I found Michelle Moran's Madame Tussaud to be a fascinating read that I could barely put down. Which surprised me a bit because the faux-historic cover they chose implies that the book is going to be history-lite, like a trip to Epcot. And after reading it, I'm further surprised that this subject hadn't already produced a blockbuster book - because it features a strong female who's still famous 200 years later, who's thrust into the middle of a huge political upheaval, who knew all the big players of her day including the king and queen, and who has to fight for survival. It has all the makings of a great story - and this telling is especially well done.
I'm totally ignorant of this time period - that is, the French Revolution - except for the basic facts (which is especially pathetic considering I took nine years of French). Besides Les Miserables, the only strong image I have of it is Jacques-Louis David's painting Death of Marat which has freaked me out for many years.
But I'm pretty sure that Moran takes an unusual - though apparently true - perspective on the events by portraying Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as victims instead of free-loving perpetrators. This is where Madame Tussaud - or Marie Grosholtz, as she was known then - comes in. She and her mother's companion run a well-regarded wax museum in Paris and one day, Marie is asked to tutor the king's sister in wax working. Through her family and the museum, she is already acquainted with some of the revolutionaries, including Robespierre, and from her tutoring, she gets to closely observe life at Versaille. Then Marie essentially gets caught in the middle; as the politically impotent king and queen fight to survive and the revolutionaries gain more power, a mob mentality begins to take over and the virtues of "liberte, egalite, fraternite" turn into a Reign of Terror. Her family becomes nervous because of their ties to the royal family and so when the mob starts bringing decapitated heads to the museum, they feel they have no choice but to preserve these "souvenirs." The book is really about the French Revolution - only at the end does Marie even meet Monsieur Tussaud but I think it was better for it.
In the end, what I really liked about this book is that it made me think beyond the text. I know what happened but I don't understand why, not really. How does a ragtag group of men manage to take over a government, and then how does essentially one man, Robespierre, freely institute ridiculous arrest warrants? These are the same questions I'm left with when I think about the Holocaust - how does this happen? I suppose if anyone had the answer to this, we could figure out world peace.
I haven't been to Madame Tussaud's in London in about a decade so I'm struggling to remember what's there. However, the Internet is telling me that they still have some of Marie's original wax pieces, including a number of the gruesome death masks she was forced to make.
No comments:
Post a Comment