Смерть Мадам Тюссо (english)

Death of Madame Tussaud.Marie Tussaud was eighty-nine and one of the nineteenthcentury s most successful career women when she died at her London home inBaker Street.Surviving a dangerous and singularly gruesome past, she had madeherself a household name in her adopted country and Madame Tussaud s hasremained one of Britain s most popular tourist attractions to this day. Thegruesomeness began even before Madame Tussaud was born in Strasburg late in1761. She never knew her father, a German soldier named Grosholtz, whose facehad been hideously mutilated in the wars and whose lower jaw had been shot awayand replaced by a silver plate.

This nightmare figure died two months beforeMarie was born. Her young widowed mother, Anne Made, brought the child up atBerne in Switzerland, where she went to be housekeeper to a doctor namedPhilippe Curtius, who had a talent for wax modelling and ran a museum of hiswaxwork heads and busts.Itwas from this uncle that Marie learned her art as a child and after he hadmoved to Pads, where he scored a fashionable success, she and her mother joinedhim and she became his assistant.

As a result, she met many of the leadingFrench aristocrats and intellectuals of the day and she modelled both Voltaireand Rousseau from life. In the 1780s she was employed to teach MadameElizabeth, Louis XVI s sister, and met the King and many of the royal family.Curtius later developed Jacobin sympathies and Marie met Robespierre and otherrevolutionaries in her uncle s circle.Asthe Terror took its toll, Marie was forced to make casts of the heads ofvictims of the guillotine, many of whom had been her uncle s friends and dinnerguests.

In one episode, the leaders of the mob that hacked the Princess deLamballe to pieces stood over Marie while she took a cast of the severed head,its auburn hair horribly smeared with blood.Marie had known the princess andliked her. She made a mould of the head of Louis XVI himself after hisexecution. When Marat was stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday, the NationalAssembly instructed Marie to make his death mask and sketch the scene exactlyfor the painter David. She took a cast of Charlotte Corday s face, too, afterher execution, and later modelled the severed heads of both Marie Antoinetteand Robespierre.Curtiusdied in 1794 and left Marie his collection of waxworks.

A year later shemarried a man named Francois Tussaud.They had two sons, but the marriage wasnot a success and Marie never saw him again after 1802, when she took the boysand her waxworks across the Channel and began years of successful touring roundthe towns of England, Scotland and Ireland before settling down in London in1835, on the corner of Baker Street and Portman Square.

The Duke of Wellingtonwas a regular visitor and liked to look at the effigies of himself andNapoleon, and when Queen Victoria was crowned in 1837 Madame Tussaud s put on amagnificent display of the scene. The following year Marie s memoirs werepublished, but contained little about her private life. She was a talkativeperson, but was always reticent about her experiences during the Terror.Besidesthe waxworks, historical relics on view at Madame Tussaud s included one of theblades from the guillotine obtained from the executioner Sanson himself and objects associated with Napoleon.

There was also the Special Room devotedto murderers and bloodshed, which from 1846 became the Chamber of Horrors.Marie s sons, Joseph and Francis, joined her in the business, but well into hereighties Madame herself liked to sit at the entrance to her exhibition roomsand collect the public s shillings.

A painting of 1845 shows her at hercollecting table in a voluminous black dress and black, lace-fringed bonnet,her shrewd blue eyes staring measuringly at the onlooker through the spectaclesperched on her long nose, as if she was appraising someone for a waxwork.Towards the end, as she began to suffer from severe asthma, she rediscoveredher Roman Catholic faith.

Her sons were at her bedside when she died and herlast words were to beg them never to quarrel. She was buried in the Catholicchapel in the Fulham Road, where many French exiles had gone before her. Hercoffin was subsequently moved to St Mary s in Cadogan Street.