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Paris, July 12, 1789.
A crowd comes down the Boulevard du Temple shouting a name. Canvas aprons, wool jackets, sticks wrenched from market stalls. Shopkeepers close their shutters as it passes.
“Necker! Necker!”
Jacques Necker is finance minister to King Louis XVI, and the only man in the government the people trust. The king dismissed him yesterday.
A man shouts from the front of the crowd.
“The king’s troops are coming into Paris!”
The crowd stops at number 20 and hammers on the door. Behind the shop window, a row of life size wax heads looks out into the street, and a bust of Necker stands in the middle of them. It is the only likeness of him in Paris.
“The bust! Give us the bust!”
The door opens. Philippe Curtius, the wax modeler who owns the shop, comes out in his shirtsleeves, lifts the bust out of the window and puts it into the arms of the nearest man.
The bust goes up above their heads, in triumph, and the crowd moves off west.
In the Place Louis XV, a line of cavalry blocks the street. Sabers come out. The riders drive their horses into the crowd.
The man carrying Necker goes down. He does not get up.
The bust rolls across the paving stones, the face laid open by saber cuts.
The Powder
On the morning of July 14, the crowd breaks into the Invalides, the old soldiers’ hospital, and comes out with thousands of muskets.
The muskets are empty. The powder sits in the Bastille, at the other end of the city.
In front of the Bastille, the guns fire down the street. Men on ladders start pulling down the top of the walls. The fortress surrenders in the afternoon.
Launay, the governor of the Bastille, is dragged to the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall. Flesselles, who runs the city government, is brought in behind him. Both men are killed there, and their heads are cut off.
The heads go up on pikes and move off through Paris. In the middle of one procession, a young woman is elbowing her way forward.
Marie Grosholtz, 27, smaller than the men around her. Curtius took her in as a child, and she now has the best hand in the workshop.
In Alsace, where the name is from, Grosholtz men have been executioners from father to son for three hundred years.
She slips through, pushes one arm aside, then another, reaches the front. The city guard appears at the end of the street. The men carrying the pikes scatter.
She goes back to the Boulevard du Temple with both heads held against her apron.
She lays them cheek down on the workshop table. Oil with a brush, over the skin, then liquid plaster from forehead to chin.
The plaster hardens. She works it loose at the edge. The hollow holds everything.
Hot wax tinted the color of skin runs into it. It cools, it comes away, it carries the face.
Glass eyes go in from behind. The hair goes in one strand at a time, with a needle.
The Rope
The next morning, Marie sets the two new faces in the shop window.
A line forms on the sidewalk before the shops open. People push to get to the glass.
They have come to see two men the papers have been full of for months, men they hate and have never once seen. No newspaper prints a portrait.
The window costs nothing.
Beside it the shop door stands open. A man stands there all day, calling out over the line.
“Come in, gentlemen! Come and see the royal table! It’s just like Versailles!”
Admission is 2 sous, and a second line forms at that door.
Curtius has turned the back of the house into a large room. The figures stand there in full dress, life size, behind a rope strung across the room.
The king and queen sit at a table laid for dinner, the dauphin, their son, beside them, and farther back Lafayette, Voltaire, Rousseau and Franklin, with du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, asleep on a cushion.
For 12 sous, you step past the rope and walk among them.
The months pass and executions multiply in Paris. Every week another head falls, and the whole city repeats the name.
In the morning the new face is behind the glass and the line is in front of it. In the evening it goes into the large room and takes its place among the others.
Curtius no longer touches the plaster. He works the door and the cash box, and he takes the orders.
Every face that leaves the shop now comes from Marie’s hands. She molds, she pours, she sets the hair.
The Will
In the summer of 1794, Curtius leaves the Boulevard du Temple for his house in Ivry sur Seine. He does not come back to the shop.
Marie runs the door, the room and the workshop.
On August 31 he sends for a notary, and for Marie. He dictates his will in her presence. The house, the figures, the molds, all of it is hers.
“You have been under my roof for twenty years.”
On September 23, three weeks after the notary comes, Curtius dies in the house at Ivry.
Marie is 32. She inherits 28 standing figures, 10 busts, 68 other models, more than 60 paintings and an Egyptian mummy.
The Gambling Tables
In October 1795 she marries François Tussaud, the son of a family of winegrowers from Mâcon. He is younger than she is.
A daughter is born in 1796. She dies at nine months old.
Joseph is born in 1798, Francis in 1800.
Marie Tussaud works the molds in the morning. She feeds the children between coats of plaster. In the evening she takes the money at the door.
Her husband comes down at closing time, lifts the cash box off her lap and walks out with it.
He comes home in the morning from the gambling tables with empty pockets, and signs another note.
The creditors come to the shop with the papers he has signed. They take away one figure, then two.
Seven years, and nothing remains of what Curtius left her.
Nothing but the molds.
The Quay
At the end of 1802, a showman pushes open the shop door. In London he puts on ghost shows, figures thrown onto a sheet.
He offers to take her across with her figures. He will pay for the crossing, and for the posters that will advertise the show.
In return, he takes half of everything she earns in England.
She signs.
The crates go aboard. Inside them, packed in straw, the plaster molds.
She is 41. She has no money left.
Joseph, 4, is already on deck. Francis, 2, stays on the quay, his hand in his grandmother’s.
She crouches down to his level.
“I’ll only be gone a few months.”