Kate Berridge (12 page)

This licentiousness was largely because private ownership placed the Palais-Royal outside the jurisdiction and policing that applied to the public streets. This was a boon to booksellers, who evaded the censors with a torrent of disrespectful publications about the King and Queen that included explicit pornography. It was also to Curtius's advantage. Always astute in gauging what appealed to his audience, he was able to be more daring in his own depiction of the royal family. His tableau of the Queen going to bed was at the milder end of a range of unflattering representations of Marie Antoinette, tastefully titillating rather than obscene. Even with such fierce competition for their
custom, the crowds of pleasure-seekers who came to the Palais-Royal to shop, to people-watch or to tryst made sure they found the time to visit the waxworks.

Although in her adult life Marie would cultivate a public persona of ardent royalist, becoming watery-eyed at the mere mention of her former employer, Madame Elizabeth, the context of the royal tableaux dating from this time was not that of undiluted respect. In contrast to the mass of racy engravings and such pornographic best-sellers as
Essai historique sur la vie de Marie Antoinette
(in print continuously from 1781 to 1793), which were consumed in the private realm, there is something quite powerful about the collective viewing in public of the Queen going to bed. Given the growing disenchantment with the royals, the wax figures could be a good stimulus to less than flattering opinions.

At this time the King and Queen were to a degree their own worst enemies, and it is not surprising that their subjects were starting to become disillusioned. Marie recalled the optimistic spirit that had greeted the royal couple on their coronation and the longing of the nation for a reign ‘divested of the vice and licentiousness which were uncontrollably apparent throughout the reign of their predecessor'. There were high hopes that Louis XVI and his beautiful young Queen would restore the credibility of the Crown, so badly dented by the libido of the old King. A monarch who had once deployed a massive amount of manpower to track down a prepubescent young girl who had caught his eye in a vast crowd, resulting in a fiasco of a hunt, did not promise to be a hard act to follow. But from the moment the crown touched his head and he complained it was too tight, and pinched him, there was a foreboding that kingship simply did not fit Louis XVI. This was compounded by rumours of his (rather ironic) impotence ricocheting around the public domain and being given voice to by the ballad singers. When they launched into ‘Can the King do it? Can't the King do it?' the gleam of royalty was tainted by public mockery. The odds that the King would recover his dignity, and emerge as a figure commanding respect, lengthened.

His physical bearing was also catastrophic in terms of public relations. Far from blinding his subjects with the iconography of power
and projecting himself brilliantly like Louis XIV, Louis XVI squinted at his subjects and was so short-sighted he could not recognize anyone at more than three paces. Madame de La Tour du Pin conveys his ineptitude: ‘He looked like some peasant shambling along behind his plough; there was nothing proud or regal in his appearance. His sword was a continual embarrassment to him, and he never knew what to do with his hat.' Madame Campan reinforces this, and conveys that ‘his walk was heavy and unmajestic; his person greatly neglected; his hair, whatever might be the skill of his hairdresser, was soon in disorder.' For his hair-fixated subjects, his permanent bad-hair day would not impress.

The falling away of royal authority started to gather momentum. Rather as erosion eats away at cliffs, rendering a landscape unrecognizable, society in the late 1780s was starting to look radically different from even ten years before. Mercier wrote, ‘The word “court” no longer inspires respect among us, as it did during the reign of Louis XIV. The prevailing opinions are no longer supplied by the court; it is not the court which decides reputations these days, no matter in what branch of the arts; now it is only in a derisive way that one says, “The court has decided thus.”

Marie Antoinette's hairdresser, Léonard, described the distance between Paris and Versailles as ‘five leagues of mortally wearisome high road'. Even in her childhood this relatively short distance had divided two different worlds; but by the time Marie was in her late twenties the polarity between the ossifying world of the court and the energy electrifying the Palais-Royal was more marked. Paris was effervescent with talk of change. For now, the growing interest of the people in politics was interpreted as a healthy sign of their greater access to information. Speaking far too soon, Mercier wrote:

So, while her centrality to events at court seems to have been a distortion of the truth for the purposes of enhancing her image for commercial reasons later in her career, Marie's proximity to the events that ripped Paris apart in 1789 is more feasible. The function of the exhibition as a monitor of popular opinion had put Curtius on the map in public life, and in the wake of this, before she was thirty, Marie was destined to be not a bystander but a participant in and recorder of one of the most momentous periods of history.

I
N THE FIRST
half of her life, in Paris, Madame Tussaud may be said to have lived through ‘the best of times, and the worst of times'. Her close identification with the French Revolution functions at two levels. At the personal level her account of all that she had gone through enthralled her audience, and earned her a mixture of respect and sympathy. In her long years on tour in England she was remembered as telling ‘many queer tales' of the Revolution, and the Revolutionary relics at the core of her collection reinforced her account of her experiences. In the minds of many, her reminiscences established Madame Tussaud as a plucky survivor of traumatic times. A family friend of her eldest son, Joseph, Mrs Adams-Acton, encapsulates the widely held perception of Madame Tussaud's colourful past at the epicentre of the Revolution:

Her first-hand, eyewitness credentials were an integral part of the fascination her artefacts held for the public. More importantly, for the vast numbers of people who saw them, they were interpreted as an authoritative record of the recent past, and were relied upon as an
authentic historical narrative of the French Revolution. In 1904 the man who also propelled Baker Street to fame, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in a speech at a dinner to commemorate Madame Tussaud's arrival in England, described how the models and relics functioned in this way:

Many of the key images that continue to inform our interpretation of the French Revolution derive from the original exhibition that Curtius and Marie steered through the supremely challenging commercial conditions of Revolutionary Paris. Heads on pikes, death masks, Marat in his bath–for us these are gruesome reconstructions in the Chamber of Horrors, but for those paying a few sous to see them when they were newly moulded they were a valuable source of topical information. What we experience as history was, for the Parisian public, literally headline news.

If the two branches of the wax exhibition–the Palais-Royal salon and its counterpart in the Boulevard du Temple–had originated as innocent entertainments for all classes, in 1789 they started to assume a more serious function. Instead of being an amusing barometer of public interest, they became a register of a rapidly changing political scene. From being an invaluable reference for followers of fashion who loved to scrutinize the hair accessories favoured by the Queen, the exhibitions evolved in response to the mounting interest in current affairs. As a visual reference of the topical, in a largely illiterate society wax had the edge on print, and the adaptability of the model heads and bodies provided a particularly arresting parallel
to the dramatic reversals of fortune that would see the ‘heads' of a series of governing bodies rise and fall from power in quick succession. The potential of the medium to serve political ends meant that Marie–by now twenty-eight–found herself not merely a witness but embroiled with the epic events of 1789 that saw a reform movement turn into a revolution, and feudal respect for monarchy descend into anarchy.

In eighteenth-century France the relationship between head and body was a potent metaphor and recurring motif. In 1776 a spokesman at the Parlement of Paris had described the relationship between king and nation as like that of the head to the body. Addressing Louis XVI, he referred to him as ‘the head and sovereign administrator of the whole body of the nation'. On the eve of the Revolution the journalist and playwright Louis-Sébastien Mercier used a similar analogy about Paris. He referred to the city as ‘a head that had grown too big for its body'. Like the top-heavy hairstyles that characterized the excesses of the
Ancien Régime
, Mercier implied, Paris was teetering, precarious, and unbalanced.

As the relationship between Louis and his subjects became ever more strained, a power struggle was played out between Paris and Versailles. The chisels that Curtius and Marie used to remove the wax heads of those people in public life whose popularity had paled were increasingly busy chipping away at society beauties in their finery to make way for a new species of celebrity. These were men committed to radical reform–men who would translate the theories of Voltaire and Rousseau into action. In 1789, alongside Marie's models of these literary giants, Abbé Sieyès, Mirabeau, Necker and the Duc d'Orléans took up their places as the new subjects of public homage.

Later in the same year a philanthropic doctor, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, proposed a more humane system for public execution in the form of a machine that ‘would separate the head from the body in less time than it takes to wink'. It was not until 1792 that his theoretical proposition was put into practice, being most spectacularly employed in the regicide of 1793, an event emulated by fanatical republicans in the ritual decapitation of royal chess pieces. Decapitation dominates the iconography of the French Revolution. From the straightforward updates of Marie and Curtius's mannequins to the drama of the
tumbril, drum roll and drop as necks were severed like cabbage stalks, for the people of Paris the headless body became a grim reality of everyday life.

The guillotine, the mechanical decapitating machine linked for ever to the unfortunate doctor who had no part in its design or construction (it was largely the invention of a German piano-maker called Tobias Schmidt), was also to become inextricably linked to Marie. In the collective imagination of millions of people all over the world she is best known for modelling the scaffold-fresh heads of the most famous victims of the French Revolution. This association is largely derived from her memoirs, which make much of her first-hand experience of the atrocities of this period. The image of an innocent young woman in a blood-stained apron being forced to mould the brutalized faces of people she had known is central to the identity of Madame Tussaud. But, rather as Dr Guillotin was credited for a machine he did not construct, attribution to Marie of some of the most famous death masks and relics from this period has to date eclipsed the role of Curtius.

On the eve of the momentous events of 1789–95, Curtius deemed it prudent to leave his premises in the Palais-Royal and to consolidate in one large exhibition in the Boulevard du Temple, which remained the family home. In addition to seismographic sensitivity to currents of change–the asset upon which his exhibitions relied–Curtius had the added advantage of a good network of contacts in positions of power. He relied on being in the know in order to be in tune with public interest, and, just as he had a knack of showing the right material at the right time, similarly he made a point of fraternizing with or distancing himself from people in public life to serve his own ends. Marie would have us believe from her memoir that the eve of the Revolution marked her return to Paris from Versailles. She implies that it was because of Curtius's inside knowledge about the impending upheaval that he coerced her into abandoning her position as pet of the palace to return to the fold. But, instead of fond farewells at the palace of Versailles, it seems more likely that the moving she did at this time was rather more mundane.

Either late in 1788 or early in 1789, they gave up the two boutiques they had rented in the arcades besides the famous Café Foy in the area
of the Palais known as the Galérie Montpensier. It was no mean feat packing up all the paraphernalia and installing it all at 20 Boulevard du Temple. It was not going to be an easy fit. The sconces and candelabras, elaborate rococo looking glasses and pedestals that had been the backdrop to the tableaux of the royal family were at odds with the props used to create the atmosphere of cheap thrills in the Caverne des Grands Voleurs. But from now on the exhibition would comprise two different sections under one roof, anticipating a duality of glitz and gore that has carried through to the present-day exhibitions. The process of moving and adapting to whatever accommodation was available would stand Marie in good stead in the future. Wrapped in cotton shrouds, the dummies that had been reincarnated so many times as men and women, literati and glitterati, courtiers and criminals, according to which heads were affixed to their frames, were all carted back to the bustle of the theatre district.

However, the former happy bustle of street life had assumed a new edginess as privations started to have a corrosive effect on morale. The poor harvest in the summer of 1788 followed by one of the harshest winters in memory had drastically affected the supply of the staples of bread and firewood. The severe weather highlighted privilege and poverty. At the palace of Versailles the weather was largely inconvenient. Icy winds froze sauces en route to the King's dining table, and the imaginative solutions to keeping warm adopted by some members of the royal household restricted normal interaction with the world. The Marquise de Rambouillet had her servants sew her into a bearskin, while the Maréchale de Luxembourg retired to a sedan chair packed with warming pans. While at court aristocrats could hibernate in comfort, in Paris the poor without fuel died cold and hungry. In spite of this, in December 1788 Louis XVI's oppressed subjects were still loyal royalists. A few streets from her house Marie would have seen the people's monument to their monarch in gratitude for the gift of firewood, a towering snow obelisk ‘for our ruler and our friend'. The King's cousin the Duc d'Orléans had also made a generous donation of firewood, funded in part by a sale of fine art. Marie, however, was sceptical about the motivation for his charity: ‘By giving away large sums of money he rendered himself very popular with the people, as also by taking the democratic side of the question; his fortune being
so immense that it enabled him to purchase popularity.' But from the spring of 1789, like the snow tower made by hundreds of freezing fingers, regard for royalty was starting to melt away. At the Palais-Royal the political temperature was also starting to rise, and the King's wayward relative was fanning the flames.

Whereas previously people had flocked to the waxworks primarily to see what and who was in or out of fashion, now the buzz was news. The national economy was a universally hot topic as a succession of finance ministers tried and failed to implement reforms that would put the country back in the black, or at least try to haul it out of the red. Finances had been dented first by the Seven Years War (1756–63) and then by French intervention in the American War of Independence (1775–83), and this, in conjunction with the prodigality and change-resistance of the King, presented a monetary and diplomatic nightmare for each of those charged with devising solutions. At the Palais-Royal exhibition the finance minister Calonne had taken up his place. With elaborate lace ruffs and a powdered wig, he was a picture of
Ancien Régime
elegance. In her memoir Marie described him as ‘a great favourite with the court and proportionately disliked by the people'. An exceptionally well-groomed gourmet, with a penchant for truffles and expensive pomade, he was not the best role model for belt-tightening. Certainly Marie was no fan, accusing him after his fall from grace not only of stealing ‘several objects of vertue that belonged to the nation' but of selling them off ‘to defray certain expenses'.

By the time the exhibition had moved back to the Boulevard du Temple, Jacques Necker had replaced Calonne. With no frills and furbelows he was a lower-maintenance model, and no crony of the court. Marie noted that his appearance ‘savoured more of the countryman than of one who had been accustomed to fill the highest stations and commune with royalty'. His belief in transparency, demonstrated by his earlier publication of the
Compte Rendu
, a ground-breaking economic exposé of the nation's finances, had paved the way for a popularity which in the challenging climate of the first half of 1789 meant that there was both respect for and confidence in this brilliant Swiss businessman. His conviction that the Crown was accountable to the people particularly endeared him to the public,
and he also advocated tax and electoral reform. However ineffectual his efforts proved, he assumed the status of a favourite and hero.

Marie watched as the same people who patronized the exhibition–the small fry of society such as artisans, hairdressers/wigmakers, craftsmen and shopkeepers–turned into voracious consumers of political pamphlets that championed their cause. In the caste system that characterised
Ancien Régime
France, the Third Estate comprised the vast body of the populace, who had the least political power and who were subjected to the most iniquitous taxes on basic goods such as salt. It was these people who suffered most from the fluctuating price of bread. One of the recurrent complaints of the Third Estate expressed in the
cahiers de doléances
, the formal lists of grievances they were invited to submit to the Estates General at Versailles in March and April 1789, was that ‘all goods needed to support life are very dear.' Bread was the big issue. As the price of the four-pound loaf reached a new high, domestic budgets were put under almost intolerable strain. Military convoys for the transportation of grain became a common sight, and bakers were given police protection. On the outskirts of the city, extra troops were mobilized near the customs posts in the wall that encircled it. Built in 1785 to minimize evasion of royal revenue, the high-walled
enceinte
was deeply unpopular. The customs posts were natural flashpoints in the violence that erupted later in the summer, when in just three days nearly all of them were destroyed.