Kate Berridge Read Free Page A

at a genealogical aggrandisement that was to manifest itself in different ways throughout her life, for such grand relations seem strangely at odds with the humble church in the heart of a working-class district of Strasbourg with a local midwife as a proxy parent and the village sexton as godfather.
    A further hint at Marie’s lowly station was the fact that her mother was in domestic service, and Madame Tussaud’s story properly starts with the young bachelor for whom her mother went to work as a housekeeper shortly after Marie was born: Philippe Guillaume Mathé Curtius, native of Switzerland and resident of Berne. When Marie was about two, in the city she claimed as her birthplace this young doctor received a visit from the Prince de Conti, a cousin of Louis XV, who was visiting Rousseau in exile in Neufchâtel and Berne. The royal visitor was seeking out Curtius not for advice on his health, but to admire his wax miniatures. This small private collection in Curtius’s home drew first a trickle of interest from locals, and then visitors from further afield as word spread of the doctor’s artful representation of the human form and the quality of his anatomical waxes. In theabsence of refrigeration, the preservation of bodies for medical teaching was greatly restricted, and wax models fulfilled a vital role as an educational resource. However, the line between education and eroticism was elastic, and Curtius’s lithe lovelies with flip-open navels–anatomical Venuses as they are sometimes called–were prototypes for more overtly titillating tableaux he made later.
    Curtius’s facility for replicating the texture and tint of living flesh inspired him to redirect his talents to portraiture, but whether portraits or pornography were the main reason for his renown and de Conti’s interest is unclear. But evidently de Conti was so impressed by what he saw that he made Curtius an immediate offer of patronage if he would move to Paris and develop his talent on a much bigger stage. Instead of being an amusing diversion for the burghers of Berne, Curtius was to be plunged into the centre of a city with a voracious appetite for pleasure. The journalist and writer Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814) described pre-Revolutionary Paris as a city ‘of limitless grandeur, of monstrous riches and scandalous luxury. She guzzles greedily both men and money.’
    Curtius began his new life in a gracious apartment in the Rue Saint-Honoré, one of the most prestigious neighbourhoods in the city and especially popular with the growing number of aristocrats who preferred the pace and colour of Paris to the stultifying formality of the court at Versailles. De Conti was of this number–an urban sophisticate who, as well as being a patron of playwrights, painters and writers, was a roué of some renown. He is said to have commemorated his conquests with snuffboxes and rings that at his death ran into the hundreds. It is therefore likely that he enjoyed Curtius’s erotic tableaux, which from his earliest days in the city the doctor established as a lucrative sideline to his work on public display. As a contemporary put it, ‘The sale of little groups of wanton and licentious figures to the curious for their boudoirs brought him in more money than his salon.’ (Boudoirs all over the city were evidently busy places, for, while Curtius sold risqué accessories, quacks did brisk business with venereal-disease cures that sweetened the sting of sin by lacing mercury with chocolate syrup.)
    With the support of de Conti–whom Marie recalled as a generous patron whose ‘liberality and kindness not only equalled but rathersurpassed his promises’–Curtius quickly distinguished himself as an entrepreneur-cum-artist of astute judgement and prolific output. Financial security from both private commissions of miniature portraits and the public exhibition of full-scale wax