Responsible for the butchery of the Vendean prisoners at Nantes during the French Revolution. Impression of his head taken immediately after he had been guillotined, 16th December, 1794.
Thus she was compelled to reproduce the lineaments of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Hébert, Danton, Robespierre, Carrier, Fouquier-Tinville—the best and fairest, and also the worst and vilest—who met their death on the scaffold. Unthinkable were the gruesome tasks of faithfully recording their features imposed upon the young woman who was destined to bring to England that Exhibition the annals of which we now relate.
No wonder many a heated controversy has waged around these works, for it is hard to realise that they are the actual impressions of those heads that fell under the knife of the guillotine. Yet they are the selfsame impressions that were shown at Christopher Curtius’s Museum in Paris.
That Madame Tussaud’s uncle would have had the temerity to exhibit spurious heads to a crowd by no means in a humour to be trifled with, and far too familiar with the features the casts portrayed to be deceived, is more than unlikely; and we know such an imposition in his case would have been quite unnecessary. The casts were undoubtedly taken under compulsion, either with the object of pandering to the temper of the people, or of serving as confirmatory evidence of execution having taken place—perhaps both.
The idea of exhibiting the heads of those who had been done to death as enemies of the people had asserted itself during the very earliest days of the Revolution. Within a fortnight of the taking of the Bastille, Foulon’s head had been severed from its body and paraded through the streets of Paris at the end of a pike.
THE PRINCESS DE LAMBALLE
A friend and companion to Marie Antoinette.
Later the noble features of the Princess de Lamballe had suffered the same brutal degradation, with the added inhumanity of having been thrust between the window-bars of the Temple Prison, wherein the unfortunate Louis XVI and his wife were incarcerated.
