Kate Berridge (16 page)

Marie's wax model of the Comte de Lorges

To give further veracity to her account of the liberation of the Comte de Lorges, Marie's memoirs invoke Robespierre. Before Palloy's demolition squad reduced it to rubble, the deserted prison became the prime destination for curious sightseers, including Marie. She describes how Robespierre, like a tour guide, conducted the fascinated visitors to the different parts of the prison–including the cell where de Lorges had been confined. Here he burst forth into an energetic declamation against kings, exclaiming, ‘Let us for a while reflect on the wretched sufferer who has been just delivered from a living
entombment, a miserable victim to the caprice of royalty.' Her account of her visit is also memorable for her claim that, descending the narrow stairs, she slipped and ‘was saved by Robespierre, who catching hold of her, just prevented her from coming to the ground; in the language of compliment observing that it would have been a great pity that so young and pretty a patriot should have broken her neck in such a horrid place'. In a life notable for a preponderance of twists of fate, how ironic that Marie nearly met her own death while visiting the dungeon that later on indirectly contributed to her financial fortune–if indeed she was not simply creating a frisson for her English audience by this account of a notorious murderer saving her neck in such a poignant place.

What is incontrovertible is the widespread credence given to the myths and misleading interpretations of the physical remains of the Bastille. Such was the gullibility of the public that an old printing press was presented to them as a despicable instrument of torture, and human remains from the medieval past unearthed during demolition were given new biographies to better fit the status of recent victims of barbaric kings. Across the board the public subscribed to the symbolism. The son of an English doctor recording his impressions as a sightseer spoke of ‘the fallen fortress of the tyrannic power', and in a similar vein Madame de Genlis referred to ‘the frightful monument of despotism'. Marie helped propagate this perception. Dungeons had been full of noxious vapours and stench; cells infested ‘by rats, lizards, toads and other loathsome reptiles'; airless windowless cells admitted neither light nor fresh air; torture instruments would punish ‘those unhappy persons whom the cruelty or jealousy of despotism had determined to destroy'. And, most chilling, there had been ‘an iron cage about twelve tons in weight with a skeleton of a man in it who had probably lingered out a great part of his days in that horrid situation'. To read her account of her purportedly first-hand experience in the Bastille is to see a blueprint for the synthetic dungeon that eventually became known as the Chamber of Horrors. Two models of the Bastille, one showing it before the fall, and the other in ruins, were also put on display in the Boulevard du Temple exhibition, and later came to England with her. But
Curtius's show-stopper in the summer of 1789 was a tableau of the siege–a theatrical backdrop to the unambiguously authentic heads of de Launay, Flesselles and Foulon. The collection, formerly a frivolous and fashionable recreation, was fast becoming an indicator of the political climate.

W
HILE CURTIUS AND
Marie adapted their exhibition, a wave of idealism swelled. In 1790 the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille saw the first epic Revolutionary festival for a mass audience. Choreographed by the painter Jacques-Louis David, it took place on the Champ de Mars, rather than the site of the Bastille, and was designed to emphasize unity and to usher in a new era of classless harmony. Where formerly privilege and tradition had divided, patriotism was presented as a unifying force. In the spirit of equality, a cast of thousands were not just spectators but took a participatory role in the preparations, including site preparation and setting up the enormous amphitheatre and stage. Marie describes taking part in this communal earth-shifting, when both the highest and the lowest wielded the spade and the pick in fraternal harmony, and she herself trundled a barrow in the Champ de Mars. A fellow wheelbarrow-pusher and witness was Madame de La Tour du Pin, who noted, ‘Laundresses and Knights of St Louis worked side by side.'

Whereas
Ancien Régime
pageantry was a spectacle of power, reinforced by the sheer force of time and tradition, this revolutionary display was an ephemeral celebration of the present. David conceived everything on a spectacular scale, with dazzling special effects designed to increase the visual impact. Variously featuring in his festivals were fountains gushing from gigantic breasts, processions of children, clouds of white doves, the burning of old symbols, the brandishing of banners bearing new ones, togas and chariots, laurels and cypress, classical imagery recast for a new civic idyll. He also had a mass-choir habit. But it was eventually to become apparent that the new political landscape he was dramatizing was as flimsy and unstable as his plaster-of-Paris models and cardboard mountains. Unity and frater
nity were not achieved simply by putting on a spectacular show of these virtues. Festivals alone did not instantly inculcate their values in the hundreds of thousands of citizens who saw them, and the hope that patriotism would prove a cohesive force proved to be wildly over-optimistic. The initial sense of
l'année heureuse
quickly gave way to an overwhelming feeling of anticlimax. Equality too was to prove elusive in practice. The festival generated a huge influx of custom from beyond the city for the prostitutes in the Palais-Royal and yet, far from displaying a spirit of unity and equality, the opportunist girls had no qualms about charging young clients six livres, and more mature clients twelve.

As people embraced a patriotism that theoretically dissolved class differences, there was a backlash against the former frivolities of fashion. As well as pushing together to make a public arena, people in a new way pulled together to swell the national coffers. There was a mass meltdown of shoe buckles and silver accessories, as citizens from all classes proffered their valuables to the mint. The zest for patriotic donations and the eagerness to have one's name printed on the thanksgiving lists of the National Assembly meant that patriotism itself became a fashion, and its dictates were taken every bit as seriously as the wildest extravagances that had been so blindly adhered to before. Hairdressers adapted by promoting patriotic hairstyles. In place of wigs and powder, the look was overtly low maintenance, the implication being that, whereas aristocrats devoted hours and fortunes to their high hair, the patriotic mind was on a higher plane. Marie records the changes: ‘the hair cut short without powder “à la Titus” and shoes tied with strings', where before ‘hair was worn long and powdered and buckles were in use for the shoes.' The new look did not impress the English aristocrat William Wellesley-Pole: ‘Men in order to show their democracy have sacrificed their curls and toupees; some of them go about with cropped locks like English farmers without any powder, and others wear little black wigs.'

However, if the former excesses were curbed, they were not completely quashed. Enterprising jewellers produced glass and crystal trinkets emblazoned with slogans such as ‘La Patrie'. Brass shoe buckles were marketed as ‘à la nation' and even milliners cottoned on to this ruse, merely renaming their confections in tune with the times. Writing
from Paris to his wife in the country, the Marquis de Mesmon tells her he has bought her a ‘terribly pretty hat in the latest fashion which is entitled “To Liberty”–the most
ravissant dernier cri
!' What all this meant for Curtius and Marie was packing away all the frills and finery, and consigning their Bertin creations to dust sheets and trunks, as increasingly they found themselves kitting out their figures in uniforms.

The kaleidoscopic fashion palette of the
Ancien Régime
dried up to three colours: red, white and blue. Florists did well with poppies, daisies and cornflowers, and ribbon-makers profited from a run on tricolour trimmings, which were worn in buttonholes, and as rosettes and cockades. Finery with aristocratic associations was out, and, for those who had depended on the ostentatious consumption associated with feudalism, patriotism was a disaster. ‘The embroiderers are going bankrupt; the fashion merchants are closing down; the dressmakers are sacking three-quarters of their workers. Women of quality will soon no longer have chambermaids.' Not generally known for his fashion tips, Marat's fashion forecast was bleak. ‘I should not be surprised if in twenty years' time there is not a single worker in Paris who can trim a hat, or make a pair of pumps.'

In contrast, the rag-sellers and ink suppliers and those engaged in papermaking, printing and publishing all flourished. The official records of the new governing bodies and the public appetite for news generated a vast market for paper and print, and with the quickened pace of current affairs journalists thrived as never before. The wax-works were in a unique position to give a visual commentary on the changes. They were able to keep abreast of every development, where other manufacturers struggled to keep up. Topicality was particularly problematic for the producers of politically themed objects. For example, designs for plates with images and slogans for one political phase became quickly obsolete, given the turnover of governing bodies, each with a different agenda. The waxworks, however, were ideally placed to cater to a climate of instability. A nineteenth-century commentator, Audiffret, gives a good summary of Curtius's adaptability. ‘Curtius made a display of his patriotism from the start of the Revolution; he offered for the public approval or execration the men of the hour or the whirl of fashion, victors and vanquished, and awarded them a place of honour or infamy according to the
circumstances. He became a weathercock, like so many men who did not boast about it and who had found for themselves a way of making money.'

The weathercock response was not only a sound commercial strategy: it was to become a means of survival. Ill winds were gusting in 1791. The death of Mirabeau–who, in spite of his aristocratic status, had played a prominent part in the first phase of the Revolution and been elected to the Estates General as a representative of the Third Estate–was crushing for the moderate cause. Marie describes his funeral cortège as exceeding anything of the kind she had ever witnessed. His funeral was also significant as the inauguration of the Panthéon as a secular hall of fame for the great and the good. The architect de Quincy extended Soufflot's supremely elegant neoclassical shell of the unfinished church of Saint-Geneviève into a space that signified the symbolic and secular reorientation of social values. The Panthéon was radical in recognizing worth and birth as separate and unrelated criteria for social distinction. In a new way, worth was in the eye of the beholder, and the people, not the Establishment, were ostensibly the arbiters of greatness. As Madame de Staël noted, ‘For the first time in France a man celebrated by his writings and his eloquence received honours formerly accorded to great noblemen and warriors.' However, although the Panthéon might have looked more democratic, in a sense it was much less so than a Christian church. At a crucial doctrinal level, whatever the trappings of social hierarchy, all souls were equal before God. Kings and peasants alike knew they would be judged by the same God. In the Panthéon, some people were explicitly more ‘worthy' than others, and the entity ascribing worth was the nation/state/Revolutionary government. What mattered was the ‘will of the people'–though all too often this turned out to be the whim of some politician. Nevertheless, the Panthéon replicated on a grand scale what the waxworks provided as a popular entertainment, a forum for secular idolatry.

In his diary, Gouverneur Morris, reflecting on Mirabeau's funeral, eloquently conveys the climate of changeability, and questions the honours accorded to the first resident of the Panthéon: ‘I have seen this man, in the short space of two years, hissed, honoured, hated and mourned. Enthusiasm has just now presented him gigantic. Time and
reflection will shrink that stature. The busy idleness of the hour must find some other Object to execrate or exalt. Such is Man, and particularly the French Man.' This was to prove true, and when Mirabeau's double-dealing with the royal family was later uncovered, his mortal remains were ignominiously removed from the Panthéon. The installation and subsequent removal of Mirabeau was a grand-scale version of the simple dynamics of the chop-and-change celebrity culture promoted so successfully by Curtius and Marie. Like contemporary celebrity culture, political allegiance to specific people was eternal only while it lasted, an unstable mix of sincerity and fickleness. The waxworks were at the apex of the culture of impermanence, charting the changing allegiances in public life.

The fact that Curtius was politically active, with a role in the National Guard and a member of the Jacobin Club, meant that it fell to Marie to keep the exhibition running smoothly from day to day. As a captain in the newly co-ordinated civic militia called the Chasseurs, Curtius was required to go on anti-smuggling patrols and to supervise food distribution. All this ate into his career as a showman, and in his pamphlet he referred rather resentfully to ‘sacrificing the time belonging to my work. This is a loss for an artist.' Although the proliferation of men in uniform on the streets was a reminder of the background tensions, there was an atmosphere of relative calm until the King's abortive flight in the spring of 1791. After this the divisions between royalists and republicans became more serious. Marie notes in her memoirs, ‘France was at this period rent by different factions.'

There was an all-pervasive sense of duality, and of people at all levels of society being challenged by conflicting allegiances and divided loyalties–Curtius the artist-businessman negotiating an incredibly politicized environment and torn between show business and civic duties; the members of the French Guard increasingly torn between loyalty to the King and empathy with the National Guard; the general public split between moderate Girondins and extreme Jacobins; the National Assembly pulled between appeasing the people and punishing the King; and the King himself torn between complying with the constitution and fleeing to reassert his power, assisted by foreign allies. In this climate, allegiance started to become
a much more serious matter, and one can begin to understand the origins of Marie's reticence. Her iron will seems to have been forged in these trying times when it was at first prudent and then became vital that she learned not to say how she felt, not to tell what she knew. An extra pressure was that the exhibition was a highly conspicuous public arena, with the stakes set high if the tableaux and figures did not chime perfectly with public opinion.

With the failed escape attempt of the royal family, all vestiges of respect for monarchy vanished. As Grace Elliott noted, ‘Even those who some months before would have lain in dust to make a footstool for the Queen passed her and splashed her all over.' There was even more contempt for the King. He was called Louis the Hated and Louis the Fat Pig–Marie certainly blamed the failure of his escape attempt on the legendary Bourbon greed, given that he had insisted on stopping for supper. At the family home she eavesdropped as political talk at the dinner table turned to republicanism:

Writing on the eve of the Revolution, Mercier had challenged France to remould itself. In a stirring address, he had urged his audience to grasp the potential for change: ‘See that you are ruled not by order of nature but by caprices, which your cowardice has allowed to harden into laws. Know yourselves, hate yourselves and in that excellent discontent remould your world!' By 1791 discontent had turned into belief not just that the monarchy should be brought to heel, but that it could be removed. Remoulding was dramatically under way–most especially in the waxworks, where Marie found herself working all hours on an ever-shortening cycle of removals and renewals.

Beyond the waxworks, the quest for change involved the destruction of material objects, such as the burning of aristocratic pews
in churchyards, the painting over of all aristocratic livery and the felling of royal statues by way of a ritual purging of feudal symbols. But rapidly the focus shifted to flesh-and-blood subjects. If in 1790 the number-one hit and national theme song was the optimistic ‘Ça Ira'–a pre-Revolutionary version of ‘Que Sera Sera': ‘Things will work out'–then by 1791 a new second line was ominously violent: ‘Let's hang aristocrats from the lanterns!' This was belted out with gusto at every opportunity. Similarly violent was the oratory of Danton and Marat, who supplied a significant amount of the raw material from which the social order was being recast. Marie lets us see them afresh. Danton's mild manners off the podium were greatly at odds with his formidable physical presence–‘His exterior was almost enough to scare a child; his features were large and harsh…his head immense.' Marat, in stark contrast, was ‘short with very small arms, one which was feeble from some natural defect, and he appeared lame; his complexion was sallow, of a greenish hue, his hair was wild, and raven black; his countenance had a fierce aspect.' She describes his fire-in-the-belly speeches as seeming to come from someone under the influence of some ‘demonical possession'.