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Transcriber’s Note: Illustrations have been moved from the original
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flow of the text. The List of Illustrations therefore isn’t strictly
accurate in regard to where the illustrations may be found.

THE ROMANCE OF MADAME TUSSAUD’S

JOHN THEODORE TUSSAUD

[Illustration: MADAME TUSSAUD AT THE AGE OF 85

From the portrait by Paul Fischer, Court painter to H. M. George IV.]

                               THE ROMANCE
                                   OF
                            MADAME TUSSAUD’S

                                   BY
                          JOHN THEODORE TUSSAUD

                         WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
                             HILAIRE BELLOC

                               ILLUSTRATED

                                NEW YORK
                         GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

                            COPYRIGHT, 1920,
                       BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

                 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

                                   TO

                                 MY WIFE

                THROUGH WHOSE KINDLY URGING THESE LEAVES
                      HAVE GROWN TO THE DIMENSIONS
                                OF A BOOK

PREFACE

The earliest information we have concerning Madame Tussaud is that she
was born in Switzerland on the 7th of December, 1760, and was the only
child of Joseph and Marie Grosholtz. Her mother was the daughter of a
Swiss clergyman.

She married on the 20th of October, 1795, François Tussaud, who, it
appears, was her junior by seven years. We are able to trace his family
back as far as 1630, when his great-great-grandfather, one Denis
Tusseaud--for that is how he spelt his name--was born.

There is documentary evidence that Denis was brought from Burgy to Mâcon
in 1631, his family also coming from Burzy, close by, in 1658.

His descendants lived at Mâcon for more than a century, their occupation
being generally that of workers in metal.

The great-grandfather of François was Henry Tusseaud (1684-1717), and his
grandfather’s name was Claude (1716-1767).

François’ father (1744-1786) was the first of the family to adopt the
present spelling of the name, although we find that various members
of the family used the forms Tussot, Tusseau, Tuissiaud, Tussiaut,
Tusseaut, Tussiau, or Thusseaud.

Madame Tussaud’s marriage does not appear to have been a happy one,
for we learn that in 1800--two years before she came to England--she
separated from her husband, of whom we hear nothing further, although he
is known to have been living in Paris in the lifetime of his grandsons.

The foundress of the famous Exhibition had two sons, Joseph and Francis.
Francis (1800-1873) had several sons, the eldest of whom, Joseph Randall
(1831-1892), who was a student and exhibitor at the Royal Academy, was
the father of the author of this book.

Mr. John Theodore Tussaud was born in Kensington on the 2nd of May, 1858,
and at the age of six was sent to St. Charles’s College, London, where he
came under the influence of Cardinal Manning, who took a keen personal
interest in his welfare.

Some six years later he was transferred to Ramsgate, where he benefited
by the training he received from the Benedictine monks at St. Augustine’s.

In the year 1889 he married Ruth Helena, daughter of Thomas Grew. There
are seven sons and three daughters of the marriage.

Mr. Tussaud, like his father, has exhibited at the Royal Academy. His
occasional contributions to literature have been welcomed by thoughtful
readers, and he is a recognised authority on historical matters relating
to the French Revolution and the First Empire.

Seventeen great-grandsons of Madame Tussaud took an active part in the
war, all, without exception, serving in the British Army. Two were killed
and most of the others wounded.

                                                         WILLIAM E. HURT.

MIDDLE TEMPLE, LONDON

CONTENTS

                                                                      PAGE

  PREFACE BY WILLIAM E. HURT                                           vii

  INTRODUCTION BY HILAIRE BELLOC                                        25

                               CHAPTER I

  MR. TUSSAUD FIRST ENTERS HIS FATHER’S STUDIO--_REVERIE_--MADAME
  TUSSAUD’S UNCLE FORSAKES THE MEDICAL PROFESSION FOR
  ART--MADAME’S BIRTH AND PARENTAGE--A PRINCE’S PROMISE                 53

                               CHAPTER II

  CURTIUS LEAVES BERNE FOR PARIS--THE HÔTEL D’ALIGRE--THE COURT
  OF LOUIS XV--MADAME ARRIVES IN PARIS                                  59

  LIFE-SIZE FIGURES--MUSEUM AT THE PALAIS ROYAL--EXHIBITION ON
  THE _BOULEVARD DU TEMPLE_--BENJAMIN FRANKLIN--VOLTAIRE                65

                               CHAPTER IV

  MADAME ELIZABETH OF FRANCE--MADAME TUSSAUD GOES TO
  VERSAILLES--FOULON--THREE NOTABLE GROUPS--GALLERY OF NOTORIOUS
  CRIMINALS                                                             70

                               CHAPTER V

  EVE OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION--NECKER AND THE DUKE OF
  ORLÉANS--LOUIS XVI’S FATAL MISTAKES--HIS DISMISSAL OF THE
  PEOPLE’S FAVOURITES                                                   77

                               CHAPTER VI

  MADAME TUSSAUD RECALLED FROM VERSAILLES--THE TWELFTH OF
  JULY, 1789--BUSTS TAKEN FROM CURTIUS’S EXHIBITION--A _GARDE
  FRANÇAISE_ SLAIN IN THE MÊLÉE                                         81

                               CHAPTER VII

  HEADS OF THE REVOLUTION--MADAME’S TERRIBLE EXPERIENCES--THE
  GUILLOTINE IN PAWN--MADAME ACQUIRES THE KNIFE, LUNETTE AND
  CHOPPER                                                               87

                               CHAPTER VIII

  MADAME DINES WITH THE TERRORISTS MARAT AND ROBESPIERRE, MODELS
  THEIR FIGURES AND SUBSEQUENTLY TAKES CASTS OF THEIR HEADS--SHE
  VISITS CHARLOTTE CORDAY IN PRISON--DEATH OF CURTIUS--MADAME
  MARRIES--NAPOLEON SITS FOR HIS MODEL                                  92

                               CHAPTER IX

  MADAME TUSSAUD LEAVES FRANCE FOR ENGLAND, NEVER TO
  RETURN--EARLY DAYS IN LONDON--ON TOUR--SOME NOTABLE
  FIGURES--SHIPWRECK IN THE IRISH CHANNEL                               98

                               CHAPTER X

  THE BRISTOL RIOTS--NARROW ESCAPE OF THE EXHIBITION--A BRAVE
  BLACK SERVANT--ARRIVAL AT BLACKHEATH                                 103

                               CHAPTER XI

  AN OLD PLACARD--PRINCESS AUGUSTA’S TESTIMONIAL--GREAT SUCCESS
  AT GRAY’S INN ROAD--MADAME INITIATES PROMENADE CONCERTS--BYGONE
  TABLEAUX                                                             108

                               CHAPTER XII

  PLACARD (_Continued_)--THE OLD EXHIBITION--CELEBRITIES OF
  THE DAY--TUSSAUD’S MUMMY--POETIC EULOGISM--REMOVAL TO BAKER
  STREET--THE IRON DUKE’S REJOINDER--MADAME DE MALIBRAN                113

                               CHAPTER XIII

  HOW THE WATERLOO CARRIAGE WAS ACQUIRED--A CHANCE CONVERSATION
  ON LONDON BRIDGE--THE STRANGE ADVENTURES OF AN EMPEROR’S
  EQUIPAGE--AFFIDAVIT OF NAPOLEON’S COACHMAN                           120

                               CHAPTER XIV

  NAPOLEON’S WATERLOO CARRIAGE--DESCRIPTION OF ITS EXTERIOR            127

                               CHAPTER XV

  DESCRIPTION OF THE WATERLOO CARRIAGE (_Continued_)--ITS
  INTERIOR AND PECULIAR CONTRIVANCES--BROUGHT TO ENGLAND AND
  EXHIBITED AT THE LONDON MUSEUM                                       133

                               CHAPTER XVI

  THE ST. HELENA CARRIAGE--NAPOLEON ALARMS THE LADIES--CERTIFICATES
  OF AUTHENTICITY                                                      139

                               CHAPTER XVII

  FATHER MATTHEW SITS FOR HIS MODEL--TSAR NICHOLAS I. TAKES A
  FANCY TO VOLTAIRE’S CHAIR--A REPLICA SENT TO HIM--THE REV.
  PETER MCKENZIE’S EXORCISM                                            143

                               CHAPTER XVIII

  LANDSEER AND THE COUNT D’ORSAY VISIT THE EXHIBITION--A
  FRIGHT--NORFOLK FARMER’S ACCOUNT OF QUEEN VICTORIA’S VISIT           148

                               CHAPTER XIX

  WELLINGTON VISITS THE EFFIGY OF THE DEAD NAPOLEON, AND SITS
  TO SIR GEORGE HAYTER FOR HISTORIC PICTURE--PAINTINGS FROM
  MODELS--IS THE PHOTOGRAPH “TAKEN FROM LIFE,” OR--?                   153

                               CHAPTER XX

  THE STORY OF COLOUR-SERGEANT BATES’S MARCH THROUGH ENGLAND TO
  PROVE ANGLO-AMERICAN GOODWILL--START FROM GRETNA--THE DOVE OF
  PEACE                                                                159

                               CHAPTER XXI

  SERGEANT BATES’S JOURNEY FINISHES IN LONDON AMID A REMARKABLE
  DEMONSTRATION--HIS GIFT TO MADAME TUSSAUD’S                          164

                               CHAPTER XXII

  MY FIRST MODEL--BEACONSFIELD’S CURL--GLADSTONE’S COLLAR--JOHN
  BRIGHT AND THE CHINAMAN                                              171

                               CHAPTER XXIII

  THE TICHBORNE “CLAIMANT”--NEARLY AN EXPLOSION--THE BIG
  MAN’S CLOTHES--THE REAL HEIR--THE CLAIMANT’S RELEASE FROM
  PRISON--CONFESSION AND DEATH                                         177

                               CHAPTER XXIV

  H. M. STANLEY SITS TO JOSEPH TUSSAUD--THE STORY OF HIS
  LIFE--HOW HE FOUND LIVINGSTONE--A MYSTERIOUS VEILED LADY--THE
  PRINCE IMPERIAL                                                      181

                               CHAPTER XXV

  COUNT LÉON--THE SHAH OF PERSIA’S VISIT--A WEIRD SUGGESTION; NO
  RESPONSE--KING KOFFEE--CETEWAYO                                      184

                               CHAPTER XXVI

  THE BERLIN CONGRESS--LORD BEACONSFIELD AND THE “TURNERELLI
  WREATH”--“THE PEOPLE’S TRIBUTE” FINDS A HOME AT TUSSAUD’S--THE
  SCULPTOR’S DESPAIR--HE CONSTRUCTS HIS TOMBSTONE AND DIES             190

                               CHAPTER XXVII

  THE PHŒNIX PARK MURDERS--WE SECURE THE JAUNTING-CAR AND
  PONY--CHARLES BRADLAUGH--GENERAL BOULANGER--LORD ROBERTS
  INSPECTS THE MODEL OF HIMSELF                                        197

                               CHAPTER XXVIII

  MY FAVOURITE PORTRAIT--LORD TENNYSON POSES UNCONSCIOUSLY BEFORE
  MY WIFE--“THIS BEATS TUSSAUD’S”--SIR RICHARD BURTON--HIS WIDOW
  CLOTHES THE MODEL                                                    203

                               CHAPTER XXIX

  REMOVAL OF THE EXHIBITION TO THE PRESENT BUILDING--SLEEPING
  FIGURES--HISTORY OF THE PORTMAN ROOMS--THE CATO STREET
  CONSPIRACY--BARON GRANT’S STAIRCASE                                  208

                               CHAPTER XXX

  THE KING OF SIAM’S VISIT--THE SHAHZADA’S CLOTHING--THE KING OF
  BURMAH’S WAR ELEPHANT--TALE OF TWO MONKEYS                           215

                               CHAPTER XXXI

  QUEEN VICTORIA’S COPPERPLATES--ANOTHER ROYAL PERSIAN
  VISIT--“PERISHED BY FIRE”--“VISCOUNT HINTON” AND HIS ORGAN--THE
  COQUETTE’S JEWELS LOST AND FOUND                                     220

                               CHAPTER XXXII

  ROYAL VISITORS--KING ALPHONSO AND PRINCESS ENA--THE LATE
  EMPEROR FREDERICK--A PENNILESS TRIO--PRINCESS CHARLES--THE
  PRINCE OF WALES AND PRINCE ALBERT                                    225

                               CHAPTER XXXIII

  THE BEGUM OF BHOPAL PAYS US A VISIT--LORD ROSEBERY AND LORD
  ANNALY--LORD RANDOLPH CHURCHILL--LADY BEATTY--LADY JELLICOE AND
  MRS. ASQUITH                                                         231

                               CHAPTER XXXIV

  TUSSAUD’S AS EDUCATOR--QUEER QUESTIONS--WANTED, A “MODEL”
  WIFE--QUAINT EXTRACT FROM AN INDIAN’S DIARY                          236

                               CHAPTER XXXV

  STARS OF THE STAGE IN MY STUDIO--MISS ELLEN TERRY HAS A CUP OF
  TEA--SIR SQUIRE AND LADY BANCROFT--SIR HENRY IRVING AND THE
  CABBY--WE COMPLY WITH A STRANGE REQUEST                              242

                               CHAPTER XXXVI

  LITERARY SITTERS--GEORGE R. SIMS’ IMPROMPTU--HIS ORDEAL IN THE
  CHAMBER OF HORRORS. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA’S MASTERPIECE               249

                               CHAPTER XXXVII

  G. A. SALA ON MARIE ANTOINETTE--THE ROYAL FAMILY--THE
  QUEEN--HER “TRIAL,” CONDEMNATION AND DEATH--THE SANSONS--SALA’S
  IMPRESSIONS                                                          254

                               CHAPTER XXXVIII

  MORE SITTERS--MR. JOHN BURNS WALKS AND TALKS--WE BUY HIS ONLY
  SUIT--MR. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW HAS TO WORK FOR HIS LIVING--FOUR
  LEADING SUFFRAGETTES--CHRISTABEL’S MODEL “SPEAKS”--THE CHANNEL
  SWIMMER--GENERAL BOOTH                                               275

                               CHAPTER XXXIX

  BANK HOLIDAY QUEUES--CUP-TIE DAY--GENTLEMEN FROM THE
  NORTH--BACHELOR BEANFEASTS--THE MEMBER FOR OLDHAM--A SCARE           282

                               CHAPTER XL

  THE MYSTERIOUS SUN YAT SEN’S VISIT--HIS ESCAPE FROM THE CHINESE
  LEGATION--THE DARGAI TABLEAU--SIR WILLIAM TRELOAR ENTERTAINS
  HIS LITTLE FRIENDS                                                   287

                               CHAPTER XLI

  A MISCELLANY OF HUMOUR--OUR POLICEMAN--THE MYSTERIOUS
  LANTERN--THE DANGER OF OLD CATALOGUES--STORIES OF CHILDREN--SIR
  ERNEST SHACKLETON’S MODEL                                            291

                               CHAPTER XLII

  THE LURE OF HORRORS--BEGINNINGS OF THE “DEAD ROOM”--SIR THOMAS
  LAWRENCE, P.R.A., SKETCHES A SUICIDE--BURKE AND HARE--FIESCHI’S
  INFERNAL MACHINE--GREENACRE--EXECUTIONS IN PUBLIC--“FREE AT
  LAST!”                                                               297

                               CHAPTER XLIII

  THE CHAMBER OF HORRORS RUMOUR--_NO REWARD HAS BEEN OR
  WILL BE OFFERED_--THE CONSTABLE’S ESCAPADE--A NOCTURNAL
  EXPERIENCE--DUMAS’S COMEDY OF THE CHAMBER--YEOMEN OF THE HALTER
                                                                       307

                               CHAPTER XLIV

  ANECDOTAL--“WHICH IS PEACE?”--MARK TWAIN AT TUSSAUD’S--DR.
  GRACE’S STORY--MR. KIPLING’S MODEL--FILIAL PRIDE--BISHOP
  JACKSON’S SALLY--GERMAN INACCURACY                                   315

                               CHAPTER XLV

  ENEMY MODELS--A HOSTILE PUBLIC--BANISHMENT OF FOUR RULERS--OUR
  REPLY TO JOHN BULL--ATTACKS ON THE KAISER’S EFFIGY--STORY OF AN
  IRON CROSS                                                           320

                               CHAPTER XLVI

  TUSSAUD’S DURING THE WAR--CHAMELEON CROWDS--THE PSYCHOLOGY
  OF COURAGE--MEN OF ST. DUNSTAN’S--POIGNANT MEMORIES--OUR
  WATCHMAN’S SOLILOQUY                                                 326

                               CHAPTER XLVII

  THREE HEROES OF THE WAR: NURSE CAVELL, JACK CORNWELL, V.C.,
  CAPTAIN FRYATT--LORDS ROBERTS AND KITCHENER--QUEEN ALEXANDRA’S
  STICK AND VIOLETS--THE DUKE OF NORFOLK’S TIP                         335

                               CHAPTER XLVIII

  A CRINOLINE COMEDY--MR. BRUCE SMITH’S STORY--AN AMERICAN
  LADY’S SHILLING--MY FATHER’S MEETING WITH BARNUM--THE
  “CHERRY-COLOURED” CAT--“PAGANINI” AND THE TAILOR--GEORGE
  GROSSMITH POSES                                                      341

                               CHAPTER XLIX

  WE VISIT THE OLD BAILEY FOR MEMENTOES--A MOCK TRIAL--RELICS OF
  OLD NEWGATE--TWO FAMOUS CELLS--THE NEWGATE BELL                      346

                               CHAPTER L

  TUSSAUD’S IN VERSE--TOM HOOD’S QUATRAIN--“ALFRED AMONG
  THE IMMORTALS”--A REFUGE FOR CABINET MINISTERS--TWO
  DIALOGUES--“THIS IS FAME”                                            352

                               CHAPTER LI

  LAST SCENE OF ALL--MADAME TUSSAUD’S APPEARANCE AND
  CHARACTER--HER MEMOIRS PUBLISHED IN 1838--HER LAST WORDS             356

ILLUSTRATIONS

  MADAME TUSSAUD _at the age of 85_                          _Frontispiece_

                                                                      PAGE

  JOHN THEODORE TUSSAUD                                                 32

  CHRISTOPHER CURTIUS                                                   56

  LOUIS XVI AND THE DUKE OF ORLÉANS                                     56

  THREE VIEWS OF VOLTAIRE’S HEAD                                        57

  “THE DYING SOCRATES”                                                  57

  BENJAMIN FRANKLIN                                                     57

  MADAME TUSSAUD _at the age of 20_                                     72

  MARIE ANTOINETTE, THE DAUPHIN, AND THE DUCHESSE D’ANGOULÊME           72

  MADAME ELIZABETH OF FRANCE                                            73

  MADAME ELIZABETH OF FRANCE, SISTER OF LOUIS XVI                       73

  MODEL OF THE BASTILLE                                                 73

  M. NECKER                                                             73

  CAMILLE DESMOULINS                                                    88

  THOMAS CARLYLE                                                        88

  MARIE ANTOINETTE                                                      88

  JEAN BAPTISTE CARRIER                                                 88

  KNIFE, LUNETTE AND CHOPPER OF THE ORIGINAL GUILLOTINE                 88

  THE GUILLOTINE                                                        89

  CHARLOTTE CORDAY                                                      89

  JEAN PAUL MARAT                                                       89

  MAXIMILIEN MARIE ISIDORE ROBESPIERRE                                  89

  THE PRINCESS DE LAMBALLE                                              89

  DANTON                                                                89

  MADAME TUSSAUD _at the age of 42_                                    112

  HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCESS CHARLOTTE OF WALES AND SAXE-COBURG   112

  THE BRISTOL RIOTS                                                    112

  SIR CHARLES WETHERELL                                                112

  HER MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY QUEEN ADELAIDE                            113

  INTERIOR OF THE EXHIBITION                                           113

  DANIEL O’CONNELL                                                     113

  MADAME DE MALIBRAN                                                   113

  JOSEPH TUSSAUD                                                       113

  THORWALDSEN’S CELEBRATED BUST OF THE GREAT NAPOLEON                  128

  NAPOLEON’S MILITARY CARRIAGE _General View_                          128

  NAPOLEON’S MILITARY CARRIAGE _Scene of its capture at Jenappe_       128

  THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE                                                128

  NAPOLEON’S MILITARY CARRIAGE _The Interior_                          129

  ARTICLES FOUND IN NAPOLEON’S CARRIAGE                                129

  NAPOLEON’S BAROUCHE                                                  129

  FATHER MATHEW                                                        144

  NICHOLAS I                                                           144

  VOLTAIRE’S CHAIR                                                     145

  SIR EDWIN LANDSEER, R.A.                                             145

  WELLINGTON VISITING THE EFFIGY OF NAPOLEON                           160

  SIR GEORGE HAYTER                                                    160

  COLOUR-SERGEANT GILBERT H. BATES                                     161

  WILLIAM COBBETT                                                      161

  RICHARD COBDEN                                                       161

  JOHN BRIGHT                                                          178

  TICHBORNE CLAIMANT                                                   178

  DR. LIVINGSTONE                                                      179

  THE PRINCE IMPERIAL                                                  179

  NAPOLEON III                                                         179

  COUNT LÉON                                                           192

  EDWARD TRACY TURNERELLI                                              192

  THE TURNERELLI WREATH                                                192

  KING CETEWAYO                                                        193

  GENERAL BOULANGER                                                    193

  LORD FREDERICK CAVENDISH                                             208

  CHARLES BRADLAUGH                                                    208

  SIR RICHARD BURTON                                                   209

  HEAD OF LORD TENNYSON                                                209

  VISCOUNT HINTON AND HIS ORGAN                                        240

  THE SURRENDER OF GENERAL CRONJE                                      240

  WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY                                          241

  SIR SQUIRE BANCROFT                                                  241

  BUST OF GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA                                         288

  GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA                                                 288

  T. W. BURGESS _The Channel Swimmer_                                  288

  EFFIGY OF DR. SUN YAT SEN                                            289

  DR. SUN YAT SEN                                                      289

  THE CHILDREN’S LORD MAYOR                                            289

  CHARLES PEACE                                                        320

  MARQUIS OF HARTINGTON                                                320

  BURKE AND HARE                                                       320

  SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE                                                  320

  KEY OF THE BASTILLE                                                  320

  JOHN WILLIAMS                                                        320

  WILLIAM MARWOOD _The Hangman_                                        321

  DR. JACKSON _Bishop of London_                                       321

  COUNT ZEPPELIN                                                       321

  BISMARCK                                                             321

  JACK SHEPPARD                                                        321

  THE OLD NEWGATE BELL                                                 321

  EDITH CAVELL                                                         352

  JACK CORNWELL, V. C.                                                 352

  CAPTAIN FRYATT                                                       352

  FIELD-MARSHAL EARL KITCHENER                                         352

  ALFRED AUSTIN                                                        353

  TOM HOOD                                                             353

  FRANCIS TUSSAUD                                                      353

INTRODUCTION

BY HILAIRE BELLOC

INTRODUCTION

BY HILAIRE BELLOC

This is a fascinating book and its fascination consists in two things
attaching to its subject: first that the famous collection of modelled
portraits which has become a sort of national institution in England
under the name of “Madame Tussaud’s” has its roots in the greatest period
of modern history, the French Revolution; second, in that the complete
and growing record has passed through so many changes and has yet
survived.

Even though the famous collection had dealt with nothing more than the
main figures of the Revolution and of the great wars that followed it, it
would have been a possession of permanent and lasting historical value.
I am not sure that if it had so remained, stopped short at the effigies
of those now long dead, it would not now receive a greater respect. It
might well in that case have become something recognised as a national
possession, protected and preserved by the national government. For
the prolongation of the record right on into our own time, while it
very greatly increases the real value of the collection as a piece of
historical evidence, yet deprives it of that illusion which men cannot
avoid where history is concerned: the illusion that things thoroughly
passed are in some way greater and of more consequence than contemporary
things.

This continuity of the great collection--so long as it is maintained
with judgment in selection and without too much yielding to momentary
fame is none the less a thing to be very thankful for. Already those
of us who, like the present writer, are well on into middle age, can
judge how the younger generation is beginning to regard as historical
these simulacra, which, when they were first modelled, seemed in our
own youth insignificant because they were contemporary. To our children
(who are now grown and are young men and women), Disraeli, Gladstone,
Bismarck--all the group that were old but living men in the eighties
(Disraeli died at the beginning of them, Bismarck long after their
close)--are what to us were Louis-Philippe, Garibaldi, Palmerston, and
the process properly continued will be invaluable. We have already more
than 130 years of record. There is no reason why it should not extend to
the two centuries.

It often happens that a thing of great value to history, a piece of
evidence which we now find invaluable, has come to us by an accident, the
motive of its creation not historical at all nor really connected with
record. Indeed of the bulk of historical evidence which we use to-day
for the reconstruction of the past only a small proportion--official
documents--are of the nature of deliberate records. And that proportion
of evidence is on the whole the worst as material, for official
documents always have a motive underlying them, and they never give one a
vivid picture. The great bulk of the material with which we used to build
up the past and make it live again for ourselves is accidental. And so it
is with this great collection.

The motive at first was merely that of a waxwork show. The remarkable
woman who created the collection did so as a matter of business. The
exhibits were intended to satisfy no more than contemporary curiosity.
But they have become a piece of historical evidence which increases
in value with every year. Whatever you may read (and the accounts are
always contradictory) of some man prominent in the past, whatever picture
or sculpture you may find of him (and these are often deliberately
flattering or in some other way untrue) the physical impression of him
will never be so full and so exact as in the case of an effigy made by a
contemporary who saw him, watched him, knew him, _and whose whole motive
was exactitude in reproduction_.

Here there does indeed arise the question of the medium. You cannot
conceive of a better medium than wax among all the known mediums for
production of effigies of human beings. Yet it is not perfect. And it is
precisely because the likeness is so great, precisely because the effect
is so parallel to that of reality, that we note the minor details in
which illusion is not achieved. When a man sees a bust of marble he does
not expect to find illusion. The greatest portrait statuary can never be
more than a symbol. But the wax effigy aims at exact reproduction. To
put it in extreme terms, the ideal of the modeller in wax would be to
reproduce a figure such that one knowing the original could be deceived
and think he had found again his friend dead or sleeping. When a wax
effigy reproduces a known and real person, especially a person whom we
ourselves have come across, the discrepancy between reality and its copy
is clearer. But there is this strong evidence in support of the success
which modelling in wax has reached, that where we are dealing with
something unknown, some imaginary person, it is possible to create, in
spite of the immobility of the figure, an illusion of life. Everyone who
has visited these collections will testify to that. With a person whom
one has seen in the flesh the little details in which the wax does not
tally with the flesh nor immobility with life, stand out clear. That is
especially the case with those whose complexion is difficult to imitate.
It is also the case in the attachment of the hair. And I have further
noticed that the direction of the eyes makes a difference, the figure
being more lifelike as a rule when the eyes are cast down or averted,
than when a direct look is imitated. But it remains true that with an
imaginary person when you are free to suppose that the person had a
complexion of the sort easily imitated in wax, and where you are further
free to presume the pose, you can get as near to reality in this medium
as it is possible for human art to achieve.

Therein, then, lies the great value of this thing. It is a witness to
history, and as I have said, one increasingly valuable as time proceeds.

Still it is with what is chiefly historical in this gallery of figures
and _especially with the tradition of the French Revolution and the
Napoleonic Wars, that we are most concerned_. And the Tussaud collection
has this added interest that it sprung as it were from the revolutionary
time. Its origins lay in that. Its first fame was due to an emigration
from France into England, and it still remains much the best effort at
physical reconstruction which we have to-day.

The reason is that the lady who founded this institution was not only
herself a contemporary of but an actor in the principal events of that
time. She came by a series of accidents into direct touch with one
personality after another. She left a record of each. She was a personal
and convincing witness and her work remains. She is just as much a person
of the Revolution and of the Napoleonic period as any one of those whom
she modelled for our benefit. And that is (let us remember) of special
value _in that one is in the spirit of one’s time_.

The artist deliberately reconstructing a bust through plastic art is
always in danger of failing through a lack of the necessary sympathy
between the time in which he lives and the time in which his subject
lived. The truth of this is expressed very sharply in modern attempts at
reconstructing mediæval sculpture. It has been done. It is singularly
successful, for instance, in the central porch of Notre Dame in Paris.
But as a rule it fails. The modern man either works from a modern model,
or at any rate with modern expressions and modern features at the back
of his mind. One conspicuous instance occurs to me, the modern figures
upon Lichfield. They are as grievously out of their supposed time as are
the figures of Tennyson’s “Idylls of the Kings.” The Knights of the Round
Tables of Tennyson’s version are the gentlemen of pegtopped trousers who
were contemporary with the poet. They have been to public schools and to
universities. They would be horrified at the dropping of aitches, and
they have often attended at services which were fully choral. They would
have called the inhabitants of the country which they visited “natives.”
That is what Tennyson made of Geraint and Launcelot and his odious Arthur.

I am afraid one cannot say much more for the sculptures that I have in my
mind. They are dressed in mediæval armour, but the faces that look out
from the helmets are the faces to be seen in the London clubs to-day.
They are faces devoid of simplicity and strength. They are not the faces
of the Middle Ages.

You have the same thing in historical painting, and that is why
historical painting usually looks so ridiculous in the generation
after it was made. We all know those historical paintings which our
grandfathers bought and which still disfigure the large rooms of private
houses, where you have Richard I of England charging the Saracens (he, an
Angevin!), his face glowing with the emotions of the football field.

Now this prime difficulty and error in pictorial and plastic record in
the past you can only avoid by the advantage of contemporary work, and
this is where the great value of this collection comes in. All its
work is contemporary, and we can to-day, after an interval of more than
a hundred years, weigh the importance of that point. The revolutionary
figures sometimes look odd to us precisely because their real aspect has
been so vividly preserved. The hand that modelled Marat was a hand of
Marat’s age. It touched the flesh of the dead man. The eyes that received
the conception reproduced by the hands, gazed upon Marat himself as he
lay back dead.

And here it is convenient to introduce that essential character in the
great collection--the genius of its originator.

The whole thing, its character, long tradition and establishment--is the
creation of one remarkable woman, and of her we ought to have some full
biography. I know of none. She has at least the rare advantage of having
propagated her name justly and the thing she created is identified with
her. It is not often that history acts with so little irony and with so
much generosity. Her energy was much more remarkable than that of those
very few women who have created and organised permanent businesses, for
it was not only her judgment and initiative which created the commercial
side of the collection: it was also her own talent and industry, the work
of her own hands, that laid the foundation of it all. Most of the early
portraits were the direct product of her skill and it is from her that
the continuous tradition of the place descends. Her sons learnt their art
from their mother and carried it on to the third generation which still
continues it. It was she who took all the critical decisions, she who
steered the fortunes of the family through the crisis of the Revolution,
who determined to take the collection over to England, who conceived the
idea of making it a permanent record by adding contemporaries year after
year.

It is not often that one has this intimate admixture of personality
with an institution, and when one gets it it has an astonishing effect
in vivifying the whole. When an institution is thus the product of a
character at once highly energetic and highly individual, it is as though
a living thing continued on long beyond the term of a human life. It is,
in the strict and original sense of the word, “inspired.” You get that
quality, of course, in all literature, and in some of the corporations
which remarkable men and women have founded, but very rarely in a piece
of business in an institution of affairs. Here you get it, and the more
you read of the woman’s life and character the more you understand the
success of her effort and its vitality.

[Illustration: JOHN THEODORE TUSSAUD]

It was an astonishing life! There lies behind it the story of her uncle
Curtius, a Swiss who left medical practice in the middle of the 18th
century and took to modelling in wax. It was a taste which had grown
upon him from his habit of modelling parts of the human body for the
purposes of his profession. He extended it to portraits and at last he
abandoned medicine for his new art. He had firmly established himself in
it and had already been taken up by members of the French Royal Family
who had visited Switzerland, when under their protection he left for
Paris. And there his sister, Madame Grosholtz, and her child, then five
or six years old, joined him. There she learnt her uncle’s trade and
thence in her twentieth year she went to live at Versailles as a sort
of companion to Madame Elizabeth, Louis XVI’s sister, a girl about four
years older than herself. She was the close friend and companion of the
princess right up to the moment of the Revolution. Madame Elizabeth like
her brother had a delight in manual work. With her it took the form of
modelling under the guidance of Marie Grosholtz and it was these nine
years that formed the character and that remained the liveliest memory
throughout all the very long life that this remarkable woman was to live.

It would be interesting to discover (I know of no such document that
could tell me, but there must be some) whether the young companion
whom Madame Elizabeth thus took under her protection, and to whom she
thus gave a unique opportunity for the observation of contemporary
life, was in race German or French. Berne would seem to be the origin
of the family, and the uncle’s Latin name and the family name of his
brother-in-law point to German origin. All his associations on the other
hand were French, and when he came to Paris it was hardly as a foreigner.
The story reads as though they were French-speaking on their arrival.
Perhaps in some future edition of the work this point will be settled. It
is one of considerable moment to our judgment of the art.

It was a moment when the connection between Switzerland and French
society was very close. It was to Switzerland that Voltaire had retired.
It was from Switzerland that the genius of Rousseau proceeded. The
unfortunate Necker, with his caution and his avarice, played his great
part in the early Revolution as a Swiss. To Switzerland also he went back
when he had failed--and there, by the way, in his retirement we have
an amusing picture of him listening to the daily recital of the news
from Paris as the Revolution proceeded, wagging his head solemnly, and
perpetually saying, “I told you so.”

Madame de Staël, his famous daughter, whom Pitt so much desired to marry
for her money, and whom Napoleon so hated, was thoroughly Swiss. She
shows it in every line of her writing. She is from the heart of Geneva in
her traditions and ideas.

The family coming thus to Paris were part of a general movement and even
their connection with Versailles can be paralleled. It would not have
taken much, had things proceeded quietly, for Switzerland to have fallen
into the orbit of the French monarchy within the next hundred years.

After these nine formative years in the continued company of Madame
Elizabeth, Marie Grosholtz enters the Revolution, and the connections of
the family with the origins of the great upheaval are close, curious,
and of intense interest. It was, it will be remembered, the bust of
Necker from the collection of Curtius, then on exhibition, which the mob
carried round at the beginning of the insurrection. The show of figures
already well-known in Paris became the starting-point for the future
collection. It was because the Revolutionaries from the very beginning of
the movement showed so much acquaintance with those effigies that the
continuous stream of further portraits began. That is why Marie Grosholtz
was sent for time after time to take a death mask, to model a famous
living man, to establish what afterwards became the invaluable record we
still have.

From 1787-89, the preliminary years when she was already at work, right
on to 1802, a matter of 15 years, the most crowded of all history, the
newly developed art went on actively without interruption. There is
not, I think, in all history a parallel to so astonishing and lucky a
chance. It was almost as though fate had designed a reporter, or a state
portraitist for the benefit of posterity. You do get the same thing now
and then in the shape of a chronicler who happens to keep out of the
turmoil and mark the detail of his time, but it is extremely rare and in
the case of plastic art, unique. The nearest parallel to-day--which may
raise a smile on account of the extreme difference in time and manner--is
that of Holbein’s portraits of the English Court. There also you get the
living record marvellously preserved for future times.

It is to our advantage that the character of this foundress does not
diminish in energy with the passage of time. We see her doing the work of
three people all through the years of her middle age and making decision
after decision upon the fortunes of her house. And while she was thus
conducting with one hand the financial side of the business, with the
other she was herself still modelling perpetually, and with a third and
quite separate faculty she was creating a school of her own, as it were,
for the continuation of the modelling after her time. If ever there was
the maker of an important thing it was this woman and if ever there was
an important thing proceeding entirely from one individual, that thing is
the collection which still remains to us.

There is a sort of parallel which can be drawn between Madame Tussaud and
Madame Campan. Both of them have seen, and worked at, the Palace of Louis
XVI, under and in connection with his Queen. Both were much of an age,
Madame Campan eight years senior to Madame Tussaud. Both lived on through
the Revolution and the Empire, the one till 1822, the other beyond the
revolutionary year of 1848. Both had something of the same strength. Both
carried on the tradition of the old attachment to the Bourbons. Both have
left the legend of a strong personality, the one through an effect on
education in France which was deeper than has been generally recognised,
the other in a more lasting manner through her plastic work. In this
connection one muses upon what would have been Madame Tussaud’s fate had
she continued her career in the country where it had begun, and had she
not taken over the collection in its origins to England at the Peace of
Amiens. I think she would have been a great figure in the France of the
Restoration and of the bourgeois Monarchy. A continuous unbroken link
with all the great years up to 1848 and presenting a whole gallery of the
past for a new generation to witness would have been something the French
and Paris would have made much of, and a great deal that was lost on the
other side of the Channel through lack of understanding would have been
preserved. I mean that too many of those figures were for those who saw
them in an alien atmosphere jests or shades, whereas in France they would
have been an intimate part of the great national story.

This removal to England also in some degree affected the proportion of
the collection and in the same degree diminished its great international
value. Not that figures of international moment had not been
included--the great figures are all there--but that Paris would have been
a better general centre for watching and recording the moving history of
the 19th century, than London. The Musée Grevin in Paris supplemented
the Tussaud collection in England. One imagines that it would have been
better for history as a whole had one great collection, preferably in
Paris, served for a permanent and continuous chronicle of what living men
had been.

When we come to details of the personalities from the period before
the Revolution to the Peace of Amiens (the foundation of the whole
Exhibition) we are struck, I think, by the great difference in our
appreciation. Some of the figures are just what we should have thought
these men would have been. Others offend us or puzzle us by what seems to
us discrepancy. But we must remember that the error is in ourselves and
not in the contemporary record.

Of the great historical figures Voltaire (which is the first of them) is
least specially illuminated by what I may call “the Tussaud tradition.”
And that is because we already know pretty well all that there is to
know about Voltaire. His story was a simple one, his genius obvious,
not complex, and the time of life in which Madame Tussaud’s uncle came
to sculp him (to model his face in wax) was just at the very end, when
public fame and his own great pride in himself had combined to put him
into full evidence, even to the details of his daily life. It was just
at the end of that life, in 1778, that Voltaire sat to Curtius, Madame
Tussaud’s uncle, the original founder of the whole gallery, and the tutor
of his niece in her art.

It is interesting to compare the little miniature (one of several) which
Curtius made--it is far more lifelike than the larger figure--with the
famous Houdon. Houdon’s is much the greater thing, of course, and the
more living, but though Houdon was the greatest of portraitists by
far, the greatest renderer of the human face that ever lived, there
is something intimate in the little wax miniature of Curtius which no
great sculptor could have given. For instance, you have here admitted,
as it were, almost photographed, the domestic insufficient quality of
Voltaire’s famous smile. Houdon could not help making that smile--or
grin--have something heroic about it; or at any rate great. But the
Tussaud work undoubtedly shows you the thing as it actually was; as his
servants and his intimates saw it.

I learn, by the way, from this book (I had not known it before) that
Houdon had himself worked for Curtius--a considerably older man--and the
connection is as curious as it is interesting. It is striking to find a
record of the connection in this book, but not astonishing that it should
be absent from others, for there has been no good comprehensive work on
Houdon written that I can recollect. I am told that there is some German
encyclopædic work or other but no proper study of the man and his life.

Next after Voltaire we have to note side by side with the collection
a small work of Curtius’s own in miniature, the very striking profile
of the Duke of Orléans. How it helps one to understand that base and
extraordinary career! Everyone reading the story of the Revolution
should concentrate upon that man’s ambition, weakness and intrigue.
The origin of the whole business was his false idea (unfortunately for
himself confirmed by circumstances for many years) that Louis XVI and
Marie Antoinette would have no children. He came to regard himself as the
heir, and the natural result was that when the first child came after so
perplexing a delay (a delay the cause of which I have explained in an
appendix to my own monograph on Marie Antoinette) Philippe Égalité felt
himself aggrieved. His grievance was illogical and unjust, but it was
there and in that grievance you find no small part of the motive force
that impelled the early Revolution.

The family tradition carried on by the Tussauds from the Revolution was
what may be described as the “orthodox” tradition. It is the tradition
which appears in this book. I am not sure that the historian can wholly
agree with it.

This “orthodox” tradition is the tradition of an equable and happy
society overthrown into a sort of chaos at the head of which chance
scoundrels floated, each to disappear in turn, struck by a sort of
anarchic doom proceeding from their fellow anarchs. The Revolution was
rather a resettlement of society from a state which had become unstable
to a new and more stable state, and its leaders were upon the whole,
though suffering under the exaggeration from which leaders at such a time
invariably suffer, men of capacity--especially on the military side.
Further, those who were made responsible in popular tradition for the
worst excesses were hardly the principal authors of them.

Thus, the real director of what is called the Terror was Carnot, not
Robespierre. Carnot was a perfectly sane man and a genius to boot,
attached to the new democratic principle, but a soldier, and working for
the highly practical ends which a soldier has in view. He thought of
the Terror as a piece of martial law, and it is significant that under
his direction by far the greater number of those who suffered in Paris
suffered through a direct breach of the temporary regulations (such as
those against the export of money or communication with the enemy) which
were necessary for the prosecution of the campaign.

Robespierre was not the director of the Terror at all. He was a man
singularly restricted in nature, but of powerful effect in oratory in
spite of his close academic style. He was a man of complete sincerity,
much too narrow in doctrine, but because he exactly expressed with more
lucidity than anyone else, and with more conviction, what was the
passionate creed of the time, he became for something like two years at
once the idol and the symbol of the revolutionary masses. As the Terror
looked like an intensive application of the Revolution men associated it
with Robespierre’s name, and Robespierre, suffering from the very grave
defect of vanity (common in men who reach a public position), was willing
to allow the false imputation, and to enjoy the title of ruler, when he
was really in the Central Council of the Republic, singularly impotent.
He paid a heavy price for that falsehood. It cost him his life and--what
was worse--his reputation.

What we know positively of Robespierre’s action during the Terror is
that he attended the Central Council less and less frequently, and that
he tried, if anything, to stop the Terror. In fact it was precisely on
this account, his interference with the rigour of the martial law, that
his enemies brought him to the guillotine. But, by a curious irony not
uncommon in history, the death of this man who was not the leader of the
Terror, and who had if anything attempted to check it, and who was put to
death because he attempted to check it, caused the Terror to cease. Men
had so universally (and so falsely) identified him with the extremity of
the republican military régime that when he passed it was impossible to
continue it.

In the matter of Marat what I may call “the Tussaud tradition” is
sounder. The man was unbalanced to the point of lunacy, and when Madame
Tussaud was called in to take the impression of his face just after
death, her use of the word “fiend” though exaggerated is comprehensible.
This effigy of Marat which you may see in the famous gallery and
which was modelled immediately after his death--an immediate piece of
historical evidence of the first value--was shown in Paris when it was
completed. It is an astonishing thing to have that piece of continuity
with us.

But all these death masks of the Revolution are of the highest value.
There is an extraordinary dignity in the full features of the Queen,
looking younger than she did in the last years of her life, and a
singular and awful reality in the mask of Robespierre. I know only two
representations of Robespierre which really recall the man. One is this
effigy exactly modelled from the face itself after these last thirty-six
hours of agony, and the other is the portrait which Greuze made of him
and which is now in Lord Rosebery’s collection. And of these two, of
course, the death mask, though repulsive, is the more actual.

But of all these revolutionary figures, by far the most interesting to
me is that of Carrier. The contrast between that strongly exact, clearly
cut face and the story of Carrier’s madness at Nantes, is one of the
things that make one understand not only the Revolution but in general
mankind at white heat. Here is a man who, if features mean anything,
might have been some sharp, self-contained, disappointed, ironic speaker,
or even poet. It is the face of a man who certainly knew his own mind,
who despised other men, which is a weakness, but who followed some great
idea within. It is a face human in its self-repression and exactitude.
Were we familiar with it in connection with some great name of peaceable
activity, were it the face of one of those who settled the Congress of
Vienna, or of some monarch, or of some writer, it would be famous as an
index of genius. As it is, the name--especially to those who do not know
the face--suggests nothing but a mad infamy, and indiscriminate shooting
and drowning in batches of the wretched Vendean prisoners. And I myself
when writing thus of Carrier have a right to be balanced in my judgment
for he came very near to guillotining my grandfather’s father, from whom
he differed in politics. And here in the case of Carrier is an excellent
example of the historical value of that which I postulate as the first,
much the greatest, character in a collection such as this: for had we
not the bust of the living Carrier, itself almost a living thing, taken
immediately after death, we should hardly have guessed what Carrier was.
But the face combined with the history explains him well enough.

The story of Madame Tussaud seeking for Sanson’s guillotine, or rather
for one of his guillotines after the Peace of Amiens and sending her
son over to Paris to look for the man and his implements (which the
executioner had pawned) and getting it at last at great cost, is
characteristic of her energy and business sense. She lived at a time when
the material relic was the _clou_ of her collection. If to-day it rather
detracts from the sober historical value of the figures, it remains an
excellent witness to her indefatigable initiative. And so it is with the
collection of Napoleonic relics, notably the Waterloo carriage, which
she secured just at the moment when it was of the greatest value to her
business.

Her modelling of the dead in the revolutionary time included, by her own
account, the head of the Princess de Lamballe, when that unfortunate and
rather insipid young woman (but gracious and kind) was so foolishly and
so atrociously murdered. The record would seem to correspond more or
less with the judgment of Michelette, and Michelette’s portrait mostly
produced by chance illusion is the best I know.

In the fate of all those men and women, but particularly in that of
Madame de Lamballe, the main element of tragedy is their bewilderment.
They could not conceive what cause or motive lay behind the fierce hatred
which concentrated upon them. It was for them a nightmare, something
irresponsible like a cataclysm of nature, and yet something human, and
something that ought, therefore, to be explicable. Oddly enough the
one person who did get a glimmer of the human motive at work was Marie
Antoinette herself. It is astonishing how rapidly not only the general
character but the intelligence of Marie Antoinette developed in these
years. She became the true daughter of Maria Theresa--too late!

They suffered (of course) through that illusion which is the curse of
publicity. They were tortured and they were killed for a label, not for
their very selves. But the tragedy is increased in their case, I think,
because they did not seek publicity. Your politician, often a mountebank,
whose appetite is for strutting upon a stage, who loves the limelight,
whose meat and drink it is to hear his name repeated perpetually by the
populace, deserves what he gets. And he nearly always gets what the fates
reserve for such vanities. In a greater or less degree these creators
of their own label suffer in the end: at the least disappointment and
neglect, at the most death. But as I have said they deserve what comes
to them. They have had their reward. It was not so with the stable
hereditary publicity of the Bourbon royal family and its adherents. They
could not help the light which beat upon them. They did not seek it.
The absurd legends in which any public figure is necessarily clothed as
with a wrap of falsehood is not one of their seeking or of their making.
They suffer for those legends and for the consequences of those legends
precisely after the fashion which dramatic irony demands that the victim
of any great tragedy should suffer--in spite of themselves and with no
understanding of how the thing came.

What could be more ridiculous than the figment of Louis XV--obese,
good-natured, slow, irresolute in morals, irresolute in policy--as a
tyrant. Or what could be more absurd than the fiction of a libertine
Marie Antoinette? Or of a democratic Duke of Orléans? Or of a patriot
Necker?

It was, I think, this element of undeserved and awfully ironic tragedy
which burnt into the soul of all those who had come into contact with
the harmless but sometimes dignified and always splendid circle of
Versailles. One of the few sincere emotions of Burke’s life was,
I think, the moment when he broke out into rhetoric on the fate of
the Queen. This middle-class man had seen her, and the grotesque
disproportion between herself and her fate moved him to real feeling. It
is to his credit, for not many things that Burke said were genuine. He
was an advocate taking pay from people who wanted arguments and I think
he would have argued just as well for better pay on the other side.

This appassionate sympathy with and support of the victims was very
conspicuous in Madame Tussaud herself. And she carried it through the
whole of that period when she was at first unwillingly modelling the
revolutionaries, often with disgust compelled to take the mask of a dead
face, or later (she was in prison with Josephine) associated with the
figures of the period of the Directorate and the Consulship.

Of those personal interviews when that handsome woman now in middle
age was still engaged at her task of modelling and sculpture in wax,
there is none of which we would rather have a full record than the
modelling of Napoleon. It is mentioned in Mr. Tussaud’s book only by
way of quotation from a contemporary journal--the _Belle Assemblée_. It
would be interesting to know if there is any family record giving full
details, for we have not even the date, though we have the hour of the
day--six o’clock in the morning--that she first met the Emperor. He was
not Emperor yet and we can fix an inferior and a superior limit easily
enough for the portrait was made at the Tuileries, after Napoleon as
First Consul had gone there, and before the Peace of Amiens. It must,
therefore, have fallen within a period of only just over two years; it
must have been done either in 1800 or in 1801.

It is in connection with Napoleon that the shifting of values, which I
have suggested took place through the transference of the collection
to England, may be noted. The exhibition once fixed in London took on
the English point of view and to that extent distorted a full European
impression. For instance, one of the great features in the story of
the collection is the visit of the Duke of Wellington to the effigy of
Napoleon, and a well-known and almost famous picture was made of the
incident. I am old enough to remember many people who spoke of it as
though it was a most dramatic moment in the history of the nineteenth
century. But no one with the full European sense would feel like that.
Wellington was not the great protagonist against Napoleon. He was but
one of fifty men opposed to the Emperor. The defeat of Napoleon was in
Russia, and at Leipsic and at Waterloo, not at Waterloo alone, and the
victors of Waterloo were Wellington and Blücher, neither of whom could
have succeeded without the other.

Of the figures added to the great collection after Madame Tussaud’s
death, of the figures which carry on the historical record and continue
to add to its value, I am sure that the one of most interest for an
Englishman is that of Richard Burton. It was not (apparently) modelled
directly from life. But it was modelled under the eye of Lady Burton
herself, and satisfied that critic.

The inclusion of such a figure is an example of what I mean when I say
that such a collection is a valuable and continuous piece of historical
evidence. The greatness of Burton was missed. He was subject to a boycott
due in the main to his exposure of the ritual murder at Damascus. His
energetic but isolated character did not square with that of the most of
his countrymen. And yet to have an Englishman so uniquely English and to
have recognised what a part he was of the record of his time shows a sure
instinct.

It is here that the chief danger imperilling the value of the collection
appears. And with that after so much praise I would conclude.

Madame Tussaud, it will be remembered, decided at some time early in
the 19th century to make continuous additions to her collection as
time went on, to keep it up to date, to make it contemporary. It was a
natural decision and obviously necessary to the conduct of the thing as
a business enterprise. For contemporaries will always desire to look at
the portraits of those who are for any reason notorious, rather than to
preserve the historical record. But save in quite exceptional times, such
as that of the Revolution, which gave the collection its origin, there is
always the danger of a change in values. In the first place, for a man
to be notorious is not the same thing as for a man to deserve fame. His
notoriety may be of the quality of fame rather than mere notoriety, and
may mature into fame, and yet not be a fame of that first class which
warrants an historical record. In either of these two cases there is the
danger of disproportion in the collection, regarded as something of
slight historical value. But that disproportion may be remedied by the
removal of the figures.

The third danger attaching to the system is not remediable. It is
omission, and that is what I had in my mind in the case of Burton. It is
very unlikely that a man producing a series of contemporary portraits
in the early part of James I’s reign would have included William
Shakespeare; or in the end of Victoria’s reign a man so remarkable
(though, of course, not on a great scale) as Samuel Butler. There is
always a certain proportion of men in any generation with regard to whom
the careful observer can say with fair certitude that posterity will
require to know much more of them, and who are yet for the moment not in
the public eye. Now the commercial necessities of an exhibition cannot
consider these men. They are of no value to the crowd, and therein, I
say, lies the danger. Let me give an example.

I do not think (I may be wrong as I am speaking in the negative of what
is only a detail), I do not think that there is in the Tussaud collection
any model of the great Carnot. Carnot was on the whole the most virile
of all that virile revolutionary group, and he was one of the first half
dozen of those who created the modern world. In a military sense Carnot
was the tutor and creator of Napoleon. But it would certainly not have
occurred to any observer of popular feelings (even if Carnot had been
included) at the time, especially of popular feelings with an eye to the
English market, that Carnot was worth preserving. To-day I think most
students of history would rather have a really accurate study of Carnot
than of even Robespierre.

If ever, which is possible, a collection of this sort comes under the
aid or patronage of the state, the peril I speak of might in theory be
removed: for the state will endow. But as things are, the peril exists.
I mention it because I do sincerely regard this body of effigies not as
something concerned with as ephemeral a function in the state as popular
curiosity, still less as a mere commercial venture, but rather--what
I have called it throughout this essay--a unique piece of historical
record. And history, I take it, is the indispensable memory with which
citizens should furnish themselves if they are to understand their own
state and civilisation.

THE ROMANCE OF MADAME TUSSAUD’S

CHAPTER I

    Mr. Tussaud first enters his father’s studio--Reverie--Madame
    Tussaud’s uncle forsakes the medical profession for
    art--Madame’s birth and parentage--A Prince’s promise.

It was at the age of fourteen and in the year 1872 that I first entered
my father’s studio, and well I remember the bright summer morning I
passed its threshold to place myself under his tuition.

It was an odd rememorative sort of place, the eeriness of which sat
uneasily on the mind of, I fear, a somewhat jocose and irresponsible
youth.

The surroundings somehow seemed to force upon my mind the memories of men
and things I must have heard about or dreamt of, or with whom I had been
in some way made familiar. Moreover, the place was so out of touch with
the ordinary affairs of life, so reposeful and secluded amid the din and
turmoil of the world outside.

The studio stood well in the rear of an old-world residence, known as
Salisbury House, in the parish of Marylebone. Here the family had long
lived. The house confronted what, in my early days, was then still
designated the New Road. Upon its site there has been since erected the
imposing classic palace designed to accommodate the hitherto poorly
housed Corporation of the borough.

Whenever I recall this eventful day there readily springs to my mind the
circumstance that I found my father busily engaged in modelling a new
portrait of the Prince of Wales--the late King Edward--for whose recovery
from a very dangerous illness the nation had recently held a Day of
Thanksgiving.

From this day onward I may claim to have acted as something more than a
mere spectator of that long procession of models wrought by my father’s
diligent hands. Each one necessitated the making of some small sketch,
some characteristic study, that has helped to swell as strange a
collection of memorials as ever existed of men and events of bygone days.

It is amid these surroundings that I now sit to begin the writing of
these chapters; and a strangely engrossing retrospect they reveal. Five
generations of my family have contributed towards them, and now, on a
modelling stool by my side, there stands the promising work of a son who
will, I trust, one day follow me to carry on the work.

During the quietude of those hours that succeed the labours of the day,
and when the last studio hand has closed the door behind him, I take the
opportunity of penning this brief history. Often in the moving shadows of
the twilight or in the flickering flame of a falling ember I fancy I see
life and movement in the faces that gaze down upon me, quickened, as it
were, to respond to the memories their features evoke.

But for me, at least, there is little that is disquieting in their
scrutiny. For the most part they are old familiars, and a long
acquaintance has set us wonderfully at our ease.

As the eye passes from the semblance of one celebrity to that of another,
how vividly they carry one’s thoughts back through King Edward’s reign,
the long years Queen Victoria sat upon the throne, the days of William
IV, the reign and regency of “The First Gentleman of Europe,” and far
back into the days of good “Farmer George”!

Even though set among the strong and characteristic features of the
leading men of these memorable reigns, the striking countenance of
Napoleon can be discerned without hesitation, and his familiar features
force me in imagination to undergo the ordeal of crossing the Channel to
retrace the course this narrative takes and discover my ancestress under
the domination of the First Consul, then pushing in hot haste his fortune
at the point of the bayonet, and fast traversing the hazardous road
leading to the throne of France.

Somehow we do not find this long and curious retrospect illumined by
any very strong ray of human happiness. Even the overshadowing head
and shoulders of the great Napoleon do not conceal from our vision the
dismal heads of the revolutionists; indeed, if they had been hidden from
our sight, could these ghoulish impressions ever be effaced from our
memory? And so, behind Bonaparte, one’s eyes sight the sinister heads
of Robespierre, Fouquier-Tinville, Carrier, Hébert--merciless creatures
who gambled with the lives of their fellow men for high positions, and
multiplied these awful human stakes that they might hold themselves
secure.

There, too, in the falling light, one perceives the faces of Louis XVI
and his Queen, Marie Antoinette, the two most notable and pitiful victims
of the Reign of Terror--a reign, forsooth, in which these ill-starred
sovereigns, the descendants of generations of kings, were but the poorest
and saddest of subjects.

The vista is long and hazy, but it is not too dim for one to observe upon
a bracket the visage of the great Voltaire, with its leering eyes and
sardonic grin. His bust is _vis-à-vis_ with the ponderous head of the
idealist Rousseau, with its heavy forehead and its short, narrow chin.

And so face after face peers down upon me, carrying the mind back with
unfailing steps until is reached the true source from which this dramatic
story springs.

[Illustration: CHRISTOPHER CURTIUS

Uncle of Mme. Tussaud and founder of the Museum in Paris during the
French Revolution in the Boulevard du Temple. A Portrait Study by John T.
Tussaud.]

In the year 1758, so far afield as the city of Berne, a certain young
Swiss, named Christopher Curtius, was earnestly employing his days as a
medical practitioner.

With the object of improving himself in his profession he had taken to
modelling the limbs and organs of the human body in wax. He soon extended
the scope of his labours to the execution of many miniature portraits
in that same plastic material, and gained the patronage of many of the
leading members of the aristocracy. In this work he succeeded well, and
towards his latter days in Berne he practised rather as an artist than as
a family doctor.

It is as the maternal uncle of Madame Tussaud, the subject of these
memoirs, that Christopher Curtius comes under our consideration.

Madame Tussaud was the child of one Joseph Grosholtz, who lost his life
when serving on the Staff of General Wurmser during the Seven Years’
War, a couple of months or so before she was born. He was of purely
Swiss parentage, and the family to this day prides itself on being of
Burgundian Swiss stock.

Although Marie Grosholtz was not married until the year 1795, it will be
well to refer to her henceforth as Madame Tussaud, under which name she
is universally known.

Madame Grosholtz and her child seem to have been the only relatives
possessed by Curtius, who later induced his sister to take up her
residency with him, doubtless with the object of taking control of the
affairs of his household.

It was when Curtius had fully established himself as an artist in Berne
that an incident took place, about the year 1762, which led to important
consequences.

The Prince de Conti had been losing favour at the Court of his royal
cousin, Louis XV, a circumstance mainly due, we are told, to the Prince’s
excessive popularity with the Army and a certain independent bearing he
adopted towards the King and his favourites. The King’s mistress, Madame
de Pompadour, did not hesitate to show her resentment at de Conti’s lack
of deference.

According to all accounts, the Prince did not take his position very
much to heart, for, in truth, an estrangement between the Court and the
representatives of his house afforded little in the nature of a new
experience. At any rate, he shook the dust of the capital off his boots,
and set out on a tour through Europe.

On this journey he tarried for some days in the city of Berne, betraying
a keen desire to participate in all that mediæval town could afford him
by way of interest and entertainment.

Among these Curtius’s studio--which had now acquired something of the
dignity of a private museum--was not allowed to escape his attention.
No account of his visit to this establishment has been handed down,
but a few words uttered by the Prince on leaving conveyed, beyond all
doubt, his genuine admiration for the doctor-artist’s skill in his new
profession as a sculptor in wax.

“If you will leave Berne and come to Paris, I will undertake to find
you a suitable atelier in which to carry on your work, and hold myself
responsible for your receiving as many commissions as you feel disposed
to executive. Come,” he urged. “You will not regret it.”

One wonders what kindred foibles, what curious traits of disposition in
common, existed between this Prince and the artist that there should have
been struck so readily a chord of sympathy between them. For the offer,
as we shall hereafter learn, had not been lightly made, nor had its ready
acceptance been inspired without betraying a ready confidence most men
would have deemed it highly imprudent to concede.

CHAPTER II

    Curtius leaves Berne for Paris--The Hôtel d’Aligre--The Court
    of Louis XV--Madame arrives in Paris.

In response to the Prince de Conti’s invitation, Curtius left Berne for
Paris a few months later, and for once the time-honoured adage proffering
a warning to those prone to rely upon the promises of princes had no
bearing, for this Prince kept his word.

On his arrival at Paris, Curtius found a handsome suite of apartments
awaiting him at the Hôtel d’Aligre, hard by the Croix du Trahoir in the
Rue St. Honoré. They were spacious and well furnished, and in style and
comfort far exceeded his expectation. The Rue St. Honoré on the north,
the Rue Bailleul on the south, the Rue de l’Arbre Sec on the east, and
the Rue des Poulies on the west, outline to this day the ground on which
the hotel, with its gardens, then stood.

The Hôtel d’Aligre was a place that had seen better days. It had, like
so many of the great family dwellings that existed in Paris towards
the end of the eighteenth century, demanded of its owners a longer and
more speedily replenished purse than they possessed. The sheltering of
a stately and magnificent household had long been unknown to this once
famous residence, and its handsome rooms had been divided up and let as
separate tenements.

The building contained a fine _salon_, which at one time was placed by a
Chancellor d’Aligre at the service of the Grand Council, and so late as
the year of Curtius’s arrival in Paris we hear of it being used for an
exhibition of pictures displayed under the ægis of the Académie de Saint
Luc. Of this académie Curtius was soon elected a member, and it may be
presumed that some of his own works were shown in the exhibition.

During its latter days the hotel figured under a dual appellation,
the ancient name of d’Aligre being prefaced by that of the renowned
Schomberg. Finally it was known to the good citizens of Paris, shortly
before its total disappearance, as the Old Hôtel Schomberg d’Aligre.

This building occupied a position that could hardly have been better
chosen for Curtius’s purpose, for it stood in the very heart and throng
of the busy capital--that is to say, close to the Louvre and at no great
distance from the Tuileries--and was surrounded by the houses of the
wealthiest and most influential inhabitants of the city.

We should like to follow the footsteps of Curtius, and enter with him
into his new home in Paris; but with the meagre information we have
concerning these early days in his career we can only picture him as
settling down to his work and drawing around him many famous patrons, to
some of whom we shall have to refer as we make progress with our story.

Doubtless the ideals he had conceived of the French capital as a citizen
in far-off Berne would not have squared with the actual state in which he
found the city when he took up his domicile within it.

Report had carried the splendours of Versailles far beyond the frontiers
of France, and might well have enlivened the imagination of an artist
like Curtius, who, doubtless, would have hoped to enjoy the pleasure of
witnessing them for himself; but on his arrival in the capital he found
the glories of the palaces had set, and that the Court of Louis XV had
not only grown dull, but had even gone out of fashion.

The King himself had become weary of the great Court functions and
sumptuous entertainments, and now preferred to indulge in complete
seclusion the appetites that still remained to him. The military exploits
of his reign had not brought him any great renown, and in recent years he
had suffered reverses that had cast a gloom over these closing days of
his life.

He had also been reminded more than once that the levelling hand of
Death took no heed of rank and power. That dread visitor had already
unceremoniously claimed the King’s son (the Dauphin) and his wife, and
his own neglected Queen, Marie Leczinska, was fast failing in health.

The temper of the people towards the King had undergone a great change,
and the days of “Well-Beloved”-ness had long since departed. During the
reign of his predecessor, Louis XIV, the excessive taxation and the state
of semi-serfdom had been borne by the lower classes with something like
resignation, for they had received some compensation through the glory
of his military achievements and the extension of his power. But small
reason had they for so patiently bearing the ever-increasing burdens
that had signalised the reign of his successor, Louis XV, whose military
exploits had brought the country little by way of glory, and whose career
had naught to show but a long life of wanton extravagance, combined with
a painful disregard for the welfare of his people.

What Curtius did in the four years that succeeded his arrival in Paris
one cannot say for certain; but there is little doubt that he was busily
engaged in executing commissions for his numerous and ever-increasing
list of patrons, whose liberality and kindness not only equalled, but far
surpassed, the Prince de Conti’s promises.

It is quite evident that soon after his arrival Curtius tried his deft
hands upon a model of the Queen of Louis XV, and it is this comparatively
early work that constitutes one piece among a mere half-dozen examples
that have been handed down to us. Probably the influence of his friend,
the Prince de Conti, aided him in obtaining this commission.

It was after having practised his profession as artist for some years
that Curtius repaired to Berne for the purpose of fetching his sister and
her little daughter.

That was in the year 1766, and Madame Tussaud was then about six years
old. On the authority of her _Memoirs_, published in 1838, it would
appear that she was born at Berne in the year 1760; but documentary
evidence exists which appears to indicate that her birth actually took
place a year later. Be that as it may, we first hear of her when she
accompanied her mother to Paris as the guest of her uncle.

This brief review will not permit us to dwell long on the early days of
the young girl in Paris, nor on those events that prefaced the outbreak
of the Revolution. Truth to say, between 1766 and 1789--a matter of
twenty-three years--the details concerning the lives of Curtius and
his niece are neither very full nor very clearly defined. This seems
to be all of a piece with the nature of the work they produced, for it
is astonishing, having regard to the considerable output, how small a
quantity of it has been handed down to us.

One has, therefore, little material to assist him in gaining an insight
into the artists’ careers, or to guide in the forming of a just opinion
either as to the exact character of their work or the nature of their
subjects. Miniatures in coloured wax, modelled in fairly high relief
and framed and glazed in the ordinary way as pictures, seem to offer a
general idea and the best conception of the work that emanated from the
studio during these momentous years, so pregnant with meaning for the
near future.

[Illustration: LOUIS XVI AND THE DUKE OF ORLEANS

Specimens of the few existing examples of Curtius’s miniature work.
Modeled from life shortly before the outbreak of the French Revolution.]

The pity of the loss is that the work, taken direct from life, afforded
a faithful record of important personages. Of this there is ample proof,
and that the models should have been of so ephemeral a character is a
matter of great regret, extending far beyond the feelings of the artists’
descendants. Yet, when one remembers the hatred of the populace towards
the aristocrats and those holding authority under the Old Régime, it is
not to be wondered at that many portraits should have shared, with their
originals, the destructive effects of the antipathy that was shown both
to patrons of art and to the art itself. It goes without saying that
during the Reign of Terror people would be disposed to hide, or even to
destroy, any art subject in their possession indicating their attachment
to the Royalists.

    Life-size figures--Museum at the Palais Royal--Exhibition on
    the Boulevard du Temple--Benjamin Franklin--Voltaire.

A good deal of hearsay and some incontestable evidence helps to fill the
hiatus between the time Curtius came to Paris and the outbreak of the
Revolution.

Although the many years spent by Curtius in the production of miniatures
in coloured wax do not appear to have brought him a very great or a very
wide reputation, yet they were the means of leading him to the modelling
of life-size portraits in this same material, with the express intention
of forming them into a collection solely for the object of exhibiting
them to the public.

Now it is to this important departure in the treatment of his works that
we owe the present Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition, an establishment with
which his name must be for ever associated.

He seems to have set his mind upon this venture round about the year
1776, and some years later to have opened a Museum of life-size portrait
models at the Palais Royal, an enterprise that was soon to be followed
by the opening of a second Exhibition of a far more renowned and
interesting character on the Boulevard du Temple, to which we shall have
occasion to refer more than once.

The Museum at the Palais Royal seems to have proved a lucrative concern,
and to have been devoted to the portraits of men and women of position,
holding for the time being a prominent place in the public eye. Little is
known concerning it, except for a few meagre and commonplace references
in the literature of the period, and it may, to all intents and purposes,
be considered as relegated to the domain of the forgotten past.

We shall not, however, find ourselves able to dispose of the Exhibition
on the Boulevard du Temple without rendering an account of it, for in the
course of a few years it figured very largely in the Revolution, and had
associated with it several incidents of an important and far-reaching
character.

There is the record about this time of an acquaintance between the
sculptor and Benjamin Franklin, the American statesman and philosopher.

Franklin had come to Paris in December, 1776, “to transact the business
of his country at the Court of France,” his chief purpose being to obtain
political and financial assistance in consolidating the newly formed
United States of America.

Curtius and his niece--now a young woman of sixteen years--had the
pleasure of entertaining the Doctor, who took considerable interest in
their work. Not only did he commission them to execute several distinct
portraits of himself, but he also ordered models of many other notable
characters of the day. One of his own portraits is the identical figure
which has been shown at Madame Tussaud’s ever since.

[Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Modeled from life, in Paris, by Christopher Curtius for his Exhibition.]

This model was executed in 1783, in which year Franklin assumed great
prominence as one of the signatories to the Treaty of Peace between the
Mother Country and the United States, which recognised the latter as
an independent nation. The figure in question is a life-size one; but,
in addition to this, Curtius, aided by his capable niece, who was now
earnestly supporting her uncle in his work, produced several miniature
portraits of the statesman which went directly into his possession.
Indeed, it is well known that Franklin had in his rooms in Paris many
works that had emanated from Curtius’s studio.

In Franklin’s _Autobiography_ there is an account of his home in Market
Street, Philadelphia, in which he finally settled, and the following
extract under the date 13th July, 1787, from a journal kept by an old
friend of his, the Reverend Dr. Manasseh Cutler, a distinguished scholar
and botanist, of Hamilton, Massachusetts, who had recently paid him a
visit, shows that he took with him from Paris a number of miniatures,
many of which he had obtained from Curtius:

    Over his mantel he has a prodigious number of medals, busts and
    casts in wax or plaster of paris, which are the effigies of the
    most noted characters in Europe.

When Franklin returned to America in 1785 there sailed with him, on
board the same ship, Houdon, the eminent French sculptor, who had been in
his early student days a friend and companion of Curtius, who engaged his
services, and to whom he rendered considerable assistance in his work.

Houdon’s skill was highly appreciated by Franklin, and the object of
the journey to America was that the sculptor might execute a statue of
Washington for the State of Virginia, the instructions for the work
coming from both Franklin and Jefferson. The voyage was made in the
_London Packet_, and the date of the embarkation was the 27th of July,
1785.

Perhaps the most famous man of this period was the satirist, philosopher,
and dramatist, Voltaire, who, throughout the whole of his long life, had
championed the cause of the people against arbitrary and despotic power.

[Illustration: THREE VIEWS OF VOLTAIRE’S HEAD

Modeled from life by Christopher Curtius in Paris during the spring of
1778, a few weeks before Voltaire’s death.]

After an absence of twenty-eight years the aged Voltaire left his home on
the shores of Geneva and returned to Paris, arriving there on the 10th
of February, 1778. He was welcomed by an ovation that might well have
befitted the homecoming of a great conqueror.

Curtius’s reputation at that time stood at its highest, and Voltaire
gave him several sittings soon after his arrival. It is owing to this
circumstance that the artist was able to place among the models of
his recently opened Exhibition on the Boulevard du Temple a life-size
standing figure of this popular idol.

It is a matter of exceptional interest that the selfsame figure still
exists, and is shown to-day as one of the most attractive and notable
objects in Madame Tussaud’s, where it has stood for just upon a century
and a half.

Besides producing this figure, Curtius took the opportunity the sittings
afforded him of executing several miniature models, one of them
representing the philosopher during his last moments. To this he gave
the title of “The Dying Socrates.” Several copies of this are known to
exist, and we give an illustration of the one in the Tussaud collection.
These were the last portraits produced of him from life, and they were
completed none too soon.

[Illustration: “THE DYING SOCRATES”

Portrait of Voltaire at the time of his death. Wax miniature modeled by
Christopher Curtius.]

The stirring reception accorded Voltaire on his arrival in Paris, to
which he responded with great energy, coupled with the strenuous effort
and anxiety attending his personal superintendence of his new tragedy,
_Irene_, soon affected his health. The sittings were given during the
months of March and April, and on the following 30th of May his eventful
life terminated at the age of eighty-four.

CHAPTER IV

    Madame Elizabeth of France--Madame Tussaud goes to
    Versailles--Foulon--Three notable groups--“Caverne des Grands
    Voleurs.”

In the year 1780 the ill-fated Louis XVI had been six years on the
throne, and Curtius by this time had become well ingratiated with the
followers of the New Régime.

[Illustration: MADAME ELIZABETH OF FRANCE

The Sister of Louis XVI and Patroness of Madame Tussaud. A Portrait Study
by John T. Tussaud.]

Among the many distinguished visitors who honoured Curtius’s studio with
their presence in 1780 was one who was destined to exercise a great
influence on Madame Tussaud’s life. This was the King’s sister, Madame
Elizabeth of France, who, at the time we speak of, was sixteen years of
age. Her disposition was singularly sweet and charming, and the keen
interest she took in the models and mysteries of the studio caused her to
bestow upon the niece of Curtius very special attention.

Madame Elizabeth, according to her young protégée, was of medium
height and slight build, her forehead was high and intellectual, and
she had kind, soft, blue eyes. Her expression and demeanour were most
sympathetic, and on the slightest provocation her amiable countenance
became wreathed in smiles, the parting lips revealing a perfect set of
teeth.

So infatuated did Madame Elizabeth become with this pleasant work of
modelling in coloured wax, which was soon to become a veritable craze,
that she asked Madame Tussaud to instruct her in the art, and for that
purpose invited her to live with her in her apartments at the Palace of
Versailles, for the Princess seldom visited Paris.

Her overtures to his niece met with little opposition on the part of
Curtius, who, in spite of the fact that he had decided leanings towards
the cause of the people, yet, in order to further his relative’s
interests, readily gave his permission to her accompanying the Princess.
This concession Curtius must have made at some sacrifice, for it deprived
him of his niece’s society and of the help she was then rendering him in
his studio.

Madame Tussaud accordingly bade her uncle farewell, and left Paris for
Versailles.

[Illustration: MADAME TUSSAUD AT THE AGE OF 20

Madame Tussaud, as the young and beautiful Marie Grosholtz, at the time
she was compelled by the National Convention to take impressions of the
dead features of Louis XVI, his Queen Marie Antoinette and many leaders
of the French Revolution. A Portrait Study by John T. Tussaud.]

The quarters then occupied by Madame Elizabeth were situated at the end
of the façade of the south wing of the palace, and looked out upon the
Swiss Lake.

One wonders whether the fascinating work of modelling in wax was the
sole influence that prompted Madame Elizabeth’s friendly feeling towards
Madame Tussaud. The Princess had already shown a marked predilection
for the Swiss, for both at the palace and on her own private estate of
Montreuil hard by she had many Swiss people about her.

Unfortunately, little is known of the life of Madame Tussaud either
at Versailles or at Montreuil, which the King presented to his sister
with the understanding that she should continue to make Versailles her
official home until she attained the age of twenty-four.

[Illustration: MADAME ELIZABETH AT MONTREUIL

From a painting by Ricard in Versailles.]

We are told that the Princess was very fond of modelling sacred subjects,
and many of these works produced by her own hands she gave away to her
friends. She showed her attachment to Madame Tussaud in many ways, and
required her to sleep in an adjoining apartment.

Curtius’s niece often found herself engaged in many duties besides those
associated with modelling in wax, and it was no unusual thing for the
girl to be made the means of conveying alms to the Princess’s numerous
pensioners.

For nine years she enjoyed the confidence and almost daily company of
her patroness, and throughout the long life vouchsafed to her she deemed
them the happiest she had known. Seldom could she be brought to dwell
upon these days, or call to mind the fate of her illustrious pupil and
the other members of the Royal Family she then so often encountered,
without the tears, sooner or later, welling to her eyes. Indeed, not even
after the passage of some sixty years, when her own days were drawing
to a close, and when one might have expected her grief to have become
assuaged, could she restrain her emotion at the memory of their sad and
tragic end.

We have already referred to the second and larger Exhibition opened
by Curtius on the Boulevard du Temple. A collection of wax figures
representing famous personages, living and dead, attired in their
everyday costume, and exhibiting their usual pose and attitude, was known
as a “Cabinet de Cire.”

The house wherein Curtius opened this second Exhibition was formerly
occupied by Foulon, the Minister of Finance, who earned public execration
by his ill-timed suggestion that if the people could not get sufficient
bread they might eat hay. When the Revolution broke out Foulon was one
of the first victims for the mob to vent its rage upon. They hanged him,
decapitated the body, and then paraded the streets with his head stuck
on a pike, between his lips being placed a wisp of hay in memory of the
cruel sneer at the people’s want.

For his Exhibition Curtius modelled several notable groups. Three of
these call for some mention.

The first was a representation of the Royal Family dining in public, a
curious ceremonial of that period. There was, within the walls of the
Palace of Versailles, a chapel whither the family repaired to hear mass
every morning; and on Sundays, after returning from prayer, they held
a grand _couvert_ in the palace. The dining-table was in the form of a
horseshoe, the _Cent Suisse_ (or Swiss Bodyguard) formed a circle around
it, and, between them, the spectators were permitted to view the august
party at their dinner.

To this spectacle everyone had access, provided the gentlemen were
fully dressed--that is, had a bag-wig, sword, and silk stockings--and
the ladies were correspondingly attired. Even if their clothes were
threadbare the visitors were not turned back; nor were they admitted,
however well clad, unless they presented themselves as etiquette
prescribed.

The costume of the Swiss Bodyguard was magnificent, being similar to that
worn by Henry IV of France. It comprised a hat with three white feathers,
short robe, red pantaloons or long stockings (all in one, and slashed
at the top with white silk), black shoes with buckles, sash, sword, and
halbert.

The Royal Family generally remained three-quarters of an hour at table.
The spectacle was such an interesting one that Curtius, ever alive, as
his successors have been, to satisfy the popular imagination, modelled a
group for his Exhibition depicting the incident.

The second tableau represented an Indian group. In the grounds of the
Palace of Versailles are two residences, the Grand Trianon and the Petit
Trianon, the latter having been a favourite retreat of Marie Antoinette
because of its secluded position and charming attractions.

Curtius--assisted by his niece, who was now a full-grown woman, sensible
of her responsibilities, and able to execute commissions of her
own--modelled a group of figures, consisting of the envoys of Tippoo
Sahib and several sepoys in their picturesque Eastern costumes, which was
arranged under a tent placed in the Grand Trianon.

Tippoo Sahib was the Sultan of Mysore, and he had sent to Louis XVI to
invoke his assistance in expelling the British from his dominions.

On the 10th of August, 1788, after spending the night at the Grand
Trianon, the envoys were escorted to the Palace of Versailles, and
received with great pomp.

This was one of the last occasions on which Madame Elizabeth appeared in
public at the palace and on which the King was able to receive freely the
representatives of a foreign Power. The winter that followed was long and
severe, and had much to do with hastening the outbreak of the Revolution
and the downfall of the monarchy.

We do not know for certain whether the commission for the third group
was prompted by Madame Elizabeth or by Marie Antoinette herself, but we
know for certain that it was one of the groups shown in the Petit Trianon
before those disturbing elements manifested themselves that heralded the
terrible upheaval which was to come. The tableau comprised the seated
figures of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette with their young children, the
Dauphin and the Duchesse d’Angoulême, all attired in full Court costume.

[Illustration: MARIE ANTOINETTE, THE DAUPHIN, AND THE DUCHESSE D’ANGOULÊME

Models taken from life and exhibited for some time in Le Petit Trianon at
Versailles.]

A very special interest attaches to this group, inasmuch that, except for
the renovation necessitated by the long passage of time, it is now shown
within the walls of the present Exhibition exactly as it was when first
modelled.

While Madame Tussaud was fully occupied at Versailles her uncle was busy
with his Museum in Paris.

In 1783 Curtius added to his collection on the Boulevard du Temple
the “Caverne des Grands Voleurs,” which we may fairly regard as the
forerunner of the present Chamber of Horrors.

There seems to be some doubt as to the distinctive character of Curtius’s
two Exhibitions. One authority informs us that his rooms at the Palais
Royal contained the effigies of famous and celebrated men, and that the
venture on the Boulevard du Temple was devoted to those of notorious
and infamous scoundrels. One cannot say for certain what were the
characteristics of the two collections at this time, but there can be no
doubt that both attracted great numbers of people for a very long period.

The descriptive accounts of Parisian amusements of the time make mention
of Curtius’s “Cabinet de Cire”--or, to make use of the titles given to it
on a copperplate etching of that period by Martial, “Théatre des Figures
de Cire, ou Théatre Curtius”--as a sight well worthy of inviting the
attention of persons of rank and condition. “One may see,” said Dulaure
in 1791, “waxen coloured figures of celebrated characters in all stations
of life.”

Upon closing the Exhibition at the Palais Royal, Curtius conveyed its
figures to the Boulevard du Temple, wherein merged all the models that
had been previously on view, thus combining the peculiar characteristics
of the two establishments and constituting the Madame Tussaud’s
Exhibition as we know it to-day.

CHAPTER V

    Eve of the French Revolution--Necker and the Duke of
    Orléans--Louis XVI’s fatal mistakes--His dismissal of the
    people’s favourites.

We are now approaching the day when the long-pent-up storm, threatening
for so great a while, was about to burst, and we must contemplate King
Louis XVI and his advisers seeking for a means to placate a people at
last stirred to resentment through the cruel and unjust burdens it had
for generations been made to bear.

The murmurings which had long been general and indefinite were now
resolving themselves into a hatred fast becoming focused upon the rich
and the powerful, many of whom, it must be added, were also arrogant and
dissolute.

A rude awakening among some of these, who had at last been brought
to realise the imminence of the convulsion, induced them to advocate
with much haste and little discretion certain concessions. These were
obviously granted as acts of expediency, and with as little derogation as
possible from their own interest, rather than out of any sympathy for a
distressed and desperate people clamouring for relief.

So, early in 1789, the King was prompted to resort to an expedient which
had not been adopted since the year 1614. He summoned the States-General
to meet together at Versailles on the 5th of May, 1789.

In the deliberations of this National Council the King and his Ministers
looked for support and guidance to meet the difficulties that beset them.
But matters took an unexpected course. The Deputies of the Third Estate,
which out-numbered the First and Second put together, demanded that
all three Estates should sit and vote as one whole indissoluble body.
In spite of opposition they pushed their demand to a successful issue,
and, grasping control of both legislative and executive power, forthwith
resolved themselves into a permanent constitutional assembly.

The King soon found himself confronted by an irresistible authority,
including a majority of men who betrayed little concern for his
prerogative, and manifested a strong sympathy with the cause of the
people.

In such stirring times as those which were now being experienced in
France, Curtius turned to the advocates of the people’s cause for many of
his subjects for his new Exhibition. Among these were many who were to
figure largely in the Revolution.

Special mention must be made of two figures, added about this date,
namely, Necker and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, for their models had an
important bearing upon the events that followed.

Necker, at the time his model was made by Curtius and Madame Tussaud, was
the French Minister of Finance. In 1775 he had claimed for the State the
right of fixing the price of grain and, if necessary, of prohibiting
exportation; a year later he was made Director of the Treasury, and in
1777 he became Director-General of Finance.

His retrenchments were bitterly opposed by Queen Marie Antoinette; and
his famous _Compte Rendu_, in 1781, occasioned his dismissal at that
time. Some of his measures, such as his adjustment of taxes and his
establishment of State-guaranteed annuities and State pawnshops, were
a boon to suffering France. He retired to Geneva, but in 1787 returned
to Paris, and, when M. de Calonne cast doubt on the _Compte Rendu_, he
published a justification which drew upon him his banishment from Paris.

Recalled to office in September, 1788, he quickly made himself a popular
hero by recommending the summoning of the States-General, to which
reference has already been made.

On the 11th of July, 1789, he received the royal command to leave France
at once; but the fall of the Bastille, three days later, frightened the
King into recalling him, amid the wildest popular enthusiasm.

[Illustration: MODEL OF THE BASTILLE]

The Duke of Orléans, the famous Égalité, was another hero of the people
at this time. He was looked upon coldly at Court owing to his dissolute
habits.

London was frequently visited by him, and he became an intimate friend
of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV. He infected young France
with Anglomania in the form of horse-racing and hard drinking, and made
himself popular among the lower classes by profuse charity.

In 1787 he showed his liberalism boldly against the King, and as the
States-General drew near he lavished his wealth in flooding France with
seditious books and papers. In the following year he promulgated his
_Délibérations_, written by Laclos, to the effect that the Third Estate
was the nation; and in June, 1789--the month that preceded the fall of
the Bastille--he led the forty-seven nobles who seceded from their own
order to join that Estate.

The Duke presumed to become constitutional King of France, or at least
Regent; but he was only a comparatively small fragment that drifted into
the vortex of the Revolution itself. In 1792, when all hereditary titles
were swept away, this “citizen” adopted the name of Philippe Égalité.

He was the twentieth Deputy for Paris in the National Convention, and
voted for the death of the King; but in the following year retribution
overtook him, for he himself was found guilty of conspiracy and
guillotined.

The public distrust of the King’s party, the fatal error in bringing the
foreign troops to Paris and its environs, and, finally, the banishment of
Necker and the Duke of Orléans, the great champions of the people, must
be regarded as the immediate cause of the catastrophe that followed.

CHAPTER VI

    Madame Tussaud recalled from Versailles--The 12th of July,
    1789--Busts taken from Curtius’s Exhibition--A Garde Française
    slain in the mêlée.

It must be remembered that the “romance” of Madame Tussaud’s began in the
French capital one hundred and fifty years ago.

As we view to-day the quaint little figure of Madame which stands in the
Exhibition she helped to found in France and established in this country,
we must imagine her in the full vigour of her young womanhood, sensible
to the dangers and terrors of the Revolution in which she was about to be
involved. The Exhibition was as yet in its infancy; but stirring times
were approaching, and the days were pregnant with meaning for the France
that was to be--a time of bloodshed and grim ruthlessness born of a
people’s desire for freedom, and attended by ghastly scenes in Paris that
revealed the extremities to which unbridled human passions could go.

We must see through her eyes the sights that marked the red dawn of the
French Revolution; and hear the first low rumble that gave warning of the
approach of the Reign of Terror. Her uncle recalled her from the Court of
Versailles, an order that he might afford her his protection, and she
did not leave a whit too soon.

Now we come to the fateful days of July.

The Three Estates had been fused into one on the 27th of June with the
assent of the King, who thus virtually signed his own death-warrant.
Another step soon followed in the same disastrous course. The Queen and
her intimate advisers caused Louis to make an attempt to maintain his
authority by force, and for this purpose an army of 40,000 men, drawn
from various quarters, was concentrated upon Paris and its vicinity, and
placed under the orders of Marshal Broglie.

Among these troops were several regiments of Swiss and Germans. At that
moment Necker, whom the Court party distrusted and feared, was forced to
relinquish his office, and commanded to leave France forthwith.

The 12th of July was a Sunday, and on the morning of that day an
extraordinary degree of activity was observed among the troops in Paris.
The nerves of the people became overwrought; they were apprehensive of
imminent danger--some hidden design, some sinister motive, on the part
of the newly appointed Ministers (including the hated Foulon, who had
succeeded the beloved Necker) whose policy they could not fathom.

Before midday the Palais Royal was crowded with people, wondering what
all this military movement could mean, and gazing at the strange placards
which bade them stay at home and avoid all meetings.

The half-discredited rumour of the dismissal of Necker spread like
wild-fire through the capital, and the first person who made the
announcement was about to be ducked in one of the water basins in the
gardens of the Palais Royal, when a Deputy of the Third Estate, who
happened to be standing by, confirmed the news.

[Illustration: CAMILLE DESMOULINS

Young enthusiast who stirred the populace of Paris to riotous
demonstration on hearing of the dismissal of Necker.]

Everyone in the gardens was at once made acquainted with the fall of the
people’s favourite; and as the cannon of the Palais made known, as usual,
the fact that the hour of noon had arrived, a young man named Camille
Desmoulins sprang upon a table outside the Café Foy, and, brandishing a
drawn sword and pistol, called “To arms!” He then harangued with burning
eloquence the people who crowded around him, and fired their imagination
at the close of his oration by plucking a leaf from a tree (green being
the colour of Necker’s livery) and placing it in his hat as a cockade, an
example that was followed by thousands.

The theatres and other places of amusement were closed as a sign of
mourning for Necker, who was loudly acclaimed on every side.

Then it was suggested that the models of Necker and the Duke of Orléans
should be obtained from Curtius’s Museum. The idea was quickly seized
upon, and the crowd rushed _en masse_ to the Exhibition rooms on the
Boulevard du Temple, where they demanded the busts of the “friends of
the people.” They also asked for the model of the King, a request that
was refused by Curtius, who observed that as the full-length figure was
extremely heavy it would be “broken” if carried. This reply pleased the
people, who clapped their hands and shouted “Bravo, Curtius, bravo!”

[Illustration: M. NECKER

Director-General of Finance under Louis XVI, whose bust, taken from
Curtius’s exhibit by the mob, was carried through the streets of Paris to
fan the flame of revolution.]

Deeming it imprudent not to respond to the public clamour, Curtius
relinquished the busts of the two public idols; and as soon as they had
gained possession of them the mob shouted “Long live Necker!” “Long live
the Duke of Orléans!” and “Down with the foreign troops!”

As an expression of grief at the loss of their favourites they covered
the busts with crape. Then, elevating them upon pedestals, they carried
them through the streets of Paris in triumph.

On rolled the procession through the Rue de Richelieu, the Boulevard, the
streets of St. Martin, St. Denis, and St. Honoré, increasing in numbers
at every step, among them men of the Garde Française, till it came to the
Place Vendôme, where the busts were carried twice round the statue of
Louis XIV. _En route_ the crowd obliged all they met to take off their
hats in honour of the men the busts represented. By the time the great
throng reached the Place Vendôme it had become 5,000 or 6,000 strong.

Here a detachment of royal troops came up, and vainly attempted to
disperse the mob. The crowd pelted the soldiers with stones, and, having
put them to flight, proceeded to the Place Louis XV, where they were
assailed by the German troops of the Prince de Lambesc. The cavalry
charged the mob with drawn sabres, and the bearers of the busts were
thrown down beneath their burdens.

Again and again they were raised, only to fall once more. The figure of
Necker was cleft asunder by a soldier of the Royal German Regiment. A man
named Pepin, a hawker of articles of drapery, was wounded by a bullet in
the leg, and fell by the side of the broken figure. That representing the
Duke of Orléans escaped destruction; but a member of the Civic Guard,
while endeavouring to protect it, lost his life, and several other
persons were wounded in attempting to assist him. It was the first blood
shed in the Revolution, which may thus be regarded as having broken out
at the very doors of the Exhibition in Paris.

Thomas Carlyle gives, in his _French Revolution_, the following
characteristic account of the incident:

                                TO ARMS!

                                             Sunday, 12th July, 1789.

    France, so long shaken and wind-parched, is probably at the
    right inflammable point. As for poor Curtius who, one grieves
    to think, might be but imperfectly paid, he cannot make two
    words about his Images. The Wax-bust of Necker, the Wax-bust of
    D’Orléans, helpers of France: these, covered with crape, as in
    funeral procession, or after the manner of suppliants appealing
    to Heaven, to Earth, and Tartarus itself, a mixed multitude
    bears off. For a sign! As indeed man, with his singular
    imaginative faculties, can do little or nothing without
    signs: Thus Turks look to their Prophet’s Banner; also Osier
    _Mannikins_ have been burnt, and Necker’s Portrait has erewhile
    figured, aloft on its perch.

    In this manner march they, a mixed, continually increasing
    multitude; armed with axes, staves, and miscellanea; grim,
    many-sounding through the streets. Be all Theatres shut; let
    all dancing on planked floor, or on the natural greensward,
    cease! Instead of a Christian Sabbath, and feast of
    _guinguitte_ tabernacles, it shall be a Sorcerer’s Sabbath;
    and Paris, gone rabid, dance--with the Fiend for piper!

    However, Besenval, with horse and foot, is in the Place Louis
    Quinze. Mortals promenading homewards, in the fall of the
    day, saunter by, from Chaillot or Passy, from flirtation and
    a little thin wine; with sadder step than usual. Will the
    Bust-Procession pass that way? Behold it; behold also Prince
    Lambesc dash forth on it, with his Royal-Allemands! Shots fall,
    and sabre-strokes; Busts are hewed asunder; and, alas, also
    heads of men. A sabred Procession has nothing for it but to
    _explode_, along what streets, alleys, Tuileries Avenues it
    finds; and disappear. One unarmed man lies hewed down; a Garde
    Française by his uniform; bear him (or bear even the report
    of him) dead and gory to his Barracks;--where he has comrades
    still alive!--_French Revolution_, Chapter IV.

[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE]

It was on this very day, the 12th of July, after the incidents just
described, that the famous reply was made to the King by Liancourt.
Upon his apprising His Majesty of the ferment in Paris, Louis remarked,
“Why, it is a revolt, then?” “No, sire,” rejoined the Minister, “it is a
_revolution_!”[1]

[1] This reply has been erroneously asserted to have been made by
Liancourt on the evening of the 14th of July, the day of the capture of
the Bastille; it was really given as stated above.

CHAPTER VII

    Heads of the Revolution--Madame’s terrible experiences--The
    guillotine in pawn--Madame acquires the knife, lunette, and
    chopper.

It is no part of our concern to trace the course of the Revolution
throughout, or to dwell too long upon its horrors. Nevertheless before
Madame Tussaud passed into tranquil days she had to suffer the severest
ordeal of her life, the memory of which she could never wholly efface.

We can hardly imagine her bitter experience when compelled to employ
her young hands in taking impressions of heads immediately after
decapitation, and this, strange to say, by the very same knife which may
be seen at this day among the relics of the Revolution at Tussaud’s.

[Illustration: GEORGES-JACQUES DANTON]

[Illustration: JEAN BAPTISTE CARRIER

Responsible for the butchery of the Vendean prisoners at Nantes during
the French Revolution. Impression of his head taken immediately after he
had been guillotined, 16th December, 1794.]

Thus she was compelled to reproduce the lineaments of Louis XVI, Marie
Antoinette, Hébert, Danton, Robespierre, Carrier, Fouquier-Tinville--the
best and fairest, and also the worst and vilest--who met their death on
the scaffold. Unthinkable were the gruesome tasks of faithfully recording
their features imposed upon the young woman who was destined to bring to
England that Exhibition the annals of which we now relate.

No wonder many a heated controversy has waged around these works, for it
is hard to realise that they are the actual impressions of those heads
that fell under the knife of the guillotine. Yet they are the selfsame
impressions that were shown at Christopher Curtius’s Museum in Paris.

That Madame Tussaud’s uncle would have had the temerity to exhibit
spurious heads to a crowd by no means in a humour to be trifled with, and
far too familiar with the features the casts portrayed to be deceived,
is more than unlikely; and we know such an imposition in his case would
have been quite unnecessary. The casts were undoubtedly taken under
compulsion, either with the object of pandering to the temper of the
people, or of serving as confirmatory evidence of execution having taken
place--perhaps both.

The idea of exhibiting the heads of those who had been done to death as
enemies of the people had asserted itself during the very earliest days
of the Revolution. Within a fortnight of the taking of the Bastille,
Foulon’s head had been severed from its body and paraded through the
streets of Paris at the end of a pike.

[Illustration: THE PRINCESS DE LAMBALLE

A friend and companion to Marie Antoinette.]

Later the noble features of the Princess de Lamballe had suffered the
same brutal degradation, with the added inhumanity of having been thrust
between the window-bars of the Temple Prison, wherein the unfortunate
Louis XVI and his wife were incarcerated.

[Illustration: THE GUILLOTINE

Showing the mode of execution in France. A facsimile with wax models now
in the Tussaud collection.]

On that terrible day, the 10th of August, 1792, when the Swiss Guard was
cut to pieces in defending the Tuileries, several of these brave soldiers
had their heads stuck upon pikes and exhibited to the mob. The Royalist
writer, Suleau, suffered the same fate.

How far had Madame Tussaud been implicated in the accomplishment of the
dreadful work of taking casts from decapitated heads?

It was during the autumn of 1789 that Christopher Curtius (who had by
this time adopted Marie as his daughter) insisted upon her withdrawing
from the service of Madame Elizabeth, to whom she had, with every
reason, become devotedly attached. For Curtius had, at the outset of
the disturbances in Paris, espoused the cause of the people, and, as an
adroit and far-seeing man, had become anxious for his adopted daughter’s
safety.

He, without doubt, desired she should return under his own roof to derive
the benefit of his protection. So it is that we find Marie in her uncle’s
studio adjoining his Exhibition, and where that gruesome work was so soon
to be undertaken.

Now during the year 1793 Curtius had been drawn into the service of the
National Convention, and on several occasions had to quit Paris for
many days at a time, leaving Marie and her mother to do the best they
could with the Exhibition during his absence. He was at this time “Envoy
Extraordinary of the Republic and War Commissary at Mayence.” On the last
occasion of his quitting the capital his absence extended over a period
of fully eighteen months.

Meanwhile heads were falling fast, and no one knew how long his own would
repose upon his shoulders. Then it was that Marie suffered the terrible
experience of having to take the impressions of so many heads that were
brought to her from the guillotine. We have it from her own mouth that it
was a task with which she dared not hesitate to comply.

It must have been known to many that only a few years back she had been
a member of the household of the King’s sister, Madame Elizabeth, at
Versailles, and not a few of those who were near and dear to her had
suffered death for a far less offence than that. But at last, as the
days wore on, the Jacobins themselves fell, and the Reign of Terror
gave way to the Directorate. Then easier times came, though still far
from tranquil. Nevertheless heads had ceased to fall, and Sanson, the
executioner, finding his occupation gone, pawned his guillotine, and got
into woful trouble for alleged trafficking in municipal property.

Years after Madame came to this country she sent her son to Paris to
search out this terrible instrument of death, and, with the help of the
executioner, who was still living, and who solemnly vouched for its
authenticity, she secured the knife, the lunette, and also the chopper
that was used as a standby, lest the great knife should fail.

[Illustration: KNIFE, LUNETTE AND CHOPPER OF THE ORIGINAL GUILLOTINE USED
IN PARIS DURING THE REIGN OF TERROR

Years after, Madame Tussaud, with the aid of the executioner, procured
these for her collection.]

It was only after much negotiation and the payment of a very considerable
sum of money that her object was attained. And now the dread knife
harmlessly reposes by the side of the impressions of those heads it so
ruthlessly struck off a century and a quarter ago--that of Louis XVI and
his Queen, Marie Antoinette, as well as those of Robespierre, Danton,
Fouquier-Tinville, Hébert, and the miscreant of Nantes, Carrier. From
the time they were first shown in Paris until the present day they have
been viewed by an ever-increasing throng, though the sight of them can
never have been pleasing, and those who gaze upon them shudder and pass
on.

Though Madame Tussaud did not witness the execution of Marie Antoinette,
yet she remembered seeing the Queen pass on a tumbril through the jeering
crowds to the scaffold. The once gay and light-hearted Queen was dressed
in white for her last pageant on earth, her hands tied behind her. The
spectacle brought back to Madame memories of the royal palace where
she had frequently attended to give lessons in modelling, and she was
so overcome that she fainted. Perhaps the most horrifying experience
undergone by Madame Tussaud during this terrible period was when the
mangled head of the greatly beloved Princess de Lamballe was brought to
her that a cast might be made. In vain did she protest that she could not
endure the ordeal. The brutal murderers compelled her to comply.

[Illustration: MARIE ANTOINETTE

Impression of her head taken immediately after she had been guillotined,
16th October, 1793.]

CHAPTER VIII

    Madame dines with the Terrorists Marat and Robespierre, models
    their figures, and subsequently takes casts of their heads--She
    visits Charlotte Corday in prison--Death of Curtius--Madame
    marries--Napoleon sits for his model.

One of the most bloodthirsty of all the red Terrorists was Jean Paul
Marat, who was slain in his bath by Charlotte Corday on the 13th of July,
1793.

[Illustration: CHARLOTTE CORDAY]

Marat, as a young man, had lived in this country for some time, and was
well known to Madame Tussaud through visits he paid to the house of her
uncle, Curtius, at 20 Boulevard du Temple.

Immediately after his assassination she was called upon to take a cast
of Marat’s head. “They came for me,” she relates, “to go to Marat’s
house at once, and to take with me what appliances I needed to make an
impression of his features. The cadaverous aspect of the fiend made me
feel desperately ill, but they stood over me and forced me to perform the
task.” Marat’s model is still to be seen in the Exhibition lying in the
bath in which he was stabbed by the heroic young Norman girl.

Charlotte Corday had addressed a letter to Marat stating that she had
news of importance to communicate, and when she called he readily
admitted her. She amused him with an account of the Deputies at Caen,
when he said. “They shall all go to the guillotine.” “To the guillotine!”
exclaimed she, and as he took up a pencil to write the names of his
intended victims Charlotte plunged a knife into his heart.

Madame Tussaud afterwards visited Charlotte Corday in the Conciergerie
Prison, and described her as tall, well-mannered, and possessed of many
graces of character and appearance. The brave young woman, who paid for
her avenging act with her life, wrote in a letter to her father that
she had done what was right. After the heroine’s death Madame Tussaud
obtained a record of Charlotte Corday’s beautiful face.

[Illustration: JEAN PAUL MARAT

One of the most bloodthirsty of the terrorists, stabbed in his bath by
Charlotte Corday, 13th July, 1793. A wax model made immediately after his
death.]

The actual model, now in our Exhibition, of Marat dying in his bath, was
exhibited during the Revolution at the Museum of Curtius in Paris, and
attracted crowds, who were loud in their lamentations, for at that time
Marat was a national idol.

Robespierre visited the Museum, and took the opportunity of haranguing
the people at the door. In flamboyant language he said, “Enter, citizens,
and see the image of our departed friend, snatched from us by the
assassin’s hand, guided by the demon of aristocracy. Marat was the
father of the poor, the defender of the weak, and the consoler of the
wretched. As his heart poured forth the sweet emotions of sympathy for
the oppressed, so did the vigour of his mind emit its thunder against the
oppressor.” Then, descending to bathos, the cunning demagogue exclaimed,
“What did he get for it all? Five francs were found in his house!”

Surprise has sometimes been expressed by visitors that the bath in which
Marat was stabbed to death should be so small and of such a curious shape.

Marat was murdered in a “slipper” bath, which was more like a “halt boot”
than a slipper, so that the water would come up to the shoulders of the
bather without flowing over. This kind of bath was greatly in vogue at
the time of the French Revolution. Its object was to save water, which
in those days was not freely supplied. When the bather was in the bath a
small quantity of water would fill it.

Maximilien Robespierre had sent numerous people to their death during the
Reign of Terror. His own turn came at last, when he too met his death
from the sharp tongue of La Guillotine. The revulsion of feeling that had
set in against Robespierre was very bitter. He was shot at point-blank
range by a man named Meda in the Salle d’Égalité, a room in the Hôtel de
Ville, but was only wounded, and he went to the guillotine on the 28th of
July, 1794, with his broken jaw swathed in a white linen cloth.

[Illustration: MAXIMILIEN MARIE ISIDORE ROBESPIERRE

Impression of his head taken immediately after he had been guillotined,
28th July, 1794. One of the impressions done by Madame Tussaud, then a
young girl, by order of the authorities.]

An hour after the head of Robespierre rolled from the lunette Madame
Tussaud, reluctantly obeying a demand that an impression should be taken
of the severed head, set about the shuddering task. The cast therefrom
is now shown in one of our Exhibition rooms containing relics of the
Revolution. Her feelings may be imagined as she sat with the head of the
callous Terrorist confronting her.

Although Madame Tussaud took an impression of the features of Robespierre
directly after his execution, she had taken a portrait of him long before
his fall. He expressed a wish that his figure should be introduced
standing near that of Marat, as also those of Collot d’Herbois and
Rosignol. He proposed that they should send their own clothes in which
the figures might be dressed, to afford additional accuracy. The
likenesses were taken and apparelled as desired.

In those days Madame Tussaud often sat next Robespierre at dinner. She
describes him as always extremely polite and attentive, never omitting
those little acts of courtesy which are expected from a gentleman when
sitting at table with a lady, anticipating her wishes, and taking care
that she should never have to ask for anything. In this particular, says
Madame Tussaud, he differed from Marat, who was so selfishly eager to
supply his own wants that he never troubled himself with the needs of
others.

Robespierre’s conversation was generally animated, sensible, and
agreeable, but his enunciation was not good. There was nothing
particularly remarkable in his conduct, manners, or appearance when in
society. If noticed at all, it could only be as a pleasant, gentlemanly
man of moderate abilities. This was a strong admission for a lady who was
always a Royalist at heart and had been long detained in Paris against
her will.

Her association with the Court of Louis inevitably brought Madame Tussaud
under suspicion of the so-called Committee of Public Safety, and for
a time she was imprisoned with Madame de Beauharnais, who was later
to become the Empress Josephine, whom Napoleon divorced to marry Marie
Louise. The scene is changed, and we see Marie Grosholtz--Curtius having
died about that time--wedded in 1795 to François Tussaud, by whose name
she was henceforth to be known to posterity.

Madame Tussaud, it would appear, made the acquaintance and gained the
favour of Napoleon himself.

A Parisian publication, _La Belle Assemblée_, gives a circumstantial
account of Madame Tussaud being sent for to take the likeness of
Napoleon--when he was First Consul--at the Tuileries as early as
six o’clock in the morning. It would appear that Madame went at the
invitation of Napoleon’s first wife, Josephine, who was desirous of
having a permanent record of her husband’s features. The young modeller
was ushered into a room at the palace where the great soldier waited for
her. _La Belle Assemblée_ states that Josephine greeted Madame Tussaud
with kindness, and conversed much and most affably. Napoleon said little,
spoke in sharp sentences, and rather abruptly.

He would have shown her special consideration had she chosen to remain
in France; but it is not to be wondered at that Madame Tussaud cared no
longer to remain amid the sorrowful recollections of the Revolution, and
that she seized the opportunity, on the signing of the Peace of Amiens,
to leave France for ever. It was to England she turned for refuge and
the prosecution of her life’s work. Madame boldly transported across the
Channel to England her uncle’s two Paris Exhibitions, which, as already
related, had been made into one. Here she decided to settle, and here her
descendants have lived ever since.

[Illustration: MADAME TUSSAUD AT THE AGE OF 42

When she left France for England, never to return.

A Portrait Study by John T. Tussaud.]

CHAPTER IX

    Madame Tussaud leaves France for England, never to
    return--Early days in London--On tour--Some notable
    figures--Shipwreck in the Irish Channel.