John Theodore Tussaud

“ As to those people who retain a permanent place in the Exhibition, I suppose the secret is that, either by the example of their lives or through the medium of their works, they have deeply touched the heart or stirred the imagination of the people.
I suppose the British public never looked on two such political gladiators as Beaconsfield and Gladstone, and while these two statesmen dominated people’s minds it was natural that they should both have a pedestal at Madame Tussaud’s. I can neither say who was first to appear in the Exhibition, nor prophesy who will be the last to go. ”

“ The Catalogues are taken away for further perusal, and one may often search the whole Exhibition in vain the next morning for one that has been discarded.
All day long groups of Cup-tie trippers stand about the Sleeping Beauty, not only for her sake, but also for the sake of Madame Tussaud, whose figure stands at Madame St. Amaranthe’s head, while at her feet sits William Cobbett, wearing his old beaver hat, and holding in his hand the snuff-box which legend credits him with passing to visitors on some weird occasions. ”

“ Not very long afterwards the British public began to suspect the Kaiser of evil designs upon this country, and visitors frequently indicated their displeasure in front of his model.
With the outbreak of war, naturally enough, came an outburst of general reprobation, and the atrocities committed by the German Army and Navy provoked impulsive patriots to visible and audible manifestations of anger. More than once the Kaiser had his figure struck by men, while women shook their fists and umbrellas in the face of the world’s greatest homicide. ”

“ When we come to details of the personalities from the period before the Revolution to the Peace of Amiens (the foundation of the whole Exhibition) we are struck, I think, by the great difference in our appreciation. Some of the figures are just what we should have thought these men would have been. Others offend us or puzzle us by what seems to us discrepancy. But we must remember that the error is in ourselves and not in the contemporary record.
Of the great historical figures Voltaire (which is the first of them) is least specially illuminated by what I may call “the Tussaud tradition.” ”

“ Landseer suggested Madame Tussaud’s, an Exhibition which d’Orsay had never before seen; and to Baker Street they went. The Count, charmed with the novelty of the wax figures, was childishly delighted with all he saw, until a moment when he became conscious that his footsteps were being dogged by two suspicious-looking individuals.
“Do you see those men?” said d’Orsay. “They never take their eyes from me.” ”

“ I have to deal with Marie Antoinette, Josephe-Jeanne de Lorraine, wife of Louis XVI, and who was born, you will remember, at Vienna, on the 2nd of November, 1755, the very day of that earthquake at Lisbon in the occurrence of which Dr. Johnson for a long time so resolutely refused to believe. Would the doctor, I wonder, had he lived in 1793, have declined to place credence in a newspaper report of what is now to be narrated—an upheaval more dreadful and disastrous than any physical convulsion of the earth’s crust? The tattered, muddy, gory panorama fades into a murky nothingness. ”

“ Writing from the Langham Hotel, where he was staying, he observed that Madame Tussaud’s had previously voted him a niche among the immortal heroes who adorned their Exhibition, a mark of honour for which he was told he ought to feel no small pride.
And what had Sergeant Bates accomplished? He claimed to have succeeded in bringing the two great nations’ hearts near to each other, till they seemed to beat in unison, and the pulsation of the one was for a while that of the other.
“God grant,” he said, “that work so begun may not willingly be laid down.” ”

“ But of all these revolutionary figures, by far the most interesting to me is that of Carrier. The contrast between that strongly exact, clearly cut face and the story of Carrier’s madness at Nantes, is one of the things that make one understand not only the Revolution but in general mankind at white heat. Here is a man who, if features mean anything, might have been some sharp, self-contained, disappointed, ironic speaker, or even poet. It is the face of a man who certainly knew his own mind, who despised other men, which is a weakness, but who followed some great idea within. ”

“ But is it a mortal sin in a young, pretty and sprightly woman to spend a good deal of money on dress? How many hundred dresses did our chaste Queen Elizabeth leave behind her, in her wardrobe, at her death?
It must be granted that when the dissensions of the Revolution began, Marie Antoinette was on the Conservative side, and that she tried her hardest to incline her husband to that side. Was it so very unnatural that she should do so? Her brother, the Emperor Joseph, used to say that “Royalty was his trade”; and poor Marie Antoinette may have laboured under a similar persuasion. ”

“ It is here that the chief danger imperilling the value of the collection appears. And with that after so much praise I would conclude.
Madame Tussaud, it will be remembered, decided at some time early in the 19th century to make continuous additions to her collection as time went on, to keep it up to date, to make it contemporary. It was a natural decision and obviously necessary to the conduct of the thing as a business enterprise. For contemporaries will always desire to look at the portraits of those who are for any reason notorious, rather than to preserve the historical record. ”

“ The absurd legends in which any public figure is necessarily clothed as with a wrap of falsehood is not one of their seeking or of their making. They suffer for those legends and for the consequences of those legends precisely after the fashion which dramatic irony demands that the victim of any great tragedy should suffer—in spite of themselves and with no understanding of how the thing came. ”

“ France, so long shaken and wind-parched, is probably at the right inflammable point. As for poor Curtius who, one grieves to think, might be but imperfectly paid, he cannot make two words about his Images. The Wax-bust of Necker, the Wax-bust of D’Orléans, helpers of France: these, covered with crape, as in funeral procession, or after the manner of suppliants appealing to Heaven, to Earth, and Tartarus itself, a mixed multitude bears off. For a sign! As indeed man, with his singular imaginative faculties, can do little or nothing without signs: Thus Turks look to their Prophet’s Banner ”

“ Perhaps the remark which seemed to create the greatest fun was when the Lord Mayor said he would like to see his Sheriffs in the Chamber of Horrors.
It was very touching to observe the boys loyally and reverently take off their caps in front of the little alcove in which Queen Victoria sits, as someone has said, “signing despatches all day long.” At the close of the happy day the halls and corridors of the Exhibition rang with the shrill treble of fifteen hundred young voices singing “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” followed by “Hip hip, hooray; the donkey’s run away.” ”

“ The exhibition once fixed in London took on the English point of view and to that extent distorted a full European impression. For instance, one of the great features in the story of the collection is the visit of the Duke of Wellington to the effigy of Napoleon, and a well-known and almost famous picture was made of the incident. I am old enough to remember many people who spoke of it as though it was a most dramatic moment in the history of the nineteenth century. But no one with the full European sense would feel like that. Wellington was not the great protagonist against Napoleon. ”

“ There is always a certain proportion of men in any generation with regard to whom the careful observer can say with fair certitude that posterity will require to know much more of them, and who are yet for the moment not in the public eye. Now the commercial necessities of an exhibition cannot consider these men. They are of no value to the crowd, and therein, I say, lies the danger. Let me give an example.
I do not think (I may be wrong as I am speaking in the negative of what is only a detail) , I do not think that there is in the Tussaud collection any model of the great Carnot. ”

“ To the ministrations of this “patriotic” cleric, who was dressed in light grey coat and a bob-wig, Marie Antoinette had in the first instance declined to listen; but she occasionally spoke to him on her way to the fatal Place de la Révolution.
An immense mob, in which women were revoltingly numerous, crowded the streets throughout the entire line of route insulting the Queen and vociferating “Long live the Republic!” She seldom cast her eyes on the populace, but from time to time looked with some curiosity on the prodigious military force surrounding the cart. ”

“ The house wherein Curtius opened this second Exhibition was formerly occupied by Foulon, the Minister of Finance, who earned public execration by his ill-timed suggestion that if the people could not get sufficient bread they might eat hay. When the Revolution broke out Foulon was one of the first victims for the mob to vent its rage upon. They hanged him, decapitated the body, and then paraded the streets with his head stuck on a pike, between his lips being placed a wisp of hay in memory of the cruel sneer at the people’s want. ”

“ What is the use of telling individuals that the originator of Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, William Cobbett, who turns his head from side to side, does not take snuff, when they insist that they have actually seen him lift his hand from his snuff-box to his nose? Yet this is a widespread fallacy.
The figure of Marat dying in his bath never has breathed; it is the bosom of the Sleeping Beauty that rises and falls as she reposes in slumber.
Neither does Henry VIII turn his head to inspect his six wives. ”

“ And so, behind Bonaparte, one’s eyes sight the sinister heads of Robespierre, Fouquier-Tinville, Carrier, Hébert—merciless creatures who gambled with the lives of their fellow men for high positions, and multiplied [56] these awful human stakes that they might hold themselves secure.
There, too, in the falling light, one perceives the faces of Louis XVI and his Queen, Marie Antoinette, the two most notable and pitiful victims of the Reign of Terror—a reign, forsooth, in which these ill-starred sovereigns, the descendants of generations of kings, were but the poorest and saddest of subjects. ”

“ But save in quite exceptional times, such as that of the Revolution, which gave the collection its origin, there is always the danger of a change in values. In the first place, for a man to be notorious is not the same thing as for a man to deserve fame. His notoriety may be of the quality of fame rather than mere notoriety, and may mature into fame, and yet not be a fame of that first class which warrants an historical record. In either of these two cases there is the danger of disproportion [49] in the collection, regarded as something of slight historical value. ”

“ Mr. Smith, at the moment, was standing stock-still, scanning his work; then suddenly making a motion with his brush to retouch the canvas, he was startled by an unearthly yell from the old lady:
“Good heavens! they are alive!”
Our “Master of the Robes” fell in conversation with an American lady, who told him that she had paid for admission with a shilling given to her in the States by an English aunt with the instruction that if ever she went to London the shilling should be expressly spent on her admission to Madame Tussaud’s. ”

“ Early one morning, soon after the Exhibition had been opened for the day, Joseph, Madame Tussaud’s son, who had been wandering through the rooms, as was his habit, perceived an elderly gentleman in front of the tableau representing the lying-in-state of Napoleon I.
The model of the dead exile rested—as it does down to this very day—on the camp bedstead used by Napoleon at St. Helena, and was dressed in the favourite green uniform, the cloak worn at Marengo (bequeathed by Napoleon to his son) lying across the feet. ”

“ So infatuated did Madame Elizabeth become with this pleasant work of modelling in coloured wax, which was soon to become a veritable craze, that she asked Madame Tussaud to instruct her in the art, and for that purpose invited her to live with her in her apartments at the Palace of Versailles, for the Princess seldom visited Paris. ”