the mob into the Salon.
