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JOHN THEODORE TUSSAUD

It was an astonishing life! There lies behind it the story of her uncle Curtius, a Swiss who left medical practice in the middle of the 18th century and took to modelling in wax. It was a taste which had grown upon him from his habit of modelling parts of the human body for the purposes of his profession. He extended it to portraits and at last he abandoned medicine for his new art. He had firmly established himself in it and had already been taken up by members of the French Royal Family who had visited Switzerland, when under their protection he left for Paris. And there his sister, Madame Grosholtz, and her child, then five or six years old, joined him. There she learnt her uncle’s trade and thence in her twentieth year she went to live at Versailles as a sort of companion to Madame Elizabeth, Louis XVI’s sister, a girl about four years older than herself. She was the close friend and companion of the princess right up to the moment of the Revolution. Madame Elizabeth like her brother had a delight in manual work. With her it took the form of modelling under the guidance of Marie Grosholtz and it was these nine years that formed the character and that remained the liveliest memory throughout all the very long life that this remarkable woman was to live.

It would be interesting to discover (I know of no such document that could tell me, but there must be some) whether the young companion whom Madame Elizabeth thus took under her protection, and to whom she thus gave a unique opportunity for the observation of contemporary life, was in race German or French. Berne would seem to be the origin of the family, and the uncle’s Latin name and the family name of his brother-in-law point to German origin. All his associations on the other hand were French, and when he came to Paris it was hardly as a foreigner. The story reads as though they were French-speaking on their arrival. Perhaps in some future edition of the work this point will be settled. It is one of considerable moment to our judgment of the art.

It was a moment when the connection between Switzerland and French society was very close. It was to Switzerland that Voltaire had retired. It was from Switzerland that the genius of Rousseau proceeded. The unfortunate Necker, with his caution and his avarice, played his great part in the early Revolution as a Swiss. To Switzerland also he went back when he had failed—and there, by the way, in his retirement we have an amusing picture of him listening to the daily recital of the news from Paris as the Revolution proceeded, wagging his head solemnly, and perpetually saying, “I told you so.”

Madame de Staël, his famous daughter, whom Pitt so much desired to marry for her money, and whom Napoleon so hated, was thoroughly Swiss. She shows it in every line of her writing. She is from the heart of Geneva in her traditions and ideas.

The family coming thus to Paris were part of a general movement and even their connection with Versailles can be paralleled. It would not have taken much, had things proceeded quietly, for Switzerland to have fallen into the orbit of the French monarchy within the next hundred years.

After these nine formative years in the continued company of Madame Elizabeth, Marie Grosholtz enters the Revolution, and the connections of the family with the origins of the great upheaval are close, curious, and of intense interest. It was, it will be remembered, the bust of Necker from the collection of Curtius, then on exhibition, which the mob carried round at the beginning of the insurrection. The show of figures already well-known in Paris became the starting-point for the future collection. It was because the Revolutionaries from the very beginning of the movement showed so much acquaintance with those effigies that the continuous stream of further portraits began. That is why Marie Grosholtz was sent for time after time to take a death mask, to model a famous living man, to establish what afterwards became the invaluable record we still have.

From 1787–89, the preliminary years when she was already at work, right on to 1802, a matter of 15 years, the most crowded of all history, the newly developed art went on actively without interruption. There is not, I think, in all history a parallel to so astonishing and lucky a chance. It was almost as though fate had designed a reporter, or a state portraitist for the benefit of posterity. You do get the same thing now and then in the shape of a chronicler who happens to keep out of the turmoil and mark the detail of his time, but it is extremely rare and in the case of plastic art, unique. The nearest parallel to-day—which may raise a smile on account of the extreme difference in time and manner—is that of Holbein’s portraits of the English Court. There also you get the living record marvellously preserved for future times.

It is to our advantage that the character of this foundress does not diminish in energy with the passage of time. We see her doing the work of three people all through the years of her middle age and making decision after decision upon the fortunes of her house. And while she was thus conducting with one hand the financial side of the business, with the other she was herself still modelling perpetually, and with a third and quite separate faculty she was creating a school of her own, as it were, for the continuation of the modelling after her time. If ever there was the maker of an important thing it was this woman and if ever there was an important thing proceeding entirely from one individual, that thing is the collection which still remains to us.

There is a sort of parallel which can be drawn between Madame Tussaud and Madame Campan. Both of them have seen, and worked at, the Palace of Louis XVI, under and in connection with his Queen. Both were much of an age, Madame Campan eight years senior to Madame Tussaud. Both lived on through the Revolution and the Empire, the one till 1822, the other beyond the revolutionary year of 1848. Both had something of the same strength. Both carried on the tradition of the old attachment to the Bourbons. Both have left the legend of a strong personality, the one through an effect on education in France which was deeper than has been generally recognised, the other in a more lasting manner through her plastic work. In this connection one muses upon what would have been Madame Tussaud’s fate had she continued her career in the country where it had begun, and had she not taken over the collection in its origins to England at the Peace of Amiens. I think she would have been a great figure in the France of the Restoration and of the bourgeois Monarchy. A continuous unbroken link with all the great years up to 1848 and presenting a whole gallery of the past for a new generation to witness would have been something the French and Paris would have made much of, and a great deal that was lost on the other side of the Channel through lack of understanding would have been preserved. I mean that too many of those figures were for those who saw them in an alien atmosphere jests or shades, whereas in France they would have been an intimate part of the great national story.

This removal to England also in some degree affected the proportion of the collection and in the same degree diminished its great international value. Not that figures of international moment had not been included—the great figures are all there—but that Paris would have been a better general centre for watching and recording the moving history of the 19th century, than London. The Musée Grevin in Paris supplemented the Tussaud collection in England. One imagines that it would have been better for history as a whole had one great collection, preferably in Paris, served for a permanent and continuous chronicle of what living men had been.

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.” And that is because we already know pretty well all that there is to know about Voltaire. His story was a simple one, his genius obvious, not complex, and the time of life in which Madame Tussaud’s uncle came to sculp him (to model his face in wax) was just at the very end, when public fame and his own great pride in himself had combined to put him into full evidence, even to the details of his daily life. It was just at the end of that life, in 1778, that Voltaire sat to Curtius, Madame Tussaud’s uncle, the original founder of the whole gallery, and the tutor of his niece in her art.

It is interesting to compare the little miniature (one of several) which Curtius made—it is far more lifelike than the larger figure—with the famous Houdon. Houdon’s is much the greater thing, of course, and the more living, but though Houdon was the greatest of portraitists by far, the greatest renderer of the human face that ever lived, there is something intimate in the little wax miniature of Curtius which no great sculptor could have given. For instance, you have here admitted, as it were, almost photographed, the domestic insufficient quality of Voltaire’s famous smile. Houdon could not help making that smile—or grin—have something heroic about it; or at any rate great. But the Tussaud work undoubtedly shows you the thing as it actually was; as his servants and his intimates saw it.

I learn, by the way, from this book (I had not known it before) that Houdon had himself worked for Curtius—a considerably older man—and the connection is as curious as it is interesting. It is striking to find a record of the connection in this book, but not astonishing that it should be absent from others, for there has been no good comprehensive work on Houdon written that I can recollect. I am told that there is some German encyclopædic work or other but no proper study of the man and his life.

Next after Voltaire we have to note side by side with the collection a small work of Curtius’s own in miniature, the very striking profile of the Duke of Orléans. How it helps one to understand that base and extraordinary career! Everyone reading the story of the Revolution should concentrate upon that man’s ambition, weakness and intrigue. The origin of the whole business was his false idea (unfortunately for himself confirmed by circumstances for many years) that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette would have no children. He came to regard himself as the heir, and the natural result was that when the first child came after so perplexing a delay (a delay the cause of which I have explained in an appendix to my own monograph on Marie Antoinette) Philippe Égalité felt himself aggrieved. His grievance was illogical and unjust, but it was there and in that grievance you find no small part of the motive force that impelled the early Revolution.

The family tradition carried on by the Tussauds from the Revolution was what may be described as the “orthodox” tradition. It is the tradition which appears in this book. I am not sure that the historian can wholly agree with it.

This “orthodox” tradition is the tradition of an equable and happy society overthrown into a sort of chaos at the head of which chance scoundrels floated, each to disappear in turn, struck by a sort of anarchic doom proceeding from their fellow anarchs. The Revolution was rather a resettlement of society from a state which had become unstable to a new and more stable state, and its leaders were upon the whole, though suffering under the exaggeration from which leaders at such a time invariably suffer, men of capacity—especially on the military side. Further, those who were made responsible in popular tradition for the worst excesses were hardly the principal authors of them.

Thus, the real director of what is called the Terror was Carnot, not Robespierre. Carnot was a perfectly sane man and a genius to boot, attached to the new democratic principle, but a soldier, and working for the highly practical ends which a soldier has in view. He thought of the Terror as a piece of martial law, and it is significant that under his direction by far the greater number of those who suffered in Paris suffered through a direct breach of the temporary regulations (such as those against the export of money or communication with the enemy) which were necessary for the prosecution of the campaign.

Robespierre was not the director of the Terror at all. He was a man singularly restricted in nature, but of powerful effect in oratory in spite of his close academic style. He was a man of complete sincerity, much too narrow in doctrine, but because he exactly expressed with more lucidity than anyone else, and with more conviction, what was the passionate creed of the time, he became for something like two years at once the idol and the symbol of the revolutionary masses. As the Terror looked like an intensive application of the Revolution men associated it with Robespierre’s name, and Robespierre, suffering from the very grave defect of vanity (common in men who reach a public position), was willing to allow the false imputation, and to enjoy the title of ruler, when he was really in the Central Council of the Republic, singularly impotent. He paid a heavy price for that falsehood. It cost him his life and—what was worse—his reputation.

What we know positively of Robespierre’s action during the Terror is that he attended the Central Council less and less frequently, and that he tried, if anything, to stop the Terror. In fact it was precisely on this account, his interference with the rigour of the martial law, that his enemies brought him to the guillotine. But, by a curious irony not uncommon in history, the death of this man who was not the leader of the Terror, and who had if anything attempted to check it, and who was put to death because he attempted to check it, caused the Terror to cease. Men had so universally (and so falsely) identified him with the extremity of the republican military régime that when he passed it was impossible to continue it.

In the matter of Marat what I may call “the Tussaud tradition” is sounder. The man was unbalanced to the point of lunacy, and when Madame Tussaud was called in to take the impression of his face just after death, her use of the word “fiend” though exaggerated is comprehensible. This effigy of Marat which you may see in the famous gallery and which was modelled immediately after his death—an immediate piece of historical evidence of the first value—was shown in Paris when it was completed. It is an astonishing thing to have that piece of continuity with us.

But all these death masks of the Revolution are of the highest value. There is an extraordinary dignity in the full features of the Queen, looking younger than she did in the last years of her life, and a singular and awful reality in the mask of Robespierre. I know only two representations of Robespierre which really recall the man. One is this effigy exactly modelled from the face itself after these last thirty-six hours of agony, and the other is the portrait which Greuze made of him and which is now in Lord Rosebery’s collection. And of these two, of course, the death mask, though repulsive, is the more actual.

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. It is a face human in its self-repression and exactitude. Were we familiar with it in connection with some great name of peaceable activity, were it the face of one of those who settled the Congress of Vienna, or of some monarch, or of some writer, it would be famous as an index of genius. As it is, the name—especially to those who do not know the face—suggests nothing but a mad infamy, and indiscriminate shooting and drowning in batches of the wretched Vendean prisoners. And I myself when writing thus of Carrier have a right to be balanced in my judgment for he came very near to guillotining my grandfather’s father, from whom he differed in politics. And here in the case of Carrier is an excellent example of the historical value of that which I postulate as the first, much the greatest, character in a collection such as this: for had we not the bust of the living Carrier, itself almost a living thing, taken immediately after death, we should hardly have guessed what Carrier was. But the face combined with the history explains him well enough.

The story of Madame Tussaud seeking for Sanson’s guillotine, or rather for one of his guillotines after the Peace of Amiens and sending her son over to Paris to look for the man and his implements (which the executioner had pawned) and getting it at last at great cost, is characteristic of her energy and business sense. She lived at a time when the material relic was the clou of her collection. If to-day it rather detracts from the sober historical value of the figures, it remains an excellent witness to her indefatigable initiative. And so it is with the collection of Napoleonic relics, notably the Waterloo carriage, which she secured just at the moment when it was of the greatest value to her business.

Her modelling of the dead in the revolutionary time included, by her own account, the head of the Princess de Lamballe, when that unfortunate and rather insipid young woman (but gracious and kind) was so foolishly and so atrociously murdered. The record would seem to correspond more or less with the judgment of Michelette, and Michelette’s portrait mostly produced by chance illusion is the best I know.

In the fate of all those men and women, but particularly in that of Madame de Lamballe, the main element of tragedy is their bewilderment. They could not conceive what cause or motive lay behind the fierce hatred which concentrated upon them. It was for them a nightmare, something irresponsible like a cataclysm of nature, and yet something human, and something that ought, therefore, to be explicable. Oddly enough the one person who did get a glimmer of the human motive at work was Marie Antoinette herself. It is astonishing how rapidly not only the general character but the intelligence of Marie Antoinette developed in these years. She became the true daughter of Maria Theresa—too late!

They suffered (of course) through that illusion which is the curse of publicity. They were tortured and they were killed for a label, not for their very selves. But the tragedy is increased in their case, I think, because they did not seek publicity. Your politician, often a mountebank, whose appetite is for strutting upon a stage, who loves the limelight, whose meat and drink it is to hear his name repeated perpetually by the populace, deserves what he gets. And he nearly always gets what the fates reserve for such vanities. In a greater or less degree these creators of their own label suffer in the end: at the least disappointment and neglect, at the most death. But as I have said they deserve what comes to them. They have had their reward. It was not so with the stable hereditary publicity of the Bourbon royal family and its adherents. They could not help the light which beat upon them. They did not seek it. 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.

What could be more ridiculous than the figment of Louis XV—obese, good-natured, slow, irresolute in morals, irresolute in policy—as a tyrant. Or what could be more absurd than the fiction of a libertine Marie Antoinette? Or of a democratic Duke of Orléans? Or of a patriot Necker?

It was, I think, this element of undeserved and awfully ironic tragedy which burnt into the soul of all those who had come into contact with the harmless but sometimes dignified and always splendid circle of Versailles. One of the few sincere emotions of Burke’s life was, I think, the moment when he broke out into rhetoric on the fate of the Queen. This middle-class man had seen her, and the grotesque disproportion between herself and her fate moved him to real feeling. It is to his credit, for not many things that Burke said were genuine. He was an advocate taking pay from people who wanted arguments and I think he would have argued just as well for better pay on the other side.

This appassionate sympathy with and support of the victims was very conspicuous in Madame Tussaud herself. And she carried it through the whole of that period when she was at first unwillingly modelling the revolutionaries, often with disgust compelled to take the mask of a dead face, or later (she was in prison with Josephine) associated with the figures of the period of the Directorate and the Consulship.

Of those personal interviews when that handsome woman now in middle age was still engaged at her task of modelling and sculpture in wax, there is none of which we would rather have a full record than the modelling of Napoleon. It is mentioned in Mr. Tussaud’s book only by way of quotation from a contemporary journal—the Belle Assemblée. It would be interesting to know if there is any family record giving full details, for we have not even the date, though we have the hour of the day—six o’clock in the morning—that she first met the Emperor. He was not Emperor yet and we can fix an inferior and a superior limit easily enough for the portrait was made at the Tuileries, after Napoleon as First Consul had gone there, and before the Peace of Amiens. It must, therefore, have fallen within a period of only just over two years; it must have been done either in 1800 or in 1801.

It is in connection with Napoleon that the shifting of values, which I have suggested took place through the transference of the collection to England, may be noted. 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. He was but one of fifty men opposed to the Emperor. The defeat of Napoleon was in Russia, and at Leipsic and at Waterloo, not at Waterloo alone, and the victors of Waterloo were Wellington and Blücher, neither of whom could have succeeded without the other.

Of the figures added to the great collection after Madame Tussaud’s death, of the figures which carry on the historical record and continue to add to its value, I am sure that the one of most interest for an Englishman is that of Richard Burton. It was not (apparently) modelled directly from life. But it was modelled under the eye of Lady Burton herself, and satisfied that critic.

The inclusion of such a figure is an example of what I mean when I say that such a collection is a valuable and continuous piece of historical evidence. The greatness of Burton was missed. He was subject to a boycott due in the main to his exposure of the ritual murder at Damascus. His energetic but isolated character did not square with that of the most of his countrymen. And yet to have an Englishman so uniquely English and to have recognised what a part he was of the record of his time shows a sure instinct.

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. 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 in the collection, regarded as something of slight historical value. But that disproportion may be remedied by the removal of the figures.

The third danger attaching to the system is not remediable. It is omission, and that is what I had in my mind in the case of Burton. It is very unlikely that a man producing a series of contemporary portraits in the early part of James I’s reign would have included William Shakespeare; or in the end of Victoria’s reign a man so remarkable (though, of course, not on a great scale) as Samuel Butler. 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. Carnot was on the whole the most virile of all that virile revolutionary group, and he was one of the first half dozen of those who created the modern world. In a military sense Carnot was the tutor and creator of Napoleon. But it would certainly not have occurred to any observer of popular feelings (even if Carnot had been included) at the time, especially of popular feelings with an eye to the English market, that Carnot was worth preserving. To-day I think most students of history would rather have a really accurate study of Carnot than of even Robespierre.

If ever, which is possible, a collection of this sort comes under the aid or patronage of the state, the peril I speak of might in theory be removed: for the state will endow. But as things are, the peril exists. I mention it because I do sincerely regard this body of effigies not as something concerned with as ephemeral a function in the state as popular curiosity, still less as a mere commercial venture, but rather—what I have called it throughout this essay—a unique piece of historical record. And history, I take it, is the indispensable memory with which citizens should furnish themselves if they are to understand their own state and civilisation.