Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution

by Michelle Moran

  We embrace, and I feel the thinness of his body through his shirt. They have starved him in La Force. “Perhaps we can meet again here tomorrow,” he offers.

  “No. Maman comes and walks with me sometimes. Once after breakfast, once at noon, and another time at sunset.”

  “I will be careful,” he promises. “In case you ever look for me, I am Émilien Drouais.”

  He squeezes my hand, and despite the many betrayals and heartaches between us, he is still my brother. “I hope we will meet again on the outside,” I say. “If not, I will see you in heaven.”

  I TELL NO one about my meeting with Edmund, but I search for him every morning in the hall, praying that they will never call Émilien Drouais. He is the one I think about as the list grows longer each day. Eventually, the guards are forced to keep order while the chief jailer reads. Throughout Les Carmes they are blaming this escalation on the Law of 22 Prairial.

  On the twenty-third of July, when the chief jailer reads the name “Alexandre de Beauharnais,” Grace grabs Rose’s arm and I implore her to sit down. It is all we can do to stop her from flinging herself at the guards. When her husband crosses the hall to embrace her farewell, she faints. She is not conscious to watch as his lover begs the guards for one more moment. They warn his mistress to keep back or join him in the cart.

  François takes my hand. “Keep strong,” he whispers. “We have seen worse than this.”

  But I am so tired … “I just want to lie down and never wake up,” I tell him.

  “Don’t say that. We will get out of here, Marie.”

  “Yes, in a cart or a coffin.”

  He can see that I am giving up. When the sun sets, he sleeps on the floor beside my bed, telling me stories about the famous silk manufacturers of Lyon and what it was like to grow up in a merchant city. The guards have stopped locking the doors at night. What is the point when there are so many prisoners that the beds spill out from the cells into the hall? I have no idea if Isabel still brings fifty-six livres-assignats for the jailer each week, and it no longer matters, really. Straw, no straw. A bed, no bed …

  On the twenty-sixth of July, forty-three names are called. At this rate, we will all be dead by September. That evening, I do not take supper with the rest of the prisoners. I remain in my cell, and François joins me on my bed. We sit facing each other, trying not to breathe too deeply of the rancid air. “If we are ever released from this prison,” he says, “I would like to marry you.”

  I think at once of Henri. Almost certainly he will have found a wife by now. They will be living together in an apartment in London. Or perhaps, if she is wealthy, they will have bought a house, even started a family. “I had thought to go to London,” I say.

  He stares at me. “We are at war with England! It could be another twenty years before any Frenchman is allowed to cross the Channel.”

  I close my eyes. Why didn’t I take my chance when I had it?

  “Marie, I want you to be my wife. Tell me you will marry me.”

  “It’s likely we’ll meet our deaths tomorrow.”

  “Then we can live our last day together in hope.”

  I search his face and see that he is earnest. He is a handsome man, with a good education and a tender heart. From the moment we met here in Les Carmes, he made it his mission to watch over me. I cannot undo what’s been done. If I am ever set free, it will be to live my life in the confines of Paris. “Yes,” I tell him, and he kisses me. For a moment, I am back in Henri’s embrace, smelling his hair, caressing his skin, and brushing my lips against his.

  Chapter 63

  JULY 28, 1794

  Welcome, day of delivery [July 27]

  You have come to purify a bloody land.

  —HYMN TO JULY 27

  “HE HAS BEEN ARRESTED!” SOMEONE IS SHOUTING. “ROBESPIERRE has been arrested!”

  We scramble from our beds into the hall, where a guard is standing at the top of the stairs with the keys of the prison clenched in his hand. “Follow me!” he cries.

  The sound of a thousand prisoners hurrying up the stairs echoes above our cell. It is just after dawn, but everyone is awake. There is laughing and crying. We can hear men cheering from the great room. We follow the other prisoners up the steps into the hall, and inside it is chaos. Soldiers from outside the prison have arrived with kindling for the fireplace, and they are burning the chief jailer’s records, paper by paper. François finds the guard who has been so generous as to lose at most games of poker and asks him what’s happening.

  “They arrested Robespierre last night,” the guard says. “The National Convention has charged him with being a tyrant.”

  The irony of this is not lost of any of us.

  “When he realized they were coming for him,” the guard adds, “he attempted to shoot himself.” He smiles. “All he succeeded in doing was shattering his jaw. They are taking him to the Place de la Révolution. They are to guillotine him this morning along with all of his accomplices.”

  As the news spreads, there are shouts of relief and tears of joy. But at noon, when word comes that Robespierre is dead, there is a startled silence.

  It is real. The Terror is over.

  A soldier stands at the front of the hall and announces that we are all free. Throughout the room, men and women are crying. I embrace my mother, and we weep into each other’s arms. I think of all the people we shall live to see again. Curtius, Paschal, Isabel … Edmund.

  Next to me, François caresses my cheek. His eyes are red and his hands are trembling. “Madame Tussaud, will you escort me to freedom?” He takes me by the arm, and I am filled with the most immense gratitude I have ever known.

  God, it seems, exists even in Les Carmes.

  Epilogue

  ENGLAND

  AUGUST 11, 1802

  AS THE SHIP SAILS INTO PORT, JOSEPH RUSHES TO THE RAILS, begging to be picked up so he can see the shore. At four years old, my son wants to run, and touch, and explore. Everything is an endless adventure for him. I lift him onto my hip and ask what he can see on the docks.

  “Happy people,” he says.

  I smile. Yes. There is one man, in particular, who will be happy to see us. I search the crowd for his face, and he is standing beside my brother and his wife. After ten years, it is as if nothing has changed. He wears his hair loose around his shoulders, and there are still smile lines around his eyes. From the cut of his coat, I can see that he is doing well for himself. Then, for a moment, I panic.

  What if he is disappointed in what he sees? I am not a young woman anymore. In the eight years since Robespierre’s fall, I have been married and given my husband two sons: Joseph, and Francis, who is two. They have not been easy years. After the end of the Terror, whatever money I earned, François gambled or drank away. We have been poor, then wealthy, then poor again, and now my fortune has changed with rise of a Corsican general named Napoléon Bonaparte. He has taken for his wife a young woman I once knew as Rose de Beauharnais, renaming her Joséphine and promising to someday crown her Empress over all of France. Together they have rebuilt what was once torn down, and though I did not think I would live to see peace between England and France, Napoléon has signed a treaty. It has allowed me passage to the man I have yearned after now for ten years.

  Much has been given up for this voyage. I have left my mother behind with my second son, since she is too old to travel and Francis is too young. It is my hope that François will take care of them. The models I did not bring on this ship, I left with him. But my guess is that it will be Maman and Isabel who will run the Salon de Cire in my absence. Under the constant threat of death, François was one man, but in the aftermath of war, he became another. Still, he has given me two beautiful gifts, and for that I will always be thankful. I look at my son and ask if he has ever seen such tall, white cliffs.

  As the ship is being secured at the dock, I catch my reflection in a small window. I would like to believe that I am not much different than the thirty-one-year-old
woman Henri left in Paris. On the inside, however, a great deal has changed. I take Joseph’s hand, and we step together onto the plank. At the bottom, just as he promised he would be, Henri is waiting.

  Whatever happens for me here in England, I shall not betray my heart again.

  AFTER THE REVOLUTION

  MARIE GROSHOLTZ

  After Marie arrived in England in 1802 with her elder son, Joseph, she never looked back. Henri was there waiting for her, as were several other émigrés who had fled the Revolution. Together, they took their shows throughout England, traveling from city to city for the next thirty-three years. In 1822, Marie, Henri, and Joseph boarded a ship bound for Ireland, where they hoped to tour. The captain of the Earl Moira, however, was inebriated, and the ship went down off the coast of Liverpool. Of the more than one hundred passengers on board, only half survived, including Marie and her party. In the disaster, however, all of Marie’s wax figures were lost.

  After the shipwreck, Marie set about re-creating each of her models, basing them on her exceptional memory and a box of miniatures she’d been able to salvage. When word reached France that she was not one of those who had drowned, her younger son was overjoyed. He left his father in Paris to join his mother’s traveling exhibition. Meanwhile, François Tussaud was delighted to hear of Marie’s rescue for another reason. It meant that he could continue to harangue her for money.

  Marie’s marriage to François Tussaud in October 1795 had been one of her greatest errors in judgment in a life that would span almost nine decades. An inveterate gambler with an aversion to work, François Tussaud saw her as his meal ticket to an easy life. Their short union resulted in three children: a daughter, who died in infancy, and two sons. In what is an extraordinary document for the time, Marie’s marriage contract stipulated that she would retain all of the possessions with which she entered the marriage. This turned out to be a very wise decision. Within five years, it was clear that the marriage would never be a partnership. Whatever money Marie made, her husband gambled away, and for a woman obsessed with financial security, this must have been devastating.

  Within months of Napoléon signing the Treaty of Amiens (1802), Marie had begun preparing for her trip to England. She knew that her husband would never consent to her taking both children, which meant she was forced to leave Francis behind. She hoped to send for him as soon as she had the funds, but life on the road was incredibly difficult and made more so by François’s frequent letters demanding more money. Finally, in 1804, Marie wrote to her husband, “My enterprise has become more important to me than returning to you. Adieu, adieu, we must each go our own way.” She never communicated with him again.

  At eighty-one, Marie created her final figure, a self-portrait that can still be seen in many of her wax museums around the world. In 1850, just eight years later, she died in her sleep in London. She lived long enough to see the rise and fall of Napoléon, the return of the monarchy in France, the crowning of Queen Victoria in England, and the commemoration in stone of the Swiss Guards’ massacre. This monument can be seen in Lucerne, Switzerland, dedicated to the nearly eight hundred Swiss Guardsmen who were killed in 1792. Carved from sandstone, the sculpture shows a dying lion impaled by a spear and resting on a pair of shields, one of which bears the symbol of the French monarchy. Mark Twain called the Lion Monument the “saddest and most moving piece of rock in the world.”

  PHILIPPE CURTIUS

  After Robespierre’s fall, Curtius was sent home from his prolonged mission along the Rhine. Having been for so long responsible for reporting on the patriotism of various revolutionary generals, he returned severely ill and emotionally exhausted. Less than a month later, on September 26, 1794, he passed away. Curtius left Marie all of his possessions, including mirrors, candelabra, and the caissier’s desk where his protégée had learned to manage money.

  ANNA GROSHOLTZ

  With Curtius gone and Marie in England, Anna Grosholtz dedicated the rest of her life to raising her grandson Francis Tussaud and watching over the Salon de Cire. After her death, Francis joined his mother in England.

  FRANÇOIS TUSSAUD

  In 1802, when Marie left for England with her elder son, Joseph, François remained in Paris, ostensibly to take care of their two-year-old son and run the Salon de Cire. All the money and property Marie had left in his care, however, was swiftly lost to his gambling. Hearing of his wife’s success in England, François began sending letters asking for financial support, until finally she cut off all communication. However, at seventy-two years old, François decided that it was time to renew their correspondence. After four decades of silence, he wrote to remind Marie that she was still legally his wife and that he would like to be given power of attorney. Predictably, Marie rejected this request. François’s demands for money continued until his death, in 1848.

  THE DAUPHIN, LOUIS-CHARLES

  After the Reign of Terror came to an end, the world seemed to forget about the nine-year-old dauphin, Louis-Charles. Horribly abused by his captors both mentally and physically, he was forced to live in a tiny cell surrounded by rats and covered in his own excrement. Now Louis XVII of France, he had been imprisoned in solitary confinement from the time he was eight years old, and no one seemed interested in rescuing him from his torment. On June 8, 1795, Louis-Charles died at just ten years old. Numerous impostors later claimed to be him, but DNA testing performed in 2000 proved that Louis-Charles did, in fact, die in the Temple.

  MADAME ROYALE, MARIE-THÉRÈSE

  Marie-Thérèse was the only member of her immediate family to survive the Revolution. After being separated from her brother, she was imprisoned by herself in the Temple until 1795, when the new French government agreed to her release the day before her seventeenth birthday. Sent to Austria to live with the family of Holy Roman Emperor Francis II, Marie-Thérèse was persuaded to marry her cousin Louis-Antoine, the Comte d’Artois’s son. The marriage was a very unhappy one, and it is unlikely it was ever consummated.

  In 1824, the Comte d’Artois became King Charles X of France, and Marie-Thérèse became Madame la Dauphine, next in line for the throne along with her husband. After a three-day Revolution in 1830, Charles X was forced to abdicate. Marie-Thérèse then became Queen of France and her husband became King Louis XIX. Their reign lasted for only twenty minutes, however. Recalling the Revolution that had taken his aunt’s life only thirty-seven years before, Louis-Antoine abdicated on the spot. Marie-Thérèse lived the remainder of her years in exile. She died in Austria in 1851 at seventy-two years old.

  ROSE BERTIN

  In 1795, Rose returned to France, where she discovered that new fashions had emerged from the dirt and grime of the Revolution. Gone were the days of liberty caps and tricolor cockades. In their places were rich silk pantaloons, pashmina shawls, and transparent dresses modeled after those of Greek and Roman goddesses. Rose continued to dress the wealthy women of Paris, and her customers included Empress Joséphine, formerly known as Rose de Beauharnais. In 1813, at sixty-six years old, Rose passed away in her house in Paris.

  MARQUIS DE LAFAYETTE

  Perhaps no man was more devastated by the failure of the French Revolution than the Marquis de Lafayette. Having been instrumental in the American victory over the English, he truly believed that, after the storming of the Bastille, the French were on the threshold of democracy. A key to the Bastille that he sent to George Washington can still be seen on tours of Mount Vernon in Virginia. It was accompanied by a note that read, “[Here is] the main key of that fortress of despotism. It is a tribute which I owe as a son to my adoptive father, as an aide-de-camp to my General, as a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch.”

  But Lafayette’s role as a “missionary of liberty” was short-lived. After being declared a traitor to France, he fled to the Dutch Republic, where he was arrested by the Austrians and imprisoned at the citadel of Wesel. His wife petitioned Emperor Francis II to live with her husband in prison, and this is where she died in 1797. Sev
eral months later, Napoléon Bonaparte negotiated Lafayette’s release.

  For the rest of his life, Lafayette remained active in politics. In 1824, he returned to the United States to tour the country whose liberty he helped secure. He visited George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon, and his reunion with Thomas Jefferson that same year deeply affected those who saw it. Jefferson’s grandson recalled that the two shuffling old men “threw themselves with tears into each other’s arms—of the 300 or 400 persons present not a sound escaped except an occasional supprest sob, there was not a dry eye in the crowd.” The men had not seen each other for thirty-five years. Another witness to this emotional reunion was Lafayette’s own son, George Washington. Ten years later, Lafayette died in France. He was buried at the Cimetière de Picpus under soil from Bunker Hill.

  JACQUES CHARLES

  Rather than flee the Terror, Jacques Charles remained in Paris, where he continued his scientific experiments. In 1793, he was elected to the Académie des Sciences and became a professor of physics at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. He died in 1823 at seventy-six years old and is credited with the law of volumes now called Charles’s Law.

  JOSEPH AND FRANCIS TUSSAUD

  Fifteen years before her death, Marie and her sons moved their traveling exhibition into a permanent location on Baker Street in London. From here, the small family worked to promote and improve what would eventually become the world’s most famous wax museum, Madame Tussauds. In addition to curiosities such as the shirt the French king Henry IV was wearing when he was murdered, Marie and her sons purchased King George IV’s coronation robes, adding authenticity to what would already have been a very realistic exhibit. After their mother’s death, Joseph and Francis Tussaud continued working at her trade. In 1884, when rent became too high at Baker Street, Marie’s grandson moved the exhibition to its current location, on Marylebone Road. Today, Madame Tussauds has expanded across the globe, with museums in Berlin, Los Angeles, and Shanghai, among other locations.