Kate Berridge (22 page)

If she did not capitalize on interest in the Dauphin at the time of his death, she made up for it later. Throughout the nineteenth century the fate of the boy-king captured the public imagination, fuelled by the sheer number of claimants to the French throne, who cropped up in the most unlikely places and in the most improbable guises–for
example, boys who could not speak a word of French. Marie sided with the survivalists, and part of her publicity-stunt repertoire was her claim that she knew that the Dauphin had not died but was alive and well, and living as the Duc de Normandie. Those interested in the legitimacy of this particular claimant set great store by ‘the acute perception and accurate memory of Madame Tussaud'. Discussing the case retrospectively, an article in
Notes and Queries
in August 1851 reported how, when asked if she thought the person calling himself the Duc de Normandie was the same individual she had modelled as a child, Madame Tussaud replied with great emphasis, ‘I would take my oath of it for he had a peculiar formation on the neck which still remains. Besides something transpired between us which he referred to, which was never likely to be mentioned to anyone.' This enigmatic response whetted people's appetite. This is one case where if Marie had made a death mask of the Dauphin, then the hundreds of escape rumours and flights of fancy that went with the mystery of the ‘Orphan in the Temple' would have been nipped in the bud. However, an infinitely more ghoulish memento had been taken from the dead child. The doctor who performed the post-mortem seized the opportunity to obtain a royal relic and removed the boy's heart. The wizened organ, smuggled out under a napkin, eventually discredited all the claimants when twentieth-century forensic science conclusively proved Bourbon DNA.

With so many trials and traumas, personal loss, financial worry, a business to keep afloat, one can imagine feelings of vulnerability could not be indulged. But Marie's innate self-reliance was soon to be challenged more personally.

I
N OCTOBER
1795–Vendémiaire Year IV in the Revolutionary calendar–the Place de la Révolution was renamed the Place de la Concorde, but discord was more the order of the day. Inflation and starvation were uppermost in people's minds. Symbolically, the floor beneath the printing press that produced the paper money called the
assignat
collapsed under the weight of paper that it was handling. This physical collapse echoed the fiscal collapse whereby each note was now worth merely 1 per cent of its face value. Marie relates how she papered a room with notes. This same month, twenty-six-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte rose to prominence and became known as General Vendémiaire for his role in quashing a popular uprising on the Right Bank, when armed royalist factions staged a show of strength. The fighting so famously referred to as ‘a whiff of grapeshot' was, according to Marie, ‘a tremendous hail of grape', with hundreds of casualties, and once again the streets of Paris were splattered with blood. These events in public life were the backdrop to a momentous month in Marie's personal life. On 18 October 1795 Marie married.

The wedding certificate authenticates the marriage of Citizen Marie Grosholtz, aged thirty-four, with François Tussaud, aged twenty-six, described as ‘an engineer'. The civil ceremony took place in the prefecture of the Département de la Seine in Paris. Witnessed by an inspector of buildings and a painter on behalf of the groom, and by a theatre proprietor and a merchant on behalf of the bride, the
ton
was hardly
haut
. Certainly for a woman who later made so much of her time at Versailles, and the number of aristocratic and otherwise charismatic men in public life who supposedly took a shine to her, it was a curiously down-to-earth union. It was also not propitious. Tussaud was not a man of substance. It was Marie who had the
assets, and, unusually, a nuptial agreement stipulated that she retained control over the property that she owned. It is as if from the outset, rather than sharing all that she had, she felt it would be prudent to protect her assets from her husband.

All that is known of François is that his family were from the Mâcon area and, going back several generations, had been involved in the metalworking industry. He was the eldest of seven children, and surviving documents record his father as an ‘iron merchant'. François had moved to Paris a few years before the Revolution, and, although his stated profession was engineer, circumstantial evidence suggests he may have worked for Curtius for a time. Virtually the only documented insight into the relationship between Marie and her husband surfaces in 1903, in a letter from her grandson Victor Tussaud to his nephew John Theodore Tussaud: ‘I have always understood that in addition to incompatibility of temperament, your great-grandfather was a confirmed gambler, which propensity he afterwards however varied by becoming miserly.'

Whether to fund her husband's gambling or to help out the business it is not clear, but within days of her marriage Marie was negotiating a private loan from Madame Salomé Reiss. The terms of the loan were that, in exchange for 20,000
assignats
, Marie would pay Madame Reiss an annuity of 2,000. In addition to the earlier loans she had negotiated, this meant that, far from a carefree start to married life, the Tussauds had a weight of debt.

Not only were there financial worries; it appears that only a few months after their marriage Marie was left to fend for herself while François took some of the figures on tour in England for several months. From January 1796 the movements of a show billed as Curtius's Grand Cabinet of Curiosities can be traced from posters and newspaper advertisements. The tour included Chester, Cambridge, Norwich and Birmingham, and an advertisement in the
Norfolk Chronicle
of 16 January 1796 implies that it also visited the capital, where it ‘gave great satisfaction in New Bond Street, London'. In modest rooms attached to pubs in the smaller venues, and more spacious halls in the larger cities, the exhibits that had thrilled Paris must have been a welcome injection of exotica. The predominantly French Revolutionary subjects included wax busts of the King,
Queen and Dauphin, a model of the Temple where they had been imprisoned, a model of the guillotine–one inch to a foot–and the head of M. de Launay, governor of the Bastille. These were shown alongside assorted curiosities including profiles of the French royal family made of human hair, a three-foot-high crystal-glass warship, and a gunship ‘beautifully cut in paper with scissors'. Given the ongoing war with France and hungry interest in the Revolution, these artefacts must have been a fascinating insight into foreign news. The show was highly acclaimed, the
Birmingham Gazette
referring to it as the ‘ne plus ultra of the arts' and singling out for praise the representation of the ‘Dying Philosopher' Voltaire.

From intriguing fragments it seems plausible then that the affable showman presenting these exhibits and calling himself Curtius was François Tussaud trading under his uncle-in-law's famous name. Later in England Marie would make recriminating references to her husband, about him leaving her all alone, and in this correspondence she also alludes to him having visited London. The evidence is therefore compelling that from the outset the Tussaud union was dogged by separations arising from attempts to keep the business afloat, and François's trip to England in 1796 so soon after their marriage was but a forerunner of a much more prolonged and dramatic separation seven years later. If it was far from propitious for their relationship, this earlier successful tour would augur well for Marie, for it meant that by the time she herself came to England a positive impression had already been made by work associated with Curtius.

With an absent husband and ailing finances, it is unlikely that Marie shared the joie de vivre in her midst. After the strictures of the Revolution and the patriotic dress code that had seen fashion magazines close down for a time, under the Directory, in 1795–9, the city put on its glad rags once again. In spite, or perhaps because, of the hardships imposed by food shortages and currency problems, in these years a carefree, almost decadent spirit started to enliven public life as once again Parisians came out to play. Pleasure gardens, gambling establishments and dance halls were perpetually packed. As a reaction to the earlier restrictions, those who could afford to dressed from head to toe in garments from as many different countries as they could display on one body. As the German traveller
Kotzebue noted, ‘The whole world has to pay tribute to the toilette of the Parisian–one wears English cloth, Egyptian shawls, Roman sandals, Indian muslins, Russian riding boots and English waistcoats.' The most gossiped about and gawped at beauties in public life at this time were Madame Tallien and Joséphine Beauharnais, who caused a sensation with their diaphanous dresses that left little to the imagination. Draped like Greek goddesses, their look emulated classical sculpture, but, unlike cold marble statues, the way these flesh-and-blood women flaunted their charms set pulses racing. Blonde hair was all the rage–brunettes wore blonde wigs–and another fashion favourite from this period was the pashmina, after Napoleon sent them to Joséphine by the hundred during his Egyptian campaign. Although they became her signature item, Joséphine was not immediately drawn to the lightweight shawls: she wrote, ‘They may be beautiful and expensive with the advantage of lightness, but I very much doubt that they will ever become fashionable.' How wrong she was!

The opulence and air of glamour that had been the hallmarks of the exhibition in the early days now returned, but this time there was no guiding hand from Curtius to determine who was shown. Under the Directory, current affairs were so complicated and factional that it was not obvious which figures the waxworks should focus on. But, attractive women always being of interest, Marie installed an elegant portrait of Joséphine. The preference of the Directory for rich costumes gave scope for sumptuous display, as Marie noted in her memoirs: ‘The costume of the directors was most remarkable. A cherry-coloured cloak, white silk pantaloons, turned-down boots, waistcoat of silk,
à l'espagnol
, the whole richly embroidered with gold, Spanish hat and feathers.'

Once people had kept a respectful distance as they watched the royal family eating in public; now eating in public was egalitarian. Following on from the fraternal feasts of the Revolution, now individual menus, private tables, grand mirrored dining areas and fancy foods were available to anyone who could afford them. What had previously been the privilege of a noble minority had become a democratic experience. The dining table at the waxworks charted this change, as a succession of politicians took their turn as the VIP guests, the young, impassioned
and self-made sitting in the very same place that had formerly been occupied by the royal family. But the greater social mingling in society at large removed some of the magic the exhibition had created in the days of the
Ancien Régime
. In those days the lifestyle of the royal family and other dignitaries gave them the mystique of an exotic species, so removed were they from the ordinary people. But now, as a sans-culottes diarist records, ‘Poorly dressed people who would formerly have never dared show themselves in areas frequented by people of fashion were walking among the rich, their heads held high.' Having to persuade people paying to look at wax figures when the new social mobility meant there was much more scope to get up close in public to the glitterati of the day was from Marie's perspective a distinct downside to democracy.

Before her first wedding anniversary, at the age of thirty-four–an age that was more typical of death than of first-time motherhood in this period–Marie gave birth to a daughter, Marie Marguerite Pauline, in September 1796. The baby lived only six months, and at her death Marie cast a tiny mask that she later displayed in the exhibition. Two sons, who were to play such a pivotal role in the future direction of the exhibition, were then born in fairly quick succession for an older mother: Joseph on 16 April 1798 and, when she was thirty-nine, François (later known as Francis) on 2 August 1800. If their adult life would see them basking in their mother's success, their infancy was set against a backdrop of real struggle for her, both in an unhappy relationship but also commercially. In François Tussaud, Marie had more of a drain on her resources than a reliable ally who shared her industrious nature. His speculative streak also meant she was living on a fault line. Even with her mother in the background throughout–a woman who, barring a couple of mentions in the memoirs, is so remote that we have no sense of her relationship with Marie or any clues as to her character–it seems that this was both one of the toughest times for the exhibition and a bleak time personally.

In the social whirl that saw restaurants, gambling venues and dance halls boom, viewing wax figures simply couldn't compete. People were relishing movement and noise, music and laughter. Indicative of the hedonistic spirit was the subject matter of a new wax exhibition that started up at this time, catering to an entirely different audience. Once
Curtius had offered a dazzlingly elegant salon at his rented premises in the arcades of the Palais-Royal; now the Palais-Egalité was home to the Cabinet of Professor Bertrand, a cautionary tale showing ‘all the dreadful consequences of libertinism in the most lively manner in wax'. This type of show, which became more common in the nineteenth century, prompted unfavourable comparisons with the modelling maestro. Looking back nostalgically, one contemporary commented, ‘Curtius may have committed some blunders, but he never sought to attract his patrons by the exhibition of unpleasant subjects likely to disagree with a delicate stomach.' You needed to be robust for Bertrand's waxes. Directed at a male-only clientele, their depiction of the progressive ravages of venereal disease on the body provided a graphic warning of the price of pleasure: ‘At the end of this gallery of the furies lies a youth on his death bed, as large as life, in whose languid eyes and distorted features, pain, shame, repentance and despair are eloquently displayed.' This unhappy ending seemed to be an insufficient damper on the promiscuous mood, as evidenced by the number of times a directory of the prices and specialities of the prostitutes of the Palais-Egalité was reprinted.

In her twenties Marie had watched the rise of Robespierre, who in five years had insinuated himself into a position of power with the whole of France in thrall to him. Nearing middle age, she was poised to witness the more epic scaling of the heights of glory by a young Corsican general with not just a country, but the world in his sights. Just as the earlier dictator helped fill the coffers of the exhibition when it was still managed by Curtius, the cult of Napoleon would substantially benefit Marie in the future when she was making her own success. In the difficult days under the Directory, when he was only just starting to distinguish himself, Marie could have had no idea of the role Napoleon would play in her professional life. She could never have predicted the stature he would attain over the next fifteen years, and how she would exploit the explosion of public interest in the great man.

Napoleon had a split personality sartorially. His preference for the jackboots and uniforms of the field was offset by an awareness of the impact of ceremonial dress in creating the aura of power. Marie recalls him during his triumphal return from his military campaign in Egypt,
‘dressed in the costume of a Mamaluke, in large white trousers, red boots, waistcoat richly embroidered, as also the jacket which was of crimson velvet'. With the
coup d'état
of 1799 Napoleon manoeuvred himself into the position of First Consul. In Marie's view this event signified ‘the true end to the history of the Revolution, which resolved itself into a government of military despotism under the guidance of a talented but arbitrary dictator'.