Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution (4 page)

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

Chapter 3

J
ANUARY
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
.

—M
EMORANDUM TO
H
ER
M
AJESTY THE
Q
UEEN
C
ONCERNING THE
D
IAMOND
N
ECKLACE
A
FFAIR

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 Réveillon—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
à la française.
”

“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
à la française
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 more than a hundred measurements: from the tip of her chin to the tops of her cheekbones, from the ends of her eyebrows to her delicate ears. When I am finished, I begin the clay model of her face. It is a curious trick of the mind that I am able to look at a person and know—even without these measurements—how wide the forehead should be and how long I should extend the nose.

As the afternoon passes, Rose begins to ask questions. She wants to know how I learned to make wax models, and I tell her that I was an apprentice to my uncle from the time that I could talk.

“You and I are not so different then,” she reflects. “I became apprenticed to a milliner at Trait Galant when I was young and eventually became her partner. Now I own Le Grand Mogol. No partners. Just me.” She is proud of what she’s done, and rightly so. For a woman to rise without a man’s support is rare. Even I have had the help of my uncle. “Did you know that I was the one who suggested the Pandoras?” she asks.

She means the little dolls dressed in the ever-changing fashions of the queen and sold in every shop from here to London. “No.”

Rose nods importantly. “They made her image famous. Even in America they can recognize her face.”

My sitter talks enough for two people as the long hours draw on and she is forced to hold still while I sculpt. When my mother arrives with a tray of warm drinks, Rose tries to engage her in conversation, but my mother’s French is poor, since our family uses German when we are together.

“How long has your mother been in France?” Rose asks.

“Almost thirty years.” Then I add defensively, “She understands more than she speaks.”

“The queen has been here for twenty years. Her French is flawless.”

“The queen, I believe, had private tutors.”

Rose smiles. “You would do well at court. The queen likes her ladies to be quick.”

“And the king?”

Rose’s expression is less kind. “He likes men who build. If God were just, the king would spend his life in a construction yard, not a palace.”

I have heard this before and am not surprised. Then I draw her gaze to a practice bust of Franklin. “Is that why His Majesty didn’t like
him
?”

Rose leans forward, and I know I am about to hear something sensational. “No,” she reveals. “That was jealousy.”

I stop sculpting to listen.

“Do you remember, three and a half years ago, when Franklin was here and his face was on everything?”

“Of course.” Snuffboxes, necklaces, canes, buttons … His image was everywhere. The Countess Diana even wanted her hair
à la Franklin
.

“Well, when the king saw how Paris idolized Franklin, he grew upset, and for Christmas, he gave one of the courtiers who had praised Franklin’s hat a very special present.” She pauses, drawing out the suspense. “It was a chamber pot with a cameo of Franklin’s face—on the bottom of the bowl!”

I gasp, caught between laughter and horror. “But there are many men who are more popular than the king.”

“Men who dress in linen suits with fur caps?”

I return to the sculpture and think about this. “Was it his humble dress the king disliked, or his accomplishments?”

“Both,” she replies and doesn’t expound. But I imagine that Rose is fairly bursting with secrets whispered in her ear during intimate fittings. Another short silence stretches between us while she instructs her girls to unpack the baskets and lay the contents on a second table. She drums her fingers as she watches them unfold her dress. “What do you do to protect your hands from the clay?” she asks suddenly. “It must dry them out terribly.”

“I have lotion for that.”

“The queen has a new lotion delivered to Versailles every day. The ones she likes she keeps in her commode.”

“She has a chest just for lotions?”

“There are lacquered chests for everything in the palace! Some with secret springs that pop open to reveal handfuls of gems. I have seen all the queen’s best jewels.”

Though I know I should not, I ask, “Yet she didn’t want Boehmer’s necklace?” This is the necklace that has caused so much scandal. Nearly three thousand carats’ worth of diamonds fashioned by the court’s jewelers Charles Boehmer and Paul Bassenge.

“That necklace,” Rose says with contempt, “was meant for du Barry. The queen would never touch something intended for her father-in-law’s whore. Monsieur Boehmer begged her to take it after the king died and du Barry was banished.”

“And she refused?” I don’t know that I could ever turn down over one million livres’ worth of jewels, even for the good of France.

“Her Majesty has taste.” Rose raises her chin. “No one who knows the queen could believe she would want such a thing. And it was all Rohan’s doing,” she adds contemptuously. “Rohan and that prostitute of his.”

She tells me the entire story. How a young woman named Jeanne de Valois tricked her former lover, the Cardinal de Rohan, into believing that she had become close to the queen. The cardinal, vulgar and greedy, had always been out of favor at Versailles. He begged Jeanne to intervene on his behalf, so Jeanne and her husband forged letters in the handwriting of Marie Antoinette pretending to forgive Rohan. The letters grew warmer and more intimate, and Jeanne then arranged an interview between the cardinal and a prostitute impersonating the queen. The impostor told the cardinal that she wished to purchase a diamond necklace without angering the commoners, and if Rohan could obtain the jewels for her, she would be forever in his debt. She told him that he should use Jeanne as an intermediary.

Immediately, the cardinal arranged to buy the necklace. He delivered it to Jeanne, who then took it to London, where the diamonds were removed one by one and sold. When Rohan failed to pay the jewelers, Boehmer approached the queen and asked for payment. Within days the entire affair was exposed, and the cardinal was arrested. But in a sensational trial, the queen’s reputation was such that Rohan was acquitted. No one was willing to blame the cardinal for thinking she might secretly meet him at night or make promises to him in letters foolishly signed, “Marie Antoinette de France.”

“But the queen never uses her surname!” I exclaim.

Rose gives me a knowing look from her chair. Everyone knows what happened next. The prostitute Nicole d’Oliva was set free after her testimony on behalf of the Crown, while Jeanne was taken to Salpêtrière prison, where she was whipped and branded and sentenced to life. But soon after, she escaped to England and published a book she called her
Memoirs
, detailing a love affair with Marie Antoinette.

I shake my head. “The queen has not had good fortune in France.”

“No,” Rose agrees. “Not when the crime of
lèse-majesté
goes unpunished and the woman responsible for the greatest con of the century is moving about London pretending to be a comtesse. Can you imagine?”

Jeanne de Valois is exactly what my uncle wants for our exhibition. Someone shocking, scandalous, a woman without morals. He would place her in the room dedicated to great thieves. Of course, I do not mention this to Rose. As I finish her sculpture, I turn the clay model around so that she may see.

“My God,” she whispers. She rises from her chair and reaches out to touch the head. “The jaw. You’ve gotten the jaw exactly right.” She peers into my face, as if she can discern the secret of my skill. “Come look,” she orders, and her ladies flutter around her. I can hear that Rose is pleased. “So what happens now?”

“I will make a plaster mold from this head. When that is finished, I will pour a mixture of beeswax and a vegetable tallow into the mold and let it cool. Then I’ll add tint, to make sure the skin color is just right—”

“It will be white?” she confirms.

I frown. Her coloring is far more Gallic. There is a touch of the sun in her skin. “It will look just as you do,” I promise.

“And my teeth? I want everyone to know that I have good teeth.”

“That is what those are for.” I indicate a glass box. Several of her ladies make noises of disgust, but Rose moves toward the collection and picks it up.

“These are real,” she replies, caught between horror and fascination.

“Yes. From the Palais-Royal.”

“But how—”

It has clearly been a long time since Rose has had to do her own shopping. If she had been in the Palais-Royal in the past several months, she would have seen the men with their pliers in the streets. “No one can afford a dentist with a shop,” I tell her. “Anyone in pain goes to a street dentist. It’s fifteen sous for every extraction.” Or ten, if you allow him to keep the tooth. “Then he sells the teeth to us.”