![]() ![]() And she related her own role in it to fascinated audiences: she had lived at Versailles, been art tutor to Louis XVI’s sister and cast the king from life and later, during the Revolution, been ordered by the National Convention to duplicate his severed head. Imagine how extraordinary it was for a Londoner in the early 1800s to be shown exact replicas of famous faces of the time. She may have embellished her life, perhaps exaggerated here and there, but who can blame her for that? As France became fixated on a single man – Napoleon – Tussaud left Paris and her husband to bring some history to England so we could see it. Hoping to strengthen her position, she married a hapless engineer called Tussaud, who nearly sank her whole business. When Curtius died a few years later in 1794, he left her everything, but now she was on her own. When she was released, to cast the guillotined head of Robespierre, the Revolution was over. Towards the height of the Terror, Tussaud was arrested and imprisoned. The waxworks became a very dangerous place, as it was illegal to have busts and figures of people no longer deemed acceptable. In her version of Marat, the sick and ugly visage is very different to the terrifying propaganda painting by Jacques-Louis David. ![]() She was called to take a cast of the rapidly decomposing body of Jean-Paul Marat, just after he was stabbed in the bath by Charlotte Corday. Soon Tussaud was casting guillotined heads even without their bodies, they were still the personalities of the time. (The real men had been banished, so the protesters felt their waxy simulacra had to bear punishment.) The mob was shot at, marking the first real bloodletting of the Revolution, an event that stoked the storming of the Bastille two days later. She was in Paris during the Revolution and, on 12 July 1789, a mob stole the wax busts of the Duc d’Orleans and finance minister Necker from their exhibition, and paraded them about the streets in a mock funeral. Curtius and his young pupil moved to Paris where, in time, she would model not internal body parts but instead the likenesses of Voltaire, Louis XVI, Benjamin Franklin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Tussaud was trained by a Swiss master of wax anatomy, Philippe Curtius. Stanfield/National Geographic/Getty Images ![]() The death mask of Jean-Paul Marat cast by Tussaud. She feels made up, she seems like a story. There’s something a little cockroachy about her, too. There’s something mythical about her, as if she were a character from folklore or fairytale. A very small old woman, with a large nose and chin, dressed in suitably chilling Victorian bombazine, stands guard over the rest of the wax populace. This had noise and lights and you felt you were standing on the gun deck of HMS Victory and there - you could almost see him breathing his last - was the bloody, pale body of Horatio Nelson.īut the greatest waxwork in Madame Tussauds is of Tussaud herself. The Chamber of Horrors was certainly upsetting, but not as much as the tableau of the Battle of Trafalgar. Guy Fawkes crouching by a barrel of gunpowder had terrified me, as had a peculiarly pockmarked waxwork of Hans Christian Andersen. Like countless others, I had been taken to the wax museum as a child and blessed with nightmares from the experience. S ome 20 years ago, in a freefall from university and picking up odd jobs in London, I spent a few months working at Madame Tussauds. ![]()
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