Kate Berridge (21 page)

Like many during the Revolution, he had a dual role–in his case showman and soldier. From the start, he was a keen supporter of the Revolutionary cause and an early member of the Jacobin Club. That he was a consummate self-publicist, name-dropper and string-puller is evident in his claiming to be known to the French legation in Mayence while chasing his claim to his German uncle's estate, in his self-published pamphlet about his National Guard service, and in his toadying to the Jacobin Club by making donations to the war effort and offering patriotic works for public display–such as a bust of the Polish martyr Lazowski, a Commune member who was murdered in April 1793. Apart from some evidence that he was involved in an investigation into the loyalty of General Custine, commander of the army of the Rhine–a mission that took him to Mayence, where his
findings in favour of the general later backfired when Custine publicly denounced
him
–Curtius's military career in the employ of the Jacobins during the Revolution is never anything but obscure. Mysterious missions and mentions of powerful contacts that are filtered through Marie's memoirs also make it hard to formulate an accurate picture of what exactly he did. From the evidence we do have, we can extrapolate a portrait of a man who always tried to keep in with the right people. His mercurial bent was the secret of his success, but as time went on led some people to question his motives. A contemporary, de Bersaucourt, wrote, ‘Curtius always takes advantage of the situation. He is wily, this German! He changes all the time according to the wind, the situation, the government, the people in power. He removes the King at Dinner and replaces it with figures of the deputies of the Gironde. He is successively Feuillant, Girondin, Jacobin, Maratiste, Hebertiste, Robespierriste, Thermidorien. He goes with the flow, Curtius.' Perhaps his death was timely, in that he died before the backlash against the Jacobins that came with the fall of Robespierre. This would doubtless have subjected his various dealings to closer scrutiny.

Marie was not with him when he died, but went to the house with two neighbours the following day. Instead of all the friends in high places, it was the grocer Villon and the proprietor of a local theatre called Louis Sallé who rallied round. Curtius had clearly anticipated his own demise, for his will was dated 31 August 1794. In it he is described as a painter and sculptor of Paris, and names as his principal beneficiary ‘Citizenness Anne Marie Grosholtz, spinster of full age, my pupil in art who has lived with me under my roof for more than twenty years.' To Marie he left ‘everything that the law allows me to give, in view of my not having an heir'.

The strong impression is of a daughter in all but official acknowledgement. In fact a daughter denied, for the will declares, ‘I do not have, or know of, any female heir either in France or in a foreign country.' Whether Curtius was her real father or just a father figure–and a very convincing one–Marie found herself with a considerable inheritance that was in the form more of assets than of cash. Curtius left a portfolio of three properties: the house in Ivry-sur-Seine, on which only one instalment had been paid, a rental property
in the Rue des Fosses du Temple, and the family home and exhibition in the Boulevard du Temple. Like many artistic types, Curtius also left a quagmire of administration, unpaid bills and taxes, and a daunting amount of stuff. From floor to ceiling there were literally stacks of possessions that meticulous copperplate inventories detail. Of most significance for Marie's future career were the contents of the exhibition: thirty-six life-size figures, seven half-length and three reclining figures, including those of Madame Du Barry and the Princesse de Lamballe. There were also cases of miniatures, relics and assorted
objets d'art
, including a significant collection of paintings, both framed and unframed. A large proportion of the fixtures and fittings was mirrors, sconces and candelabras, confirming the importance of lighting. The list also includes an item of furniture that was always close to Marie's heart, and where she would spend a great deal of time: a cashier's desk.

Over and above the material inheritance, it was the artistic and business skills that he had taught her from childhood that were the most significant aspects of what Curtius bequeathed to Marie. From the precise blend of bleached beeswax and the secret formula for the in-house colourant for the heads and hands to the art of creating hype and spin, by the time he died Marie was versed in every aspect of showmanship. In the best show-business tradition, since she had been a little girl she had lived and breathed the exhibition. Her family home had been part cabinet of curiosities and part dressing-up box. For all her claims that the great and the good were in constant procession through the house, it seems highly likely that a high proportion of the visitors would be members of the entertainment fraternity–the showmen scientists and theatre people, the wheelers and dealers in artefacts and novelties. Curtius knew who traded in Egyptian artefacts and relics, flea circuses and freaks, and from this pool of contacts he was always able to source additional attractions to spice up his usual bill of fare. At different times in the Palais-Royal, the waxworks were supplemented with a display of living, breathing attractions, great and small, from the giant Paul Butterbrodt, who weighed in at 476 lb, to ‘Les Enfans Vivans', a six-year-old boy and girl from Guadeloupe, whose rare skin pigmentation gave them a piebald appearance, and who were advertised as ‘an extraordinary phenomenon of nature'.
What Curtius passed on to Marie would stand her in good stead for the rest of her life, and meant that in the immediate aftermath of his death she was able to keep buoyant in turbulent times. It was an especially precarious path that she had to negotiate. The backlash against the Jacobins that came with Robespierre's death was dangerous for an exhibition that had become so closely identified with them, and which had attained the unofficial status of the leading sans-culottes entertainment.

She had weathered the spells when Curtius's various commitments beyond Paris had found her temporarily in charge of the waxworks, but with his death she was unanchored. Her mother was still alive, and looked after the domestic realm, but the burden of keeping the business afloat and financing the family now fell to Marie.

The first initiative she took was to update the doormen's uniforms. Sans-culotte austerity and drabness was replaced in the autumn of 1794 by the more colourful garb of the Gilded Youth. This was the name given to the band of affluent youths whose fine clothes–elaborate cravats at the neck, frock coats and buckled shoes–gave a misleading impression of harmless dandyism. In fact they were fired up with desire for revenge on the terrorists, and the canes that they carried, far from being innocent accessories, were weapons with which they coshed sans-culottes in street fights. Many of the Gilded Youth had lost relatives during the Terror, and so were eligible to attend the ‘victim balls' which flourished at this time, admission to which hinged on having lost a close relative to the guillotine. At these balls, often held in the vast halls of defunct monasteries and convents, women wore thin red ribbons at their throats as a further reminder of the guillotine. But such macabre references were not confined to parties. Fashionable men favoured
toilette à la guillotine
, where the hair was long at the sides and either held up with a comb at the back or cut short to imitate the actual preparations for the blade.

The perennial request to hairdressers not to take too much off was in vain for Carrier, an infamously cruel member of the Convention, who was sent to the guillotine on 16 December 1794. Described by a contemporary as ‘the bloodiest of the bloody', his notoriety largely hinged on the mass drownings he supervised in Nantes and which were euphemistically described as National Baptisms. Innocent men,
women and children were packed on to boats, with rails to prevent them jumping off. The hulls were then shot at until the vessels sank. His other signature atrocity, which Marie describes in her memoirs, was the Republican Wedding, in which a naked male and female prisoner were tightly bound together facing each other before being drowned. Marie does not mention what other witnesses do, namely how ‘in some cases copulation actually occurred and death took them in the very moment that sexual pleasure reached its zenith.' The scale of Carrier's killing was such that human remains were tainting the water of the Loire, and a government directive imposed a temporary ban on its consumption.

Carrier's legendary status as a sadist meant that his death head generated a lot of public interest when it went on display shortly after his execution. In terms of the history of the exhibition it is of particular interest because it was the first head made since Curtius's death, and so there can be no doubt about its attribution to Marie. In her early catalogues in England she referred to it as ‘taken immediately after his death by order of the National Assembly'. This too could be plausible, as the ruling Directory were keen to hold up for public execration the most hated terrorists. Marie makes her antipathy for Carrier clear in her catalogue description of him as having taking root in a ‘dunghill of corruption'.

The climate of change was such that allegiances veered dramatically. A prisoner of war aboard a battleship called
Marat
described how, after the fall of Robespierre, he noticed a difference in the sailors' shouts. Whereas every day they had habitually shouted ‘Long live the Jacobins!', at the end of 1794 they were shouting ‘Down with the Jacobins!' By January 1795 the cult of Marat was a sinking ship. The people's favourite was now vilified, and on 21 January–the anniversary of the regicide–an effigy of Marat was ceremonially burned in the Palais-Egalité, formerly the Palais-Royal. In the ensuing months certain groups of the public took to smashing busts of their erstwhile hero wherever they found them, intent on purging the city of his image. Even Marie's iron nerves must have registered some perturbation at the strength of the anti-Marat feeling, given that her tableau of his martyrdom had once been the centrepiece of the exhibition and one of the prime attractions. In the Palais-Egalité she must
have shuddered at the sight of rampaging children offering passers-by fragments of Marat's smashed image with taunts of ‘So you want some Marat; here is a little piece of Marat!' The backlash was a mixed blessing for the purveyors of busts: while Marats were two a penny as demand plummeted, there was a boom in Rousseau busts, which were used to replace many of the Marats, and which tripled in price. Such was the climate of hatred that not only were busts of Marat thrown down the sewers of Montmartre, but it was proposed to rename the sewers–‘Montmarat'. The waxing and waning of public opinion was such that Mercier wrote, ‘The people of Paris drink, dance, laugh and gossip about a peaceable and responsible government, which in the morning they accuse of being royalist and in the evening terrorist.'

The instability was compounded by the ravages of a cataclysmically hard winter, which like that of 1788 highlighted the divide between haves and have-nots. Yet, whereas before the haves were mainly aristocrats and wealthy clergymen, now they were a more cosmopolitan group of property speculators and profiteers, arrivistes and opportunists. The poor, however, were the same, and inflation meant starvation was rife, as astronomical price rises put even basic foodstuffs well out of reach. Suppliers of flour started to refuse cash, and people were compelled to barter table linen and silver for the odd bushel. Commonly, a six-hour queue outside the baker's would result in the meagre reward of a bit of biscuit. Marie relates how people were reduced to scavenging heaps of rubbish for cabbage stumps and parings of turnips. Disenchantment set in as people started to question the cost of the republic that they had suffered so much to bring into being. As official bread rations became smaller and an attempt to substitute rice flopped because firewood shortages meant there was not enough fuel to cook it with, morale dipped low. As one diarist complained, ‘It really seems as if the time has come to die at last of hunger and cold. Lacking everything, Great God what a Republic! And the worst of it is one can't tell when or how it will end. Everybody is dying of hunger.'

The public execution of one of the most loathed of all the revolutionaries was a temporary consolation for the people when Fouquier-Tinville, the public prosecutor, went to the guillotine on 7 May 1795. Marie wryly observed, ‘As he ascended the scaffold he
did not appear to derive the same pleasure from viewing preparations for his own death that he had on so many occasions evinced when contemplating the requisite arrangements for the execution of others.' His was the last death head that Marie made, and like those of Carrier and Hébert she describes it as ‘taken immediately after his execution by order of the National Assembly'.

But conditions were so tough that it would take more than the novelty of a fresh head to galvanize the public to put their own troubles aside and pay to go and see the exhibition. Another problem was that the candle shortage was still acute, which meant that Marie could not display any of the exhibits to their best advantage. On 16 May she was forced to take out a loan of nearly 60,000 livres to keep the show going; security for this was the rented house in the Rue des Fosses. In the ensuing years Citizen Marie Anne Horry and her brother Didiès, who had lent her this money, proved to be tough creditors. In order to safeguard their loan, they kept on altering their terms, and Marie was eventually forced to put up the family home as security.

In June 1795 the death in captivity of the ten-year-old Dauphin in a cell airless with the stench of his own filth–he had not been allowed a change of clothes for over a year–pricked the hardest republican heart. There was a certain bitter irony to his death from scrofula, a disease that it was formerly thought the kings of France could heal simply by touching the afflicted. Although of great public interest, this was one death that remained in the private realm, the wax image made when he was a little boy remaining safely packed out of public view. In a climate of see-sawing allegiances, it was not prudent to show a member of the royal family, even if defunct. Also, the Dauphin's death resulted in an attempt by the Comte de Provence to press his claim to the throne as Louis XVIII. A hale and hearty male heir to the throne with the might of armed émigrés behind him reawakened the old royalist/republican antagonism, and it was not the right time for Marie to risk anything that could implicate her on either side in the debate.