Kate Berridge Read Free

that her revolutionary relics, death masks and heads have been a highly influential visual account of the French Revolution.
    If, as Queen Victoria averred, history is an account not of what actually happened, but of what people think happened, then this is particularly pertinent to Madame Tussaud. For too long her biographical claims have been unchallenged. In the absence of hardfacts, it seems appropriate to ask more questions. Over two hundred years after her birth, and some 200 million visitors later, Madame Tussaud remains enigmatic. What is more clearly defined is her identity as a brilliant businesswoman, artist, publicist and pioneer of mass-market entertainment. But how much of her story is history, and how much hoax?

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The Curious Cast of Marie’s Early Life
    I N HER MEMOIRS , Madame Tussaud claims that she was born in Berne, Switzerland, in 1760, and yet a baptismal record dated 7 December 1761 from the register of Old St Peter’s Catholic Church authenticates Strasbourg, in France, as her birthplace. The brevity of this single paragraph written in a clergyman’s spidery scrawl belies its importance, for it testifies to more than the baptism of the child, christened Anna Maria (but known as Marie to distinguish her from her mother, of the same name). It records the absence of the father, and it names as a godfather the sexton of the parish, Johannes Trapper. More intriguing is the absence of the child’s mother at the christening, for it is the local midwife, cited as ‘Obstretrix Müllerin’, who is recorded as bringing the baby girl to church. It is generally safe to assume that the summaries of our lives that are the three pieces of paperwork recording birth, marriage and death are straightforward, and yet with Madame Tussaud there is more to them than meets the eye. In a life where so little can be verified, these documents are valuable factual fragments that point to discrepancies in her personal claims.
    The absentee father, named as Joseph Grosholtz, remains a paternal phantom, for no other records exist that flesh him out. The sole source of information about him is the extraordinary woman his named daughter became. In her memoirs she attributes the paternal absence to his death two months before she was born. She describes him as a soldier of some distinction–specifically an aide-de-camp to General Wurmser and veteran of the Seven Years War, in which ‘he was so mutilated with wounds that his forehead was laid bare, and his lower jaw shot away and supplied by a silver plate.’ There is a certain grim poetic resonance in this grizzly image of her facially disfiguredfather. It foreshadows one of the most famous exhibits in her Chamber of Horrors, namely Robespierre’s death head with smashed features as a result of the self-inflicted wound when his suicide attempt backfired and he blew away most of his jaw.
    Her deceased father, she assures us, was from a distinguished family, the Grosholtz name ‘being as renowned in Germany as Percy in England, Montmorency in France or Vicomti in Italy’. Yet there is some evidence that, rather than being blue-blooded, the family tree had blood dripping from its branches. Members of the Grosholtz family were distinguished only as having been public executioners in Strasbourg and Baden-Baden in a line of office stretching back to the fifteenth century. So perhaps Madame Tussaud’s predilection for horror was hereditary. As for her absent mother, an earlier parish record at the same church verifies that she was baptized there too, and sets her age at eighteen at the time of her husband’s death and daughter’s birth. And as for the young mother’s antecedents, Madame Tussaud describes the clan Walter (the register of baptism writes the name as ‘Walder’) as being ‘of a highly respectable class, and their husbands were members of the Diet or parliament of Switzerland’. These connections hint