MADAME TUSSAUD: Her Life and Legacy

'Curious Busts from Nature as Large as Life,' was just one advertisement for Madame Tussaud's wax work exhibition. Madame Marie Tussaud launched her chain of wax museums more than 200 years ago but what few people know is that her original wax models were often based on famous and infamous people that she was acquainted with during and after the French revolution. Madame Tussaud created many figures in wax, from the philosopher Voltaire (of whom she said, 'the dross wants separating from the gold'), French lawyer and statesman Maximilien Robespierre (who Marie said she witnessed surrounded by his victims' relations on the way to his execution at the guillotine), and leader of the French revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, whose relics were displayed in her exhibition hall in London in 1843. Marie Tussaud took to wax making under the tutelage of Dr Philippe Mathé Curtius, who made a name making anatomical models for medical students, and was employed by him in 1777. She travelled to England in 1802, mainly because she felt France was volatile and its economy declining under the rule of Napoleon, but also because she said she was escaping an 'unsupportive and worthless' husband. Marie then launched a display under her own name in London in 1808. The exhibition hosted a Chamber of Horrors, the Napoleon Rooms, the Great Room in which there were gilt ornaments in the style of Louis XVI and a Hall of Kings section featuring Henry VIII, Mary Queen of Scots and the Hanoverians. Through this book. discover the sad place wax had in Marie's personal life as, when her daughter Marie Marguerite Pauline died six months after she was born on 1 September 1797, all Marie had to remember her by was a wax sculpture she had made before her child's death. Learn that she knew murder was a popular attraction for the public in the early 19th century and so, when an Irish soldier in the English army conspired but failed to assassinate King George III, she began devising a plan to obtain a copy of his severed head even before his execution. The book also includes fantastic images, from a shot of Marie's death mask and a model of Madame du Barry called The Sleeping Beauty, to a wax figure of Queen Victoria as seen today at the exhibition. Black and white images, 234pp.