Kate Berridge (2 page)

At both the personal and general levels, Madame Tussaud's life raises interesting questions about history. Unlike archaeological remains, her relics and artefacts had an agenda. They were designed, made and displayed with a specific purpose–to generate takings at the till. Similarly, her self-propaganda and the way she marketed herself as a victim and survivor of the French Revolution also served her purpose, engendering an authenticity for her figures that set her apart from the competition.

An as yet unconsidered aspect of Madame Tussaud's life that this book will explore is her role as an historian. It is an important consideration, for aside from any harmless embellishment of her own personal history is the more serious point that her revolutionary relics, death masks and heads have been a highly influential visual account of the French Revolution.

If, as Queen Victoria averred, history is an account not of what actually happened, but of what people think happened, then this is particularly pertinent to Madame Tussaud. For too long her biographical claims have been unchallenged. In the absence of hard
facts, it seems appropriate to ask more questions. Over two hundred years after her birth, and some 200 million visitors later, Madame Tussaud remains enigmatic. What is more clearly defined is her identity as a brilliant businesswoman, artist, publicist and pioneer of mass-market entertainment. But how much of her story is history, and how much hoax?

I
N HER MEMOIRS
, Madame Tussaud claims that she was born in Berne, Switzerland, in 1760, and yet a baptismal record dated 7 December 1761 from the register of Old St Peter's Catholic Church authenticates Strasbourg, in France, as her birthplace. The brevity of this single paragraph written in a clergyman's spidery scrawl belies its importance, for it testifies to more than the baptism of the child, christened Anna Maria (but known as Marie to distinguish her from her mother, of the same name). It records the absence of the father, and it names as a godfather the sexton of the parish, Johannes Trapper. More intriguing is the absence of the child's mother at the christening, for it is the local midwife, cited as ‘Obstretrix Müllerin', who is recorded as bringing the baby girl to church. It is generally safe to assume that the summaries of our lives that are the three pieces of paperwork recording birth, marriage and death are straightforward, and yet with Madame Tussaud there is more to them than meets the eye. In a life where so little can be verified, these documents are valuable factual fragments that point to discrepancies in her personal claims.

The absentee father, named as Joseph Grosholtz, remains a paternal phantom, for no other records exist that flesh him out. The sole source of information about him is the extraordinary woman his named daughter became. In her memoirs she attributes the paternal absence to his death two months before she was born. She describes him as a soldier of some distinction–specifically an aide-de-camp to General Wurmser and veteran of the Seven Years War, in which ‘he was so mutilated with wounds that his forehead was laid bare, and his lower jaw shot away and supplied by a silver plate.' There is a certain grim poetic resonance in this grizzly image of her facially disfigured
father. It foreshadows one of the most famous exhibits in her Chamber of Horrors, namely Robespierre's death head with smashed features as a result of the self-inflicted wound when his suicide attempt backfired and he blew away most of his jaw.

Her deceased father, she assures us, was from a distinguished family, the Grosholtz name ‘being as renowned in Germany as Percy in England, Montmorency in France or Vicomti in Italy'. Yet there is some evidence that, rather than being blue-blooded, the family tree had blood dripping from its branches. Members of the Grosholtz family were distinguished only as having been public executioners in Strasbourg and Baden-Baden in a line of office stretching back to the fifteenth century. So perhaps Madame Tussaud's predilection for horror was hereditary. As for her absent mother, an earlier parish record at the same church verifies that she was baptized there too, and sets her age at eighteen at the time of her husband's death and daughter's birth. And as for the young mother's antecedents, Madame Tussaud describes the clan Walter (the register of baptism writes the name as ‘Walder') as being ‘of a highly respectable class, and their husbands were members of the Diet or parliament of Switzerland'. These connections hint at a genealogical aggrandisement that was to manifest itself in different ways throughout her life, for such grand relations seem strangely at odds with the humble church in the heart of a working-class district of Strasbourg with a local midwife as a proxy parent and the village sexton as godfather.

A further hint at Marie's lowly station was the fact that her mother was in domestic service, and Madame Tussaud's story properly starts with the young bachelor for whom her mother went to work as a housekeeper shortly after Marie was born: Philippe Guillaume Mathé Curtius, native of Switzerland and resident of Berne. When Marie was about two, in the city she claimed as her birthplace this young doctor received a visit from the Prince de Conti, a cousin of Louis XV, who was visiting Rousseau in exile in Neufchâtel and Berne. The royal visitor was seeking out Curtius not for advice on his health, but to admire his wax miniatures. This small private collection in Curtius's home drew first a trickle of interest from locals, and then visitors from further afield as word spread of the doctor's artful representation of the human form and the quality of his anatomical waxes. In the
absence of refrigeration, the preservation of bodies for medical teaching was greatly restricted, and wax models fulfilled a vital role as an educational resource. However, the line between education and eroticism was elastic, and Curtius's lithe lovelies with flip-open navels–anatomical Venuses as they are sometimes called–were prototypes for more overtly titillating tableaux he made later.

Curtius's facility for replicating the texture and tint of living flesh inspired him to redirect his talents to portraiture, but whether portraits or pornography were the main reason for his renown and de Conti's interest is unclear. But evidently de Conti was so impressed by what he saw that he made Curtius an immediate offer of patronage if he would move to Paris and develop his talent on a much bigger stage. Instead of being an amusing diversion for the burghers of Berne, Curtius was to be plunged into the centre of a city with a voracious appetite for pleasure. The journalist and writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814) described pre-Revolutionary Paris as a city ‘of limitless grandeur, of monstrous riches and scandalous luxury. She guzzles greedily both men and money.'

Curtius began his new life in a gracious apartment in the Rue Saint-Honoré, one of the most prestigious neighbourhoods in the city and especially popular with the growing number of aristocrats who preferred the pace and colour of Paris to the stultifying formality of the court at Versailles. De Conti was of this number–an urban sophisticate who, as well as being a patron of playwrights, painters and writers, was a roué of some renown. He is said to have commemorated his conquests with snuffboxes and rings that at his death ran into the hundreds. It is therefore likely that he enjoyed Curtius's erotic tableaux, which from his earliest days in the city the doctor established as a lucrative sideline to his work on public display. As a contemporary put it, ‘The sale of little groups of wanton and licentious figures to the curious for their boudoirs brought him in more money than his salon.' (Boudoirs all over the city were evidently busy places, for, while Curtius sold risqué accessories, quacks did brisk business with venereal-disease cures that sweetened the sting of sin by lacing mercury with chocolate syrup.)

With the support of de Conti–whom Marie recalled as a generous patron whose ‘liberality and kindness not only equalled but rather
surpassed his promises'–Curtius quickly distinguished himself as an entrepreneur-cum-artist of astute judgement and prolific output. Financial security from both private commissions of miniature portraits and the public exhibition of full-scale wax figures and busts of the luminaries of the day meant that in around 1768 he felt confident enough to invite his former housekeeper and her young daughter to live with him.

His evident attachment to the mother and daughter and their status in his life have fuelled speculation ranging from the theory that Anna Maria was his sister, and he was therefore Marie's natural uncle, to the theory that he was Marie's father as the result of an adulterous affair. Marie refers to her mother's culinary prowess, but the degree of Curtius's loyalty to them both, and his life-long commitment to their welfare, would seem to be founded on more than appreciation of Alsatian casseroles. She describes him as ‘her uncle who afterwards assumed towards her the character of a father, both in regard to tenderness and authority', and she goes so far as to say that ‘he legally adopted her as his child'. In fact there is no evidence of either formal adoption or a blood-line connection–an omission that would cause bureaucratic difficulties later on. Nevertheless, the paternal role played by Curtius is acknowledged within the Tussaud family history, for a faded Edwardian letterhead for official correspondence lists the credentials of the various founders and artist modellers in the firm's history, and here Curtius is billed as ‘Madame Tussaud's Maternal Uncle and Foster Father'.

When the six-year-old Marie first came to Paris, Louis XV, bloated and bored, was in the final decade of his long reign. In the words of Madame Campan, the educator and friend of Marie Antoinette, he was ‘weary of grandeur, fatigued with pleasure and cloyed with voluptuousness'. His popularity had plummeted from the early years when his people called him ‘the well-beloved', and in 1763, when a grand equestrian statue showing the King flanked by figures depicting the classical virtues had been erected in a square in central Paris, the satirists had quipped, ‘Virtues on foot, vice on horseback.' This signified a waning of regard for the
Ancien Régime
that was gathering momentum. Whereas formerly Versailles had fixed the cultural gaze of Paris, increasingly Paris was originating ideas, fashions,
movements and moods. In an unprecedented way, Versailles was now starting to look to the capital. There was such a buzz there that one aristocratic woman declared that she would rather be dead in Saint-Sulpice than alive in the country. (Saint-Sulpice was a church in a smart part of Paris where the VIPs went to RIP.) This was extremely propitious for Curtius.

The accomplished modeller was in the right place at the right time. Paris was in a ferment of change in the last twenty years of the
Ancien Régime
and, given its mutability, wax was an ideal medium with which to reflect a changing society that was rent with contrasts–rich and poor, old and new, religious and secular. As a source of light, destructible by heat, infinitely malleable into new forms, wax fitted the mood of this period when Paris itself was being remade. There was a building boom on such a scale and at such a speed that a proliferation of maps could not keep up and was out of date in no time. But the change was more profound: creeping secularism meant that wax, the medium that historically had been so closely identified with the Church–funeral effigies, devotional and votive artefacts–could be redirected by Curtius to cater for a new market whose aspirations were increasingly worldly.

Diderot and d'Alembert's
Encyclopédie
(1751–72) had set the tone. A letter from Diderot to Voltaire reveals the agenda: ‘It is not enough for us to know more than Christians; we must show we are better.' Each volume, like a secular manifesto, presented a different way of thinking about the world based on reason rather than religion. Although the faith of the majority remained strong, the tenets of Christianity were being undermined by a variety of literary genres with a common emphasis on the power of the individual for self-advancement on earth.

This was an important theme in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and his ideas reverberated beyond his readership. Later on, the unfortunate Louis XVI would blame all France's problems on this controversial figure, whose
The Social Contract
of 1762, with its message of equality and accountability of governments to the people, had been like a grenade lobbed at the old order.

Such subversive elements were radical in a society where literacy and learning had hitherto been mediated by the Church, and
education was largely in Latin and had a one-subject syllabus of theology, with the ultimate objective of getting into the kingdom of heaven. Indicative of the atheistic currents, a man dressed as Harlequin drew large crowds by quoting extracts from a banned book about the life of Christ that claimed Jesus was ‘no more than an enthusiastic, melancholy artisan, a charlatan from a carpenter's workshop who deluded men of the lowest class', and that the Gospels should be treated like an Eastern romance and were ‘a little less worthy of credence than the 1001 nights'.

If religion was under attack, there were also aspects of the clergy that made them easy targets for anticlericalism. They represented some of the most iniquitous aspects of the system of privileges, including being exempt from many of the taxes on basic foodstuffs that pressed so heavily on the poor–for example the salt tax. They were also not always as diligent as they might have been about preparing their sermons, which gave rise to an unorthodox trade in religious tracts. Mercier provides an amusing insight into the transactions at a sermon shop in Mont Saint-Hilaire.

In a reversal of the concept of self-denial to acquire spiritual worth, acquisition of things to increase social status became a common aim. Rampant consumerism was a powerful aspect of secularism, as Paris fell in love with shopping. Even the well-to-do, who traditionally did not frequent shops–suppliers going to
them
instead–deigned to grace the new wave of designer boutiques. A sighting of a duchess at a certain snuff shop resulted in a perpetual queue there for some weeks. But it was the affluent middle classes who most loved to shop, and the
Rue Saint-Honoré, where the Curtius/Grosholtz ménage first lived, was fast emerging as a premier shopping destination.

Glittering showrooms, with Venetian-glass cabinets and engravings of their celebrity clientele, attracted well-heeled tourists and locals. Here, to impress his Venetian amours, Casanova stockpiled stockings from Madame Barat, and here the famous fashion house Trait Galant became as renowned for the superstardom of two of its former shop girls as for its current collections. The two young assistants, who at different times and by different routes would rise from shop-floor humility to great fame and fortune, were Rose Bertin and Madame Du Barry, and each achieved the pinnacle of ambition that came from being a power behind the throne.