The Egyptian Royals Collection

by Michelle Moran

  “Her Majesty has taste.” Rose raises her chin. “No one who knows the queen could believe she would want such a thing. And it was all Rohan’s doing,” she adds contemptuously. “Rohan and that prostitute of his.”

  She tells me the entire story. How a young woman named Jeanne de Valois tricked her former lover, the Cardinal de Rohan, into believing that she had become close to the queen. The cardinal, vulgar and greedy, had always been out of favor at Versailles. He begged Jeanne to intervene on his behalf, so Jeanne and her husband forged letters in the handwriting of Marie Antoinette pretending to forgive Rohan. The letters grew warmer and more intimate, and Jeanne then arranged an interview between the cardinal and a prostitute impersonating the queen. The impostor told the cardinal that she wished to purchase a diamond necklace without angering the commoners, and if Rohan could obtain the jewels for her, she would be forever in his debt. She told him that he should use Jeanne as an intermediary.

  Immediately, the cardinal arranged to buy the necklace. He delivered it to Jeanne, who then took it to London, where the diamonds were removed one by one and sold. When Rohan failed to pay the jewelers, Boehmer approached the queen and asked for payment. Within days the entire affair was exposed, and the cardinal was arrested. But in a sensational trial, the queen’s reputation was such that Rohan was acquitted. No one was willing to blame the cardinal for thinking she might secretly meet him at night or make promises to him in letters foolishly signed, “Marie Antoinette de France.”

  “But the queen never uses her surname!” I exclaim.

  Rose gives me a knowing look from her chair. Everyone knows what happened next. The prostitute Nicole d’Oliva was set free after her testimony on behalf of the Crown, while Jeanne was taken to Salpêtrière prison, where she was whipped and branded and sentenced to life. But soon after, she escaped to En gland and published a book she called her Memoirs, detailing a love affair with Marie Antoinette.

  I shake my head. “The queen has not had good fortune in France.”

  “No,” Rose agrees. “Not when the crime of lèse-majesté goes unpunished and the woman responsible for the greatest con of the century is moving about London pretending to be a comtesse. Can you imagine?”

  Jeanne de Valois is exactly what my uncle wants for our exhibition. Someone shocking, scandalous, a woman without morals. He would place her in the room dedicated to great thieves. Of course, I do not mention this to Rose. As I finish her sculpture, I turn the clay model around so that she may see.

  “My God,” she whispers. She rises from her chair and reaches out to touch the head. “The jaw. You’ve gotten the jaw exactly right.” She peers into my face, as if she can discern the secret of my skill. “Come look,” she orders, and her ladies flutter around her. I can hear that Rose is pleased. “So what happens now?”

  “I will make a plaster mold from this head. When that is finished, I will pour a mixture of beeswax and a vegetable tallow into the mold and let it cool. Then I’ll add tint, to make sure the skin color is just right—”

  “It will be white?” she confirms.

  I frown. Her coloring is far more Gallic. There is a touch of the sun in her skin. “It will look just as you do,” I promise.

  “And my teeth? I want everyone to know that I have good teeth.”

  “That is what those are for.” I indicate a glass box. Several of her ladies make noises of disgust, but Rose moves toward the collection and picks it up.

  “These are real,” she replies, caught between horror and fascination.

  “Yes. From the Palais-Royal.”

  “But how—”

  It has clearly been a long time since Rose has had to do her own shopping. If she had been in the Palais-Royal in the past several months, she would have seen the men with their pliers in the streets. “No one can afford a dentist with a shop,” I tell her. “Anyone in pain goes to a street dentist. It’s fifteen sous for every extraction.” Or ten, if you allow him to keep the tooth. “Then he sells the teeth to us.”

  Now, Rose’s skin truly is pale. “I had no idea,” she whispers, but I notice that none of her women look surprised. They shop for their own goods, just as I do, and they have seen these men in their bloodied aprons. “It is the same with the hair,” I continue. “We can use a wig, or we can insert human hairs into the scalp one at a time. But for you, it will be a wig. We’ll want to be sure we get your pouf just right.”

  “And the eyes?” I can see that she is afraid I will tell her that these, too, will be real.

  “Those will be glass. The body,” I add before she can ask, “will be fashioned by my uncle, using the clothes you have so kindly donated.”

  “And how long will all of this take?”

  “Several weeks.”

  “But Her Majesty will be here by then! How will I know if I approve?”

  “Do you like what you see in the mirror?”

  She glances above my head, where the reflection of a heavy woman in pearls looks back at her. “It is acceptable.”

  “Then the model will be acceptable as well.”

  For more information on Madame Tussaud and all of Michelle Moran’s novels, please visit www.michellemoran.com, where you’ll find fascinating information on the real-life characters behind her novels, what’s fact versus fiction in the books, and lots of other fun stuff!