HISTORICAL NOTE
IT IS HARD TO RELATE JUST HOW TURBULENT AND BLOODY THE years of the French Revolution really were. The fall of the monarchy and the subsequent rise of a far worse, far deadlier tyranny make for what can be a challenging read, simply because so many innocent people perished in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Although estimates differ, up to forty thousand people may have met their end by guillotine. And contrary to popular belief, more than eighty percent of those victims were commoners.
What began as an earnest desire for freedom ended in a bloodbath that would eventually claim the lives of up to half a million citizens all across France. The highest casualities came during the war in the Vendée, where entire villages were wiped out in what some have considered the first modern genocide. The National Convention approved of this slaughter, and their captain, Charles-Philippe Ronsin, suggested deporting the unruly Vendéans and replacing them with patriots who knew what it meant to believe in “liberty.” Soon, the Convention began looking into ways of achieving mass extermination. Gassing was considered by General Rossignol, while General Cordellier dispatched enemies of the patrie with swords rather than guns (to save on powder). Women and children were massacred en masse, and arrests were made for offenses such as spitting on a liberty tree or wearing clothes deemed “too fancy.”
Yet Madame Tussaud did not let the horrors of the Terror define her. Marie’s life before the Revolution was filled with the richness and variety of being a show-woman on the Boulevard du Temple as well as a tutor to the king’s sister. Few women from this period are remembered as having straddled both worlds and lived to tell the tale. And just as fascinating as Marie’s time at court was her time in England, when she transformed herself into the famous wax artist Madame Tussaud. While much of her memoirs is fabricated (including what should be obvious facts, such as her place of birth), we are fortunate to know a great deal about Marie’s life. Her fixation with money and the fact that she was one of the only women in her time to draw up a prenuptial agreement speak volumes about the woman behind the wax masks. Marie was Curtius’s daughter through and through, if not literally (and there is some debate on that), then at the very least in spirit. In a critique written by Monsieur de Bersaucourt, Curtius was described as a man willing to take advantage of any situation. Bersaucourt wrote:
He is wily, this German! He changes all the time according to the wind, the situation, the government, the people in power. He removes “the King at Dinner,” and replaces it with figures of the deputies of the Gironde. He is successively Feuillant, Girondin, Jacobin, Maratiste, Hebertiste, Robespierriste, Thermidorien. He goes with what is in fashion, Curtius. He is a follower of the on-going government, whatever that may be, both supporting and applauding their success. One does not have a strong opinion if one is Curtius, the “Vanquisher of the Bastille.”
The same critique may be made of Marie, whose opinion of the Revolution is never made clear. When Curtius died, he bequeathed to his niece nearly all of his possessions. Yet what she chose to take with her to England is telling. She left behind a sword commemorating her uncle’s participation in the storming of the Bastille, his Bastille rock (with its certificate of authenticity), and the wax bust of him in his National Guardsman’s uniform, which now resides in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris. Perhaps this was the politic thing to do when sailing for the land of King George III. Or perhaps her true sympathies lay with the royalists. While we may never know, one of the greatest joys in being a writer of historical fiction is the ability to include little gems from history within the novel.
The chamber pot, for instance, with Benjamin Franklin’s face on the bottom, really was a gift from King Louis to one of the women at court. And a planisphere clock that could mark the phases of Jupiter’s moon was first built in 1745 and can be seen today in California’s J. Paul Getty Museum. It may come as a surprise that France at this time was rife with competing newspapers, from the Gazette de France, established in 1631, to Marat’s short-lived L’Ami du Peuple. Journalists wielded as much power as—if not more power than—members of the various revolutionary governments.
But perhaps the most intriguing bit of history I came across was the importance of cafés in the Revolution. The choice of café indicated a person’s politics to the world. From the time they were first established in Paris, in 1669, coffeehouses were places to meet, drink, play chess or draughts, and talk over politics. The Café le Procope served luminaries such as Danton, Marat, Robespierre, and Napoléon. And it was at the Café de Foy that the course of Camille Desmoulins’s life was changed forever. According to the French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874), just before the Revolution,
Paris became one vast café. Conversation in France was at its zenith. There were less eloquence and rhetoric than in ’89. With the exception of Rousseau, there was no orator to cite. The intangible flow of wit was as spontaneous as possible. For this sparkling outburst there is no doubt that honor should be ascribed in part to the auspicious Revolution of the times, to the great event which created new customs, and even modified human temperament—the advent of coffee. Its effect was immeasurable.… The reign of coffee is that of temperance. Coffee, the beverage of sobriety, a powerful mental stimulant, which, unlike spirituous liquors, increases clearness and lucidity; coffee, which suppresses the vague, heavy fantasies of the imagination, which from the perception of reality brings forth the sparkle and sunlight of truth.
And as the Revolution began, the English traveler Arthur Young (1741–1820) had this to say:
The coffee houses present yet more singular and astounding spectacles; they are not only crowded within, but other expectant crowds are at the doors and windows, listening à gorge déployée to certain orators who from chairs or tables harangue their little audiences; the eagerness with which they are heard, and the thunder of applause they receive for every sentiment of more than common hardiness or violence against the government, cannot easily be imagined.
In a time when politics were changing as rapidly as fashion, Marie Grosholtz was there to chronicle it all. The Salon de Cire became almost as important a news source as the dozens of papers being printed daily across France. And her uncanny talent for memorizing facial features and replicating them later, first in clay, then in wax, made her exhibition one of the most popular in Paris. Of course, it helped that her uncle knew all of the important men of the time—including Voltaire, Rousseau, Robespierre, Marat, Desmoulins, and the Duc d’Orléans—and invited them to his salon.
Yet Marie’s family was in the precarious position of straddling two worlds. Despite her past as a tutor to Madame Élisabeth in Montreuil, she was given the task of making death masks on behalf of the National Convention. Philip Astley, a neighbor on the Boulevard du Temple whose circus was so famous that it earned a mention in Jane Austen’s Emma, recalled the terrible scene when the mob brought Marie the heads of de Launay and de Flesselles:
Curtius was not at the Salon de Cire when the mob rampaged up the hill to 20 boulevard du Temple, bearing on pikes the heads of M. de Launay and M. de Flesselles. Delighted with their bloody trophies they demanded that Marie take casts of the heads to commemorate the actions of the day, which she did reluctantly, insisting on working outside on the pavement, for she refused to let the mob into the Salon.
Many of the most shocking scenes in the novel are based on contemporary accounts. The inspection of Charlotte Corday’s corpse to determine whether or not she was a virgin really took place, as did Danton’s desperate act of digging up his wife to make a final mask of her face. The last moments of Madame du Barry were recorded by those who witnessed her execution. Her desperate pleas so rattled the crowd—used to seeing people march to their deaths in dignified silence—that the executioner feared there would be a revolt. After her execution, the jewels for which she had unwisely returned to France were sold in London at Christie’s auction house in 1795. They fetched £8,791.
It is tempting to imagine how
different the course of events might have been had the royal family succeeded in their escape. But from the beginning it was a doomed plan. As Lafayette remarked, the queen seemed “more concerned about looking beautiful in the face of danger than about staving it off,” and for months before her flight, she planned the kind of wardrobe she would take. She placed lavish orders with Rose Bertin and, in the process, made one of her servants suspicious. If that was not enough, her husband was a man of great ambivalence. In 1791 the Marquise de Bombelles wrote in what are known as the Vaudreuil Papers, “The feebleness of our sovereign puts me in a rage … you cannot imagine how he is despised … or what his nearest relatives say of him.” The opportunity for escape had presented itself many times, but always he was uncertain. Looking back on the early events of the Revolution, Napoléon believed that if King Louis XVI had only “mounted his horse, victory would have” been his. But the king was a man of thought, not of action. When he finally decided it was time to flee, he left behind a note condemning the Revolution and ensuring his own demise should he be captured. The resulting fiasco when he was apprehended in Varennes began the quick and steady march to anarchy.
In the years after the royal family’s failed escape, France experienced rapid changes in government, beginning with the establishment of the National Convention. A new calendar was declared, along with a new method of counting the years. And while Jesus was regarded as an upstanding citizen and a fine example of a sans-culotte, the practice of any religion was abolished. In their fanaticism to spread liberty and equality, the revolutionaries created a tyranny. Thomas Jefferson watched these events unfold from the other side of the Atlantic, and he reflected on the prospects of democracy surviving beyond a single generation. “I predict future happiness for Americans,” he wrote, “if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.” It was this pretense that led to the establishment of the Revolutionary Tribunal and later the Committee of Public Safety. And yet, after all the bloodshed in the name of freedom, it was Napoléon Bonaparte who came to power next, declaring himself Emperor of all of France. More than fifty years of monarchy followed his reign, including the eighteen-year kingship (1830–1848) of Louis-Philippe I, son of the Duc d’Orléans.
Yet while I tried to convey these events as best I could, there were details I changed to better serve the story. The dates of Madame du Barry’s execution, of Lucile Desmoulins’s and Princesse Lubomirska’s arrests, of Robespierre’s whereabouts when the book begins, and the publication of Jeanne de Valois’s scandalous memoirs were all altered slightly. Similarly, Camille’s journal, Les Révolutions de France, began in November 1789 (not July), and the members of the Jacobin Club—so named because of where they chose to meet—were not actually called Jacobins until 1791.
As for the guillotine, it was initially called le Louison after Dr. Antoine Louis, who designed its prototype. In 1789, however, it was Dr.
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin who stood before the Assembly and suggested that any criminal sentenced to die would do so painlessly if this new machine were used. Although personally against the death penalty, Dr. Guillotin wanted to see an end to messy executions by ax or breaking on the wheel. After he remarked, “Now, with my machine, I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye and you never feel it,” Guillotin’s name became associated with what is arguably the world’s most infamous device. Mortified by this connection, Dr. Guillotin’s family petitioned the government to change the guillotine’s name. When their petition was refused, they changed their family name instead. It is a common misconception that the guillotine ceased to be used once the Revolution was over. It actually remained an official method of execution in France until September 10, 1977, when the last guillotining took place.
Other changes were made in the book as well. What we would consider science, for example, was actually deemed philosophy, and scientists were called philosophers. There is also no evidence that Madame Royale ever informed Robespierre about Marie’s royalist sympathies, although her character in the novel is true to contemporary accounts of her personality. As for the men who were given the task of fighting the Revolutionary Wars, Luckner was not made a general until after Lafayette’s flight to Liège, and there is no evidence that one of Marie’s brothers became a captain in the National Guard. In fact, the fates of all three brothers remain unknown, although Marie claimed in her memoirs that all of them perished during the tragic massacre of the Swiss Guards. Last, because this period of French history is so turbulent, filled with frequent changes in government, some of the major influences on revolutionary politics had to be skipped, such as the presence of the Girondists and the establishment of the Paris Commune.
Yet however complicated and chaotic these politics may seem, Marie Grosholtz followed them all in her exhibition on the Boulevard du Temple. Even after Marie gathered her wax models and left for England, the Boulevard continued to play an important role in history. Only forty-four years after the Reign of Terror, it was on this street that the chemist Louis Daguerre took the first known photograph of a human being. In the picture, you can see the individual cobbles in the road and the tree-lined streets where Marie once walked. Although the photograph appears completely devoid of people, they are simply too blurry to see, because the exposure time was over ten minutes. If you look carefully, however, in the bottom left you will see a single man, his coattails and tricorn hat just visible. Although we will never know his name, his place in history is assured simply because he was standing still long enough for the image to develop. And if you look very closely, you can just make out why he was standing in one place: his boots were being polished. Chance placed him in the frame, alone in a street full of ghosts.
Sometimes, it is not the kings and queens who make for the most fascinating history but the shadowy souls who happen to be in the right place at the right time. While Marie certainly would not have considered herself lucky to have lived through such a devastating period, history is fortunate that she remained still for long enough to record the events that raged on around her.
THE BOULEVARD DU TEMPLE, 1838
GLOSSARY
À la mode de Provence: dyed, then perfumed with flowers such as orange blossom or jasmine.
Ancien régime: “the former regime,” meaning the political system that existed for hundreds of years before the Revolution, dominated by the monarchy, clergy, and aristocracy.
Aristocrat: a member of the Second Estate, or nobility.
Armée Révolutionnaire: This force of sans-culottes and Jacobins was unleashed on the countryside to spread revolution and to direct the dwindling food supply to Paris and other towns.
Assignat: a bond secured by the value of seized church property. After April 1790 assignats functioned as paper money but were soon almost completely devalued as the Constituent Assembly issued vast amounts of assignats to finance the deficits.
Bailliage: an administrative unit, roughly equivalent to a county, overseen by a king’s bailli (bailiff).
Baiser: formally, to kiss; colloquially, to have sex with.
Berline: a four-wheeled luxury coach.
Cabriolet: a horse-drawn carriage with two wheels and a single horse, often used as a vehicle for hire.
Cachot: an underground cell, dungeon.
Cahiers de doléances: lists of grievances drawn up in early 1789 by regional bodies representing all three estates (clergy, nobility, and commoners). The proposals for reform were put before the Estates-General and the king.
Caissier: a cashier.
Caliper: a device for measuring small distances with accuracy.
Champ-de-Mars: Paris’s principal military parade grounds, on the left bank of the Seine (similar in purpose and name to Rome’s Campus Martius). This was the site of the Fête de la Fédération on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille, as well as the massacre of July 17, 1791.
Chemise: a woman’s undergarment, often made of linen. It was designe
d to look like a short dress with elbow-length sleeves.
Chemise gown: Also known as the chemise à la reine, this dress was made popular by Marie Antoinette. It was made of a light, flowing fabric (linen or white muslin), which did not require a corset, prompting the public to accuse the queen of appearing in her chemise, or undergarments. While all fashionable young women adopted the style, the queen was criticized mercilessly for wearing these gowns. The portrait of her by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun dressed in this attire created such an outcry that it had to be removed from the Royal Salon.
Coach-and-eight: a large, typically royal, coach pulled by eight horses.
Cockade: a colored ribbon, worn as a badgelike ornament.
Cocotte: a whore.
Committee of Public Safety: the twelve-member group (chaired by Robespierre during the Terror) that, between 1793 and 1795, wielded executive power.
Commode: a small cabinet or chest of drawers.
Coquine: a naughty, mischievous woman.
Cordeliers: an ultraradical club founded by Danton, Marat, Hébert, and Ronsin that had a populist appeal among both sexes.
Corvée: a tax paid in manual labor to the crown during the ancien régime. Peasants were typically required to work a number of days per year on roads and in other public service.
Cravat: a neckband often trimmed with ruffles or lace.
Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution Page 43