WOMAN BEHIND THE WAXWORKS
OWEVER, at the last minute Marie was spared, supposedly after the intervention of an influential friend. But there was a terrible cost. In return for her life Marie later told how she was forced to visit the sites of executions and capture the likenesses of the victims so that they could be commemorated in wax.
On other occasions heads were sent to her workshop so that Marie could take a cast. Describing her grisly duty later, Marie told how she would sit on the steps with a bloody head in her lap.
“This was the way people knew what was happening in the revolution,” says Pamela Pilbeam, professor of French history at the University of London. “It was a bit like the TV news today. You would go to a waxworks exhibition and keep up to date with who had been executed. It seems amazing she could do this but who was going to make waxworks of these decapitated people if Marie didn’t?”
In 1793 the king himself was guillotined and it fell to Marie to make his death mask along with his queen Marie Antoinette. The images were held up like flags and paraded through Paris.
Two years later Marie married engineer François Tussaud but despite the arrival of two sons it was not a happy union. “As a husband he was frankly a liability,” says Professor Pilbeam. “He liked to invest in theatres and married Marie for her money. He wasn’t interested in the waxworks.”
THE French economy was also in turmoil after the revolution so in 1802 she jumped at the opportunity to cross the Channel and bring her exhibition of waxworks to Britain. By then Curtius was dead and Marie was in sole charge, also inheriting his vast collection of waxworks. The opportunity changed the course of her life.
Although an exhibition at the Lyceum theatre in London was not a great success the outbreak of the Napoleonic War, which lasted from 1803-15, left Marie stranded.
She decided to take her waxworks on tour and for the next 33 years she travelled the length and breadth of the nation, adding Napoleon Bonaparte and British celebrities to her growing collection of figures. Initially she called her attraction Curtius’s Grand Cabinet Of Curiosities in memory of her “uncle” and targeted the wealthy middle classes.
She never returned to France and after officially separating from her hapless husband became a single mother. Both sons helped make the wax models but Marie always remained in firm control of the business.
Her unique talent, good business sense and sheer determination finally brought success and in 1835 she was able to establish a permanent home for her figures on London’s Baker Street. The attraction moved to its current site on Marylebone Road in 1884.
One of the main draws at Madame Tussaud and Sons, as it became known, was the gruesome Chamber Of Horrors for which enterprising Marie charged an additional sixpence entry fee. It contained waxworks of murderers, instruments of torture and relics from the French Revolution.
“People loved going to the waxworks to be shocked and frightened,” says Professor Pilbeam.
Soon after her coronation in 1838 Queen Victoria agreed to sit for Marie, giving her the recognition she craved. Victoria was thrilled with the results and later took her children to see the show. It sealed the success of Tussauds and ever since waxworks of the royals have been a mainstay.
At the age of 80, nine years before her death in 1850, Marie sat down and dictated her memoirs. They provide a fascinating insight into her life and the horrors she suffered during the French Revolution but it is her wax figures that will be Madame Marie Tussaud’s enduring legacy. Madame Tussaud: A Legend In Wax, BBC Four, tomorrow, 9pm.