By Ian Shank
John T. Tussaud, Portrait
of Madame Tussaud, via John Theodore Tussaud, "The Romance of Madame
Tussaud", 1921. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
For most Parisians, a
stroll through the ruins of the Bastille in the summer of 1789 was the ultimate
exercise in free will: the chance to personally trample over the regime’s most
notorious symbol of oppression. Yet for Madame Tussaud—then the 27-year-old
protégée of famed waxmaker Philippe Curtius—the experience was drenched in
destiny.
“Whilst descending the
narrow stairs, her foot slipped,” recounts her earliest and most breathless
biographer, “when she was saved by [Maximilien] Robespierre.” As it turned out,
this would rank among her more pleasant encounters with the firebrand. “How
little did Madame Tussaud then think,” the passage continues, “that she should,
in a few years after, have his severed head in her lap in order to take a cast
from it after his execution.”
Madame Tussaud at the age
of 85, via John Theodore Tussaud, "The Romance of Madame Tussaud",
1921. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Like Tussaud’s apocryphal
tour of the Bastille, it is nearly impossible to separate the French waxmaker’s
life and lore. A baptismal record places her birth in Strasbourg, France, on
December 7, 1761. In a grisly portent of Tussaud’s future associations, her
absent father came from a long line of public executioners dating back to the
15th century. Her mother was a housekeeper for Curtius—then a resident of
Berne, Switzerland, and a doctor by training—fueling suspicion among scholars
that Curtius and Tussaud’s mother may have been siblings or secret lovers.
Whether he was Tussaud’s
uncle, father, or simply a benevolent physician, Curtius soon assumed the role
of her guardian and artistic mentor. After impressing the visiting Prince de
Conti, a cousin of Louis XV, with a small museum of anatomical wax miniatures
produced as part of his medical practice, he accepted patronage to pursue wax
modeling as his primary vocation in Paris. Tussaud and her mother joined him
shortly thereafter.
Curtius’s move was
well-timed. Though wax modeling had been an established art form for
centuries—commonly used for religious effigies, as well as the teaching of
human anatomy—it was only in the 18th century that waxworks began to emerge as
a source of popular entertainment for paying customers. As an entrepreneur
ahead of his time, Curtius intuitively grasped that wax modeling offered a unique
way to stage current events for a novelty-hungry populace. It also offered
customers a titillating (if illusory) brush with celebrity. On both counts he
was wildly successful. “The wax models are so close to nature you could take
them for real,” gushed one contemporary reviewer. “The display is constantly
changed in response to striking and noteworthy events.”
Photo by Sebastian
Niedlich, via Flickr.
By the early 1770s, Curtius
had set up permanent shop at 20 Boulevard du Temple—the street with the highest
concentration of theaters in the city—where he plied visitors with wax
renderings of the most notorious statesmen and criminals alike. The building
doubled as Curtius’s workshop and home, affording Tussaud immediate access to
both the craft of wax modeling and the most eclectic spectacles Paris had to
offer. In the words of one visitor to the area, “There are chairs set up for
those who want to watch and for those who want to be watched—cafés fitted up
with an orchestra and French and Italian singers; pastry cooks,
restaurant-keepers, marionettes, acrobats, giants, dwarfs, ferocious beasts,
sea monsters, wax figures, automatons, [and] ventriloquists.” Tussaud absorbed
it all. By the time Curtius died in 1794, bequeathing his by-now iconic
collections and workshop to Tussaud, she had spent decades mastering both the
art and accounts of the waxworks………………………….
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