Kate Berridge (11 page)

Marie–whether from within Versailles or in central Paris we can never be certain–witnessed the waning of deference that
accompanied the explosion of consumer interest in fashion, and the occasional absurdities of trends such as baby-poo brown–
caca Dauphin
–as the must-wear colour for a boy, a tribute to Marie Antoinette's son Louis Joseph. These currents of change laid the foundations for Marie's understanding of the role of wax in marketing the monarchy, and its potential as a powerful medium with which to influence public opinion. By exploiting the image of the royal family in different ways, Léonard, Bertin and Curtius, assisted by Marie, anticipate the process whereby the royal family started to become public property, with public interest setting, not following, their agenda. These self-made artists and stylists, with their respective salons in close proximity in Paris, represent the emergence of new media through which interest in royalty can be expressed.

Le Grand Couvert–Curtius's wax replica

The Palais-Royal Exhibition gave a different perspective to royalty. Here, how the figures of the royal family were seen was vastly different from how we look at royalty at Madame Tussaud's today. The social,
political and religious importance of the royal family was such that although they were the butt of crude ballads and ribald mockery, the sacramental nature of kingship was still potent. Where we see members of the royal family as ordinary people somehow born into a more exalted position and, to a degree, as objects of amusement (the latest figure of Prince William has been made with reinforced cheeks in readiness for the kisses of his fans–more like a pop star than a future king), for Curtius's audience there was a real degree of awe and respect. He provided a second-hand way of getting a peep at something genuinely powerful and significant at this time, in a way that stirred stronger feelings than mere amusement.

In a fascinating way Curtius worked a skilful and daring interplay between private and public realms. In much the same way that he presented Madame Du Barry in an intimate pose, an even more risqué representation was of Marie Antoinette preparing to go to bed. This full-length figure turned the Queen into a fantasy boudoir femme fatale. It was like a regal peep show, putting into the public domain something to which only a very few people would have access given the strict protocol governing the private chambers of the royal household.

If Curtius made the private public, then he also made the formal informal; his most successful tableau was his reconstruction of the Grand Couvert, the ritual of the royal family dining in public. The wax replica royals at this dining table adorned with fruit and crystal required no hushed reverence. People did not have to be on their best behaviour, or conform to a dress code. It was a relaxed experience, and made the ritual more accessible to a wider audience, given that in real life it was possible to witness it only on Sundays. As for the origins of these wax figures, in a single enigmatic sentence Marie implies that they were taken from formal sittings: ‘So much did the taste for resemblances in wax prevail during the reign of Louis the Sixteenth that he, the Queen, all the members of the royal family, and most of the eminent characters of the day, submitted to Madame Tussaud, whilst she took models from them.'

The location and tone of the exhibition at the centre of the Palais-Royal leads one to question the likelihood of the royal family cooperating with a process that would put them on public display in a
commercial exhibition that also featured freaks and a ventriloquist. It was the immense popularity of this exhibition that sealed Curtius's reputation and confirmed his success as one of a number of middle-class entrepreneurs who made big fortunes in small workshop settings. The period when Marie claims to have been at Versailles coincides with the halcyon days of the exhibition at the centre of the Palais-Royal, an era that many who survived the Revolution, including Chancellor Pasquier, would recall with nostalgia as a golden period ‘when the splendour of Paris reached its zenith'.

A
S A MIDDLE
-aged woman establishing herself in England, Marie would regale the public with accounts of her time in residential royal service at Versailles. Whereas Léonard and Rose Bertin's involvement at court is well documented, even though they only ever commuted, retaining their day-to-day commercial interests with salons in the city, Marie's own role in the royal household is nowhere acknowledged. She is invisible and unmentioned. This strengthens the assumption that in her twenties she was working hard for Curtius, dividing her time between the Boulevard du Temple exhibition and his salon in the far from regal arcades of the Palais-Royal. Following its controversial conversion as a bold experiment in social engineering offering fun, fashion and shopping to anyone with money in their pocket to spend, the Palais-Royal became the People's Palace, and the waxworks were the jewel in the crown. It combined the amenities of pleasure park, amusement arcade, shopping mall and museum with the glow of a red-light district. The garish glamour was such that the chronicler Bachaumont quipped that ‘Le Palais Royal n'est plus Palais, ni Royal.'

The Palais-Royal was a private estate belonging to the Orléans family, who were first cousins of the French monarch, and one of the wealthiest families in France. However, the extravagance endemic among
Ancien Régime
nobility meant they were not always as flush with funds as they might wish, and in 1781, strapped for cash, the old Duc d'Orléans bequeathed this prime slice of Paris real estate to his son, the Duc de Chartres, who decided to redevelop it as a public amenity. Up until this time an air of exclusivity meant that none but the beau monde would dare to set foot there. ‘It was a promenade of luxury, gaiety and ceremony,' recalled Baron de Frénilly. ‘There were
plumes, diamonds, embroidery and red heels; a chenille, that is to say a frock coat, and a round hat would not have dared appear there. The Palais-Royal was the heart and soul, the centre and core of the Parisian aristocracy. This was what the Duc of Chartres one day undertook to destroy.'

Its most famous feature had been the natural beauty of the vast avenue of ancient horse-chestnut trees that provided a giant canopy under which it was de rigueur to promenade after a trip to the Opéra. Protest songs about chopping down the trees became topical with the ballad singers, and the Duc was booed in public. But to no avail: chestnuts, fountains and parterres were all demolished to make way for arcades lined with boutiques and booths offering assorted entertainments. The property development also included some first-floor penthouse apartments, which offered prime residential addresses for the super-rich. As Baron de Frénilly wistfully recalled, ‘Its verdant salon was transformed into a bazaar, and the reign of democracy began in this capital of Paris.'

The Duc de Chartres was one of the most illustrious playboys in Paris. Marie recalls him as ‘one of the most dashing characters of the day'. A renowned Anglophile, he had almost single-handedly inspired a craze for all things English, from horse-racing to English afternoon tea–although the interpretation of the latter was a little confused, and English visitors were highly amused at the sight of buttered muffins and steaming tea urns being presented to guests after formal dinners. In her twenties, Marie was in a city with a love–hate relationship to the country that would eventually become her home. officially England and France were enemies, but unofficially each was in thrall to the other's style. English riding clothes were particularly influential, and in the most elegant boulevards and gardens, amidst a mass of riding crops, leather boots, well-cut hacking jackets and tight breeches, the only accessory missing was the horse.

Marriage into one of the richest families in France (in a society wedding that helped launch the career of Rose Bertin, who made the trousseau) should have eased the Duc's cash-flow problem. But his profligacy meant he was perpetually short of money. Dismissed as a fast-living lightweight, the dilettante Duc confounded his critics by
proving to be an astute businessman. Initially reviled for ruining a green site and axing the ancient trees, thanks to the popularity of the new site he effected a pretty impressive conversion from public enemy number one to the toast of Paris. ‘From being as angry as the French can be,' noted Mrs Thrale, ‘the public were all happy and content and cried Vive le Duc.'

In 1784 the Duc inherited his father's title to become the new Duc d'Orléans. As one of his first tenants in a main wing facing the garden, Curtius was quick to realize that a wax portrait of his landlord, now the toast of Paris and riding the crest of a wave of public support, was an obvious necessity for his Salon de Cire. Asserting her own credentials as an eyewitness to the Duc's physical characteristics, Marie corrects a ‘modern work upon the Revolution' that suggested he was short. He was, she states, five feet nine–and she adds, rather imperiously, that ‘she having taken his likeness, and a cast from him, had a better opportunity of judging than most other persons.'

The illustrious Duc was more than an attraction in their wax pantheon. According to Marie, he also was a personal acquaintance and a regular fixture in their social lives. In one of the many striking examples of how she and Curtius managed to bridge the social divide, she describes the fabulously wealthy fast-living aristocrat as ‘a constant visitor', and she gives the impression that when he wasn't hobnobbing with his royal relations at Versailles he loved nothing better than to relax chez Curtius.

Sometimes, however, he tested his host's hospitality. Among many English habits, he followed ‘what the French considered the most prominent vice of that nation–that of drinking to excess'. Marie relates how when the Duc got roaring drunk Curtius contrived to get him out of the house by persuading him to go to the Cadran Bleu, a tavern opposite, where he would apparently continue carousing and once became so drunk and disorderly that he broke windows. But evidently drunkenness was not his worst vice. With his demise during the Revolution came the revelation of a darker side to the Duc. Marie would have blanched if she had been aware of the discovery in his private quarters within the Palais-Royal of a pervert's playroom, or what official reports described as ‘secret apartments containing all the equipment for skilled debauchery'.

Whatever his personal shortcomings, his transformation of a leafy aristocratic enclave into a commercial leisure complex for the general public was a resounding success. His concept of a promenade for the people was also a dramatic physical manifestation of the changing mental landscape of pre-Revolutionary Paris. The significance of people who had formerly been unwelcome gaining access correlated to a growing sense of entitlement more generally. Indicative of this was a famous incident when a lowly clerk took an aristocrat to court after a public fracas at the theatre, when the nobleman had tried to evict him from his seat. At the hearing, much was made of the entitlement of the humble man to his seat: ‘His status as a citizen should in itself have protected him from any insult, in a place where money alone put nobility and commoners on the same level, according them equal rights.' The concept of equal entitlement, and the realization that those who could afford to pay for either a ticket or a set of clothes were on an equal footing to those of noble birth, was radical. It meant rethinking all that had ordered society up to now. It meant acknowledging that wealth was the new index of worth, whereas formerly it had been rank. (More radical still was the concept that individuals had equal value as human beings irrespective of material assets–a theme given serious expression in the works of Rousseau.)

Also demoting the significance of rank as the sole indicator of worth were the theme and moral of the biggest box-office hit of the decade,
The Marriage of Figaro
by Beaumarchais, a play in which the servants were superior to their masters. It opened on 27 April 1784 and enjoyed a sell-out run in Paris and the provinces. The key speech was like an axe chipping away at the roots of the
Ancien Régime
: ‘Nobility, wealth, rank, position, all that makes you proud. What have you done to deserve so many advantages? You have given yourself the trouble of being born, nothing more.'

Beaumarchais chimed with a rising tide of anti-Establishment feeling. For a comedy his play was taken very seriously, and the Marquise de Bombelles for one had not been amused: ‘It is a stain on our century to have permitted the performance of
The Marriage of Figaro
; this condescension has already had the greatest consequences.' What started as a push by the on-the-up sector of Parisian society for
admittance to specific spaces (such as grand theatres, fashionable public gardens, and certain Masonic lodges), and a greater participation in cultural life, fed into a broader quest for political inclusion and representation.

Interior of the Salon de Cire, Palais-Royal

The Palais-Royal represented these changes in a concentrated site-specific way. It glittered with possibilities for self-improvement. This was evident both in the colonnades of chi-chi boutiques selling every frippery and trinket to enhance status and also in a host of intellectual activities, public lectures, clubs and societies, small museums encompassing scientific and artistic subjects, all offering the chance for the expansion of intellectual horizons. The whole place was imbued with a spirit of aspiration, from the luxury-carriage dealerships to an upmarket property club directed at those keen to invest in land in America. Even Curtius's salon adopted a pseudo-educational style and arranged a series of historical artefacts and relics alongside the figures of the most influential people of the day. This lent an air of
worthy instruction to idle curiosity, and gave a higher purpose to the business of having fun. As a French journal recorded some years later, ‘There were also to be seen works of art, paintings, sculpture, antiquities, mummies, rarities such as the shirt worn by Henri IV when he was assassinated with the certificate attached to prove its authenticity. In a word all sorts of objects which had caused or had been connected with a sensation in the past.' This formula of history alongside hot news was one that Marie would emulate later on, giving a veneer of gravitas to cheap thrills.

The mingling of the masses here was the ultimate expression of the newly emerging popular culture, in which social differences were being eroded by common interest in fun, fashion and ephemeral pleasures. The class mix was striking: ‘All the orders are joined together,' wrote Mayeur de Saint-Paul, ‘from the lady of rank to the dissolute, from the soldier of distinction to the smallest supernumerary of farms.' The symbolic significance of the Palais-Royal within the city is evident from contemporaries' references to it from the mid-1780s onwards. Karamzin called it ‘the capital of Paris'. For Mercier it was ‘the heart, soul, brain and essence of Paris'.

Curtius's wax salon spanned two booths in an arcade which was lined with luxury retailers including confectioners, milliners, jewellers and–the latest innovation–parfumeries. One wonders whether Marie's parsimonious personality in later life was in part a reaction to witnessing daily the recreational spending of the newly moneyed. Karamzin gives us a detailed account of the milieu:

The relish with which people flashed their cash does not seem to have struck a chord with Marie except as an indicator of the rich pickings to be had by carefully pandering to consumer interest. For her own part, she was always a model of thrift and economy.

When visitors were dropping from shopping, there were gaming tables, lottery outlets, and a bewildering choice of taverns, cafés and restaurants. The coffee house where Rousseau used to play chess became a place of pilgrimage, and ardent Jean-Jacquists toasted his memory in front of his empty chair, which was preserved as a relic. Another dimension adding to the allure of this location was its racy reputation as a place where both paid and unpaid sexual negotiations spiced the human traffic. Guidebooks testify to the temptations for which the area became famous, for example ‘les demoiselles chit chat au Palais Royal'. Here aristocratic wives bored with their husband's dalliances might seek solace with their own assignations. As one noblewoman, Madame de Matignon-Clermont d'Amboise, remarked, ‘Our reputations grow again as fast as our hair.' A famous landmark in the Palais-Royal was the solar-powered noonday gun, triggered by the powerful rays of the sun passing through a glass lens. This prompted Abbé Delille's witty observation ‘In this garden one may meet with everything, except shade and flowers. In it, if one's morals go wrong, at least one's watch may be set right.'