by Edward Carey
“He is only four,” Citizen Tussaud said.
“He has to work,” I said. “You don’t mind, do you, Little F.?”
“No, Mama, let us get to work, please.”
Good little boy.
“Where are we going, Mama?”
“To the Tuileries Palace.”
“Where Princesse Elisabeth was?”
“Yes, for a short time, that is right. Well done, Little F.”
“But it’s five in the morning,” Citizen Tussaud complained. “The child needs to sleep. Come, little man, back to bed.”
“No, Citizen Tussaud,” said the little fellow to his father, “I’m going with Mama.”
If he’d stayed in bed, he’d never have met Napoleon.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
My last French figure.
I had a great plan, a plan as dangerous as the widow’s had been when she moved us to the Monkey House. I had not yet told anyone of it, but kept it growing inside me. Moving to the Monkey House was an inspired and outrageous thing to do; so was collecting all those people, famous and infamous. Be bold or be bankrupt. I started collecting again. I wanted the very best example of French people. And so I looked about me. There was only one name on my list—on anyone’s list. I called in favors to get Napoleon.
The First Consul, for that was his title then, had married an acquaintance of mine, Weeping Rose from Carmes. I had written her a note, signing it Affectionately, Pug. It would not be easy, she replied; he had no time for such things. But he so loved Rose, though he preferred to call her Josephine.
Rose kissed me and tapped Little François fondly on his nose. Fortune ran around us. And there was Consul Bonaparte.
“Approach,” he said, and I did.
“Not you,” he said, “the other one. The future of France.”
I pushed Little François forward. He advanced, wrinkling his little beak. Napoleon Bonaparte came very close and put his hand on my son’s shoulder and looked down into him, and Little François stood very still, and then squealed, not with fear but with mirth. Little François found the strangest things funny.
François, my first son though not my firstborn, would tell this story often. It is part of his mythology. He would boast of it to his classmates, though they wouldn’t believe a word.
“Are you the mother?” Napoleon asked me.
“I am, sir,” I said. “Isn’t it obvious?”
“He is brave. We need brave people. Get to your work.”
I laid everything out. I explained exactly what would happen. His face should be completely covered in plaster. Little François came forward with the straws. He nodded.
We went to our work.
When it was done, he said, “You have me, in the plaster there?”
“Yes, First Consul, an exact likeness.”
“Be careful with it. It is a fine head.”
“I never make any judgments on heads, First Consul,” I said. “I was taught not to. Some heads last forever, but that’s unusual. We never melted Franklin down, or Voltaire. But people have even forgotten the murderer Desrues. You never can tell, there’s no guarantee. But we keep at it, First Consul, we don’t stop, there’s always someone to make, there’s always someone to melt down.”
“Little Pug,” said Rose, “how you talk.”
“It is my business. I know my business. I don’t mind talking of it.”
“Little Pug?” he asked.
“It’s what I called her in prison, between visits from Fortune.”
“There has been such a cast of exaggerated personages, lady face-taker,” Napoleon observed. “The Revolution has produced all sorts of oddities. Roux the screaming monk, Marat the doctor who only wanted people dead, Jacques Beauvisage the executioner.”
“Have you seen him, First Consul? Jacques Beauvisage?” I asked.
“Jacques Beauvisage is a story. ‘Have you heard how Jacques Beauvisage killed him?’ they say. ‘How he dispatched her?’ No one man could have done so much. He’d be the greatest monster ever known. Everything that was worst about the Revolution has been given to this one character.”
“The greatest of all murderers,” I said.
“I heard he was at Nantes drowning people,” said Rose.
“I heard he sentenced people with Fouquier-Tinville,” said Napoleon.
“I also heard,” said Rose, “that after the September Massacres, miserable with regret, he took himself to the Place de Grève, screaming and cursing, and a large crowd gathered around him, and when they were several hundred strong he murdered himself in front of them, a pistol shot to the head. Wild dogs, so the tale went, slept on the spot for many nights afterward.”
“Is that true? Was that what happened?” I asked. “Poor Jacques.”
“None of it is true,” said Napoleon. “All legend. A ridiculous name, Jacques Beauvisage. There never was such a person.”
“Oh, but there was, sir. I knew him. He was with us first, sir, at the Cabinet of Curtius. We used to call him our guard dog. We grew up together.”
“This story,” said Napoleon, “is a new one to me. Don’t expect me to believe it.”
“We’ve looked for him so long. But he hasn’t come home.”
“Another tale made out of the Revolution, to frighten children and adults. To add mystery, no doubt, to your business. Do you have proof of him? Was he cast in wax?”
“No, he was not. Though he asked to be.”
“Well. Are you done then, citizen?” said Napoleon.
“Since the world is still interested in heads, I’ve still work to do.”
“You have what you came for, then. Good day to you.”
“Thank you, First Consul, I shall not need to come back. Good-bye, Rose, thank you. Good-bye, Fortune.”
A year later, Fortune would be killed by Napoleon’s cook’s English bulldog.
And we were out again. Others were waiting in the corridor; it seemed to be Consul Bonaparte’s morning for receiving artists. There was David, and Houdon the old sculptor looking very impoverished, and a young and handsome man I had never seen before. I wondered which of these would be admitted next.
In time Houdon would make Napoleon into a lifesize bust, and that was nothing much. In time David would paint him crowning himself emperor on a canvas twenty feet by thirty-two feet: they were born for each other, David and Napoleon. The young man in the corridor would sculpt him in the finest marble, more than fourteen feet high, as Mars, god of war. That artist’s name was Antonio Canova.
It was those two, David and Canova, among others, who made five foot seven into a colossus. And by then every artist in the city of Paris had only that one head to make, over again, the whole city one large factory of adoration. Who would come to a wax house filled with Napoleons when just such a head was seen all over the capital, from every angle, in every street, in every room, both public and private? They used to say, at his peak, that there were seven million people living in France and five million were sculptures of Napoleon. What waxworks could thrive under such circumstances?
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
And never come back.
With Napoleon cast, I could at last reveal my plan. Not a new Monkey House. Something even bigger. A new country. A new city. London was the place to go. Paris was fragile; London was full of promise. In Paris the people were skin and bones; in London they were stout. In London there was future, in Paris only the past. In London, I had learned, magic-lantern men from the boulevard were making money showing slides of the guillotined.
I had something better: I had heads. Tangible heads. And now Napoleon.
I wrote letters, I transferred funds, I rented a room at the Lyceum Theatre. I’d live again. Little François and Little Joseph would grow up with those snouts of theirs. They’d sniff something good of their lives. They’d last.
“London,” I announced. “Lon-don. Say Lon-don, Little F.”
“Lon-don,” he said.
I told Citizen Tussaud I’d be back, but I didn’t believe it; and why should he? He was a man built only of negative figures, a subtraction, a leaking pocket. I’d leave him the Monkey House, a chance to prove himself. It was up to him. I was saying good-bye to that house: good-bye to the widow, Doctor Curtius, Edmond. To Jacques Beauvisage too, who never came home, and whose story was never complete, but whose myths were never forgotten. They whisper tales of him in the boulevard even now, I’m told. Go to sleep, children are warned, or Jacques Beauvisage shall get you. Good-bye to it all.
“I’m taking the children to England,” I said. “I’ll earn us some money.”
Citizen François Tussaud, husband, not inhuman, had fallen in love with his children and fought for them. Torn with pain, he spent his pocket money on lawyers. The judge in our case—how our fortunes do climb and fall—was André Valentin. Still with one eye set eastward and the other west, getting on in the world, ascending the ladder.
“Swiss. Still here?”
“Leaving now.”
“Where to?”
“To London,” I said. “Foreigners are always welcome there.”
Looking at me and Tussaud simultaneously, he declared that one child could go with the mother, but the other must stay with the father. There was nothing I could do. I still had a heart in there, choking up, spluttering and kicking. I was forced to leave Joseph with my husband, forced by the man who may have killed Edmond. But what could I do against a judge? André Valentin, still thieving.
“Were you there?” I asked. “When Edmond fell? I think you were. Were you?”
“I do not know what you are talking about.”
“What happened, please?”
“Shall I impound your papers?”
“Did you? Edmond?”
“Now, citizen, there are other cases than yours. To conclude: one child here, the other there.”
The ship was called the Kingfisher. Later it came apart, breaking up against the Isles of Scilly, but first it took us to England; there are no waxwork personalities with seaweed beards in the deep dark of the Channel. On deck I held Little F., most precious, my future. Below was my past, a lifetime of things, my history, my people, my wax loves and hates, shifting in their crates. Edmond’s portrait of me in wood and hair and glass. A shop mannequin in his shape. I’d not leave them behind.
I brought the history of France, carefully padded and crated, to the British Isles. Voltaire broke his nose on the journey, and Franklin lost an ear, and Jean-Paul Marat’s chest caved in. But these things could be fixed. I had the molds.
I waved good-bye to Paris and all it held. I’m going to an island, I said. We shall be separated by the sea. Don’t follow me, don’t ever follow.
Here I was, speeding across the English Channel, with love all about me, to tell the English our stories. You’ve heard of Bluebeard and Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots? Here’s another: the little woman who carried history on her back. You want blood? That I have. Palaces? Of course. Hovels? Certainly! Oh, and monsters? Yes, yes, I have monsters! Come and see, only come and see, let me show you how it was all done, let me tell you, how I can, what a human being is.
But do you have love in there?
Yes. Oh yes.
Away we went, Little F. and I. France was there behind us, getting smaller and smaller, until there was no more France at all. Never any more André Valentin to wreck my heart. I turned my back upon it, and directed Little F. to look forward. Over there is Great Britain, I said. What shall it do for us? What shall we do for it? They speak English there—do we know any English? George le third. Doover. Lyceum Theatre, Lon-don.
“Will we be coming back home, Mama? Will we ever be coming back?”
“We’ll make a new home, F., a whole new one. And we’ll never want to leave it.”
AFTERWARD
1850
AT HOME
I am eighty-nine.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Seventh heads.
Here I am. Upstairs. With all my things. There on the wall is the portrait of me that Jacques-Louis David painted. There in its glass case is the death mask of my uncle Curtius; there is Edmond’s wooden doll of me still, and beside her a mannequin in the likeness of a man I once knew; there is a wax heart and beside that a wax spleen, and there my head in wax, age seven, modeled by Curtius; and there is Father’s jawplate, not forgotten these long years, and last and first of all, my faceless doll, Marta, gift of my mother. There they all are and here am I. And where are we all?
We are in London. Are we in the poorhouse? No. No one has things in the poorhouse. We are in our own home, we own it, we’ve done very well. We’ve climbed to the top of London, which is the greatest of all dung heaps ever laid by man, an excrescence of appalling dimensions. I must confess, however, that I am not all here. I come now in three pieces. My teeth have all gone, replaced by other teeth: I put them in, upper and lower rows, snap my jaw like Father. When I take them out, my face collapses, and my nose comes so close to my chin they almost touch. I wear ever-thicker spectacles, round wire-framed ones. I can see no one, observe nothing, without their assistance.
My home is in Baker Street, which is only fitting, for in our way we also cook people. It is a large building we live in, a massive elephant, a great monster. This building is where history is kept. We show our people, our dolls, on the first and second floors and in the cellar. We have a gallery for royalty and other worthies, all the greatest, latest people. On the third floor is our workshop factory; there every day people are melted down or poured out, people grow, people go. I watch them all, the circus of life. All those people so desperate to do well. I’m safe at last. I remember the Widow Picot thought that behind her gates. No building is ever safe, but all long to fall apart.
Down below, out of the sunlight, in the cellar, in the dark, we keep other people, the disgraceful ones, the ones who didn’t behave well. There are always such people. Today’s villains, mixing with yesterday’s. A chamber of horrors. Only yesterday, when I went down to the cellar, a boy there, a cockney lout, was standing before Jean-Paul Marat bleeding in his bath, the wound still appearing so fresh, his sad body built by Edmond, and this boy was munching away upon a pork pie.
I do my rounds, visiting them all, moving about the old people. Looking sometimes at the new, but I belong to the old. I outlive everyone. I brush down Napoleon, smooth the brocaded jacket of Louis XVI. In his pocket I have put a map of the island of Robinson Crusoe. I can see his sister in his face.
People come to touch me too. The History Lady some call me, others Mother Time. Many call me Madame Two-Swords. I am rather a public building. I used to tell my visitors the story of my life. Is it all true? they wondered. Wax, I told them, does not know how to lie.
I cannot sit at the desk anymore taking admission fees. I’m too fragile, I might break. Others collect the money in my stead. François and Joseph have made me in wax, keeping my post. Sometimes I go and join her of an afternoon; how the public enjoy that, the two of us together. It has inspired Mr. Cruikshank to make a cartoon labeled Madame Tussaud Beside Herself. In truth, it is not an especially brilliant likeness. But I do recognize myself in the wax model, in that shriveled crumb of human existence, that corrugated, leathery old creature, something like a spider, something like a beetle, a wingless moth, a hunched form made of dust and dirt, all in black from boots to bonnet. Widow Picot, a man comes once a quarter to pluck my chin. Frightened children shriek when they see me. They dream of me and wake up screaming. Those same children are told fairy tales now—those tales are not for the adults anymore, these days those stories are kept in the nursery. Those same children sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” a tune first written down in the year of my birth. I am as old as that noise.
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One by one, some in a hurry, some taking their time, everyone has died. Louis-Sébastien Mercier in his sleep, his shoes still stuck upon his feet. Jacques-Louis David, in disgrace, in exile. Josephine, Weeping Rose, ejected from the empress’s throne. Even Napoleon, on his rock in the Pacific. François Tussaud Sr., husband, amidst debt. And André Valentin at last, having risen to high service, sliced into two pieces, one falling this way, one falling that, for crimes of embezzlement against the emperor.
The Monkey House, long vacated, gave one final baboon shriek, coughed a cloud of dust, then fell to rubble and was towed away. New buildings are there now.
No one left living understands me. Only my dolls.
The novelist Mr. Dickens comes to me. A thief, of course. I tell him everything. He takes notes. I have Burke and Hare downstairs, near Marat, Scottish body snatchers, one taken from life, the other from death. The Duke of Wellington used to come to visit my wax Napoleon. Now I have Wellington in wax.
There is a state between life and death: it’s called the waxworks.
I live at the top of the house, in our rooms, with my family. Past the door marked PRIVATE—STRICTLY NO ADMITTANCE—KEEP OUT—STAFF ONLY. This is my bedroom. In here are my own things, never to be displayed, always kept private. My personal collection, my personal history.
And here he comes every day, my seventh and final doctor, Doctor Marcus Healy. A balding man, corpulence setting in though he tries to hide it, to busy himself about me. He moves me as if I can’t move myself, fusses over me like a child with a toy.
This world has turned mechanical. The new world is made of iron. Life now is heavy, propelled by steam and pistons. In place of candles, people illuminate themselves by gas, which gives off a light without mystery. Here’s a sign of my great age: people don’t look the same as they used to. Men grow whiskers until they look more like spaniels than men, and use what wax they have to shape their enormous facial hair. And there is something else new. François is worried that it may hurt our business. This newest thing is called a daguerreotype. It traps an image of a life, captures people on polished silver. It’s much quicker than wax. It can be guaranteed not to make mistakes. They want to take my image with their machine. I intend to die before they do it.