Overview

The story of a woman whose work inspired one of London's greatest attractions. Born in Strasbourg, the young Marie Tussaud learned her skills from her mother's employer, Philippe Curtius. In 1780 she became tutor to King Louis XVI's sister and for eight years prior to the Revolution lived at the court in Versailles. In Paris throughout the Revolution, she was often in extreme danger. Incredibly, she was forced to make death masks from the decapitated heads of her friends who fell to the guillotine. In 1802, she opened her first exhibition at the Lyceum theatre in London. With modelled figures such as Napoleon and Josephine and other notables from the Revolution, her exhibition was very popular. She also had the guillotine blade that severed Marie Antoinette's head. For the next 26 years Madame Tussaud toured England and Scotland with her Waxwork Exhibition, until she established her base in Baker Street in 1835. She had always had a separate room , for the most gruesome of the models, which in 1846 Punch dubbed The Chamber of Horrors . The name stuck. She died in 1850 and in 1884, Tussaud's grandsons moved the exhibition to Marylebone Road, where it remains.

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9780750927659

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In revolutionary Paris, the crowds around the guillotine would applaud as another noble head fell into the basket. For Marie Tussaud it was a sad time, as many of these victims had been her friends. But business was business after all - so she made wax death masks of the nobility and took them on tour. It may sound mercenary now but civility wasn't much in evidence during the French Revolution, and Madame Tussaud knew better than anyone that she was lucky to escape with her own head. After all, she had been a favourite at the royal court and thrown into a dungeon because of it. The tale of how Marie graduated from provincial anonymity to royal favouritism, then fell into disgrace before reinventing herself as a travelling show-woman in England and Scotland, takes in some of the most turbulent events of European history. Teresa Ransom - biographer of Fanny Trollope and Marie Corelli - paints vivid word pictures of this diminutive figure and places her life in its wider social context. We learn of Paris's filthy slums both before and after the revolution, the simmering rage that infected an entire nation, and the little-known human side of Marie Antoinette and her husband Louis XVI. Extracts from Tussaud's somewhat-muddled memoirs appear alongside the more focused writings of her contemporaries. What emerges is the story of a determined woman who looked as harmless as a sparrow but possessed the shrewdness to manipulate those who thought themselves her intellectual superiors. Tussaud is known today for her waxworks, a trade she learned as a girl and which she taught to Louis XVI's youngest sister. She realized early on that through her wax figures she could introduce historical personalities to the general public - who would pay well for the privilege. What she never realized was that she was writing herself into the history books as well. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Teresa Ransom trained and worked as an occupational therapist, then an actress and teacher of the Alexander technique. She is the author of two previous biographies, Fanny Trollope and The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli. Both biographies have been recorded as audio books. Plans are almost finalised for Fanny trollope's life to be made into a feature film in UK in 2001. She lives in Cambridge.

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