Kate Berridge Read Free Page B

figures and busts of the luminaries of the day meant that in around 1768 he felt confident enough to invite his former housekeeper and her young daughter to live with him.
    His evident attachment to the mother and daughter and their status in his life have fuelled speculation ranging from the theory that Anna Maria was his sister, and he was therefore Marie’s natural uncle, to the theory that he was Marie’s father as the result of an adulterous affair. Marie refers to her mother’s culinary prowess, but the degree of Curtius’s loyalty to them both, and his life-long commitment to their welfare, would seem to be founded on more than appreciation of Alsatian casseroles. She describes him as ‘her uncle who afterwards assumed towards her the character of a father, both in regard to tenderness and authority’, and she goes so far as to say that ‘he legally adopted her as his child’. In fact there is no evidence of either formal adoption or a blood-line connection–an omission that would cause bureaucratic difficulties later on. Nevertheless, the paternal role played by Curtius is acknowledged within the Tussaud family history, for a faded Edwardian letterhead for official correspondence lists the credentials of the various founders and artist modellers in the firm’s history, and here Curtius is billed as ‘Madame Tussaud’s Maternal Uncle and Foster Father’.
    When the six-year-old Marie first came to Paris, Louis XV, bloated and bored, was in the final decade of his long reign. In the words of Madame Campan, the educator and friend of Marie Antoinette, he was ‘weary of grandeur, fatigued with pleasure and cloyed with voluptuousness’. His popularity had plummeted from the early years when his people called him ‘the well-beloved’, and in 1763, when a grand equestrian statue showing the King flanked by figures depicting the classical virtues had been erected in a square in central Paris, the satirists had quipped, ‘Virtues on foot, vice on horseback.’ This signified a waning of regard for the Ancien Régime that was gathering momentum. Whereas formerly Versailles had fixed the cultural gaze of Paris, increasingly Paris was originating ideas, fashions,movements and moods. In an unprecedented way, Versailles was now starting to look to the capital. There was such a buzz there that one aristocratic woman declared that she would rather be dead in Saint-Sulpice than alive in the country. (Saint-Sulpice was a church in a smart part of Paris where the VIPs went to RIP.) This was extremely propitious for Curtius.
    The accomplished modeller was in the right place at the right time. Paris was in a ferment of change in the last twenty years of the Ancien Régime and, given its mutability, wax was an ideal medium with which to reflect a changing society that was rent with contrasts–rich and poor, old and new, religious and secular. As a source of light, destructible by heat, infinitely malleable into new forms, wax fitted the mood of this period when Paris itself was being remade. There was a building boom on such a scale and at such a speed that a proliferation of maps could not keep up and was out of date in no time. But the change was more profound: creeping secularism meant that wax, the medium that historically had been so closely identified with the Church–funeral effigies, devotional and votive artefacts–could be redirected by Curtius to cater for a new market whose aspirations were increasingly worldly.
    Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–72) had set the tone. A letter from Diderot to Voltaire reveals the agenda: ‘It is not enough for us to know more than Christians; we must show we are better.’ Each volume, like a secular manifesto, presented a different way of thinking about the world based on reason rather than religion. Although the faith of the majority remained strong, the tenets of