Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution (63 page)

After the shipwreck, Marie set about re-creating each of her models, basing them on her exceptional memory and a box of miniatures she’d been able to salvage. When word reached France that she was not one of those who had drowned, her younger son was overjoyed. He left his father in Paris to join his mother’s traveling exhibition. Meanwhile, François Tussaud was delighted to hear of Marie’s rescue for another reason. It meant that he could continue to harangue her for money.

Marie’s marriage to François Tussaud in October 1795 had been one of her greatest errors in judgment in a life that would span almost nine decades. An inveterate gambler with an aversion to work, François Tussaud saw her as his meal ticket to an easy life. Their short union resulted in three children: a daughter, who died in infancy, and two sons. In what is an extraordinary document for the time, Marie’s marriage contract stipulated that she would retain all of the possessions with which she entered the marriage. This turned out to be a very wise decision. Within five years, it was clear that the marriage would never be a partnership. Whatever money Marie made, her husband gambled away, and for a woman obsessed with financial security, this must have been devastating.

Within months of Napoléon signing the Treaty of Amiens (1802), Marie had begun preparing for her trip to England. She knew that her husband would never consent to her taking both children, which meant she was forced to leave Francis behind. She hoped to send for him as soon as she had the funds, but life on the road was incredibly difficult and made more so by François’s frequent letters demanding more money. Finally, in 1804, Marie wrote to her husband, “My enterprise has become more important to me than returning to you. Adieu, adieu, we must each go our own way.” She never communicated with him again.

At eighty-one, Marie created her final figure, a self-portrait that can still be seen in many of her wax museums around the world. In 1850, just eight years later, she died in her sleep in London. She lived long enough to see the rise and fall of Napoléon, the return of the monarchy in France, the crowning of Queen Victoria in England, and the commemoration in stone of the Swiss Guards’ massacre. This monument can be seen in Lucerne, Switzerland, dedicated to the nearly eight hundred Swiss Guardsmen who were killed in 1792. Carved from sandstone, the sculpture shows a dying lion impaled by a spear and resting on a pair of shields, one of which bears the symbol of the French monarchy. Mark Twain called the Lion Monument the “saddest and most moving piece of rock in the world.”

P
HILIPPE
C
URTIUS

After Robespierre’s fall, Curtius was sent home from his prolonged mission along the Rhine. Having been for so long responsible for reporting on the patriotism of various revolutionary generals, he returned severely ill and emotionally exhausted. Less than a month later, on September 26, 1794, he passed away. Curtius left Marie all of his possessions, including mirrors, candelabra, and the
caissier
’s desk where his protégée had learned to manage money.

A
NNA
G
ROSHOLTZ

With Curtius gone and Marie in England, Anna Grosholtz dedicated the rest of her life to raising her grandson Francis Tussaud and watching over the Salon de Cire. After her death, Francis joined his mother in England.

F
RANÇOIS
T
USSAUD

In 1802, when Marie left for England with her elder son, Joseph, François remained in Paris, ostensibly to take care of their two-year-old son and run the Salon de Cire. All the money and property Marie had left in his care, however, was swiftly lost to his gambling. Hearing of his wife’s success in England, François began sending letters asking for financial support, until finally she cut off all communication. However, at seventy-two years old, François decided that it was time to renew their correspondence. After four decades of silence, he wrote to remind Marie that she was still legally his wife and that he would like to be given power of attorney. Predictably, Marie rejected this request. François’s demands for money continued until his death, in 1848.

T
HE
D
AUPHIN
, L
OUIS
-C
HARLES

After the Reign of Terror came to an end, the world seemed to forget about the nine-year-old dauphin, Louis-Charles. Horribly abused by his captors both mentally and physically, he was forced to live in a tiny cell surrounded by rats and covered in his own excrement. Now Louis XVII of France, he had been imprisoned in solitary confinement from the time he was eight years old, and no one seemed interested in rescuing him from his torment. On June 8, 1795, Louis-Charles died at just ten years old. Numerous impostors later claimed to be him, but DNA testing performed in 2000 proved that Louis-Charles did, in fact, die in the Temple.

M
ADAME
R
OYALE
, M
ARIE-
T
HÉRÈSE

Marie-Thérèse was the only member of her immediate family to survive the Revolution. After being separated from her brother, she was imprisoned by herself in the Temple until 1795, when the new French government agreed to her release the day before her seventeenth birthday. Sent to Austria to live with the family of Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, Marie-Thérèse was persuaded to marry her cousin Louis-Antoine, the Comte d’Artois’s son. The marriage was a very unhappy one, and it is unlikely it was ever consummated.

In 1824, the Comte d’Artois became King Charles X of France, and Marie-Thérèse became Madame la Dauphine, next in line for the throne along with her husband. After a three-day Revolution in 1830, Charles X was forced to abdicate. Marie-Thérèse then became Queen of France and her husband became King Louis XIX. Their reign lasted for only twenty minutes, however. Recalling the Revolution that had taken his aunt’s life only thirty-seven years before, Louis-Antoine abdicated on the spot. Marie-Thérèse lived the remainder of her years in exile. She died in Austria in 1851 at seventy-two years old.

R
OSE
B
ERTIN

In 1795, Rose returned to France, where she discovered that new fashions had emerged from the dirt and grime of the Revolution. Gone were the days of liberty caps and tricolor cockades. In their places were rich silk pantaloons, pashmina shawls, and transparent dresses modeled after those of Greek and Roman goddesses. Rose continued to dress the wealthy women of Paris, and her customers included Empress Joséphine, formerly known as Rose de Beauharnais. In 1813, at sixty-six years old, Rose passed away in her house in Paris.

M
ARQUIS DE
L
AFAYETTE

Perhaps no man was more devastated by the failure of the French Revolution than the Marquis de Lafayette. Having been instrumental in the American victory over the English, he truly believed that, after the storming of the Bastille, the French were on the threshold of democracy. A key to the Bastille that he sent to George Washington can still be seen on tours of Mount Vernon in Virginia. It was accompanied by a note that read, “[Here is] the main key of that fortress of despotism. It is a tribute which I owe as a son to my adoptive father, as an aide-de-camp to my General, as a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch.”

But Lafayette’s role as a “missionary of liberty” was short-lived. After being declared a traitor to France, he fled to the Dutch Republic, where he was arrested by the Austrians and imprisoned at the citadel of Wesel. His wife petitioned Emperor Francis II to live with her husband in prison, and this is where she died in 1797. Several months later, Napoléon Bonaparte negotiated Lafayette’s release.

For the rest of his life, Lafayette remained active in politics. In 1824, he returned to the United States to tour the country whose liberty he helped secure. He visited George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon, and his reunion with Thomas Jefferson that same year deeply affected those who saw it. Jefferson’s grandson recalled that the two shuffling old men “threw themselves with tears into each other’s arms—of the 300 or 400 persons present not a sound escaped except an occasional supprest sob, there was not a dry eye in the crowd.” The men had not seen each other for thirty-five years. Another witness to this emotional reunion was Lafayette’s own son, George Washington. Ten years later, Lafayette died in France. He was buried at the Cimetière de Picpus under soil from Bunker Hill.

J
ACQUES
C
HARLES

Rather than flee the Terror, Jacques Charles remained in Paris, where he continued his scientific experiments. In 1793, he was elected to the Académie des Sciences and became a professor of physics at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. He died in 1823 at seventy-six years old and is credited with the law of volumes now called Charles’s Law.

J
OSEPH AND
F
RANCIS
T
USSAUD

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

I
T 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 Vendée, 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 Vendéans 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
patrie
with swords rather than guns (to save on powder). Women and children were massacred en masse, and arrests were made for offenses such as spitting on a liberty tree or wearing clothes deemed “too fancy.”

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: