The Romance of Madame Tussaud's

by John Theodore Tussaud

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.