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I, Madame Tussaud
KIRKUS REVIEW
A novel, cast in the form of an autobiography, reveals the life of Anne Marie Grosholtz who came from Strasbourg, to Paris, to London to be known as the one who gave her married name to the famous waxworks. Modeling as detailedly in words as did Marie in wax, this sidelights fashionable, royal France, its swarming patriots and revolutionists, the gruesome vulgarity of the Terror, the curt courtesy of the Republic and the emergence of Napoleon. For the young Marie gives her hands -- and later her heart -- to her uncle Philip, who knew the favors of the Contis, the Orleans, and the people when he turned his wax portraiture and his cabinet of newsworthy events open to commercial use (Philip, a doctor who could not stand blood, found preciseness in wax a personal, political and powerful lever). Seeing a world die in her young life, tiny Marie became the skilled automation of the workroom and gatherings, became, too, an unmarried spinster as well as the friend of great names and faces (life and death masks), married the peasant-stamped Tussaud who never lived up to his reputed descent from Louis XV, fought his growing, phony commercialism and, when the chance came to take the Cabinet to England on tour, fled with her lover and later her sons.... Along with the dedication to a craft, the daily accounting of household and finances, the cross purposes of Philip and her mother, the mighty and the low, is the reincarnation- deduced and decisive-of an 18th century figure in high relief. Conversation worthy.
A novel, cast in the form of an autobiography, reveals the life of Anne Marie Grosholtz who came from Strasbourg, to Paris, to London to be known as the one who gave her married name to the famous waxworks. Modeling as detailedly in words as did Marie in wax, this sidelights fashionable, royal France, its swarming patriots and revolutionists, the gruesome vulgarity of the Terror, the curt courtesy of the Republic and the emergence of Napoleon. For the young Marie gives her hands -- and later her heart -- to her uncle Philip, who knew the favors of the Contis, the Orleans, and the people when he turned his wax portraiture and his cabinet of newsworthy events open to commercial use (Philip, a doctor who could not stand blood, found preciseness in wax a personal, political and powerful lever). Seeing a world die in her young life, tiny Marie became the skilled automation of the workroom and gatherings, became, too, an unmarried spinster as well as the friend of great names and faces (life and death masks), married the peasant-stamped Tussaud who never lived up to his reputed descent from Louis XV, fought his growing, phony commercialism and, when the chance came to take the Cabinet to England on tour, fled with her lover and later her sons.... Along with the dedication to a craft, the daily accounting of household and finances, the cross purposes of Philip and her mother, the mighty and the low, is the reincarnation- deduced and decisive-of an 18th century figure in high relief. Conversation worthy.
370 pages, Hardcover
Published June 19, 1957
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