Kate Berridge (7 page)

Increasingly popular in the streets too were the mobile coffee-sellers, and the sheer numbers of them in this period represent the democratization of a drink that was formerly a luxury. Whereas an Englishman was said to have snuff in his pocket at all times, a Frenchman had sugar, for the increased sugar supply from the plantations in the West Indies had made sweetened coffee the preferred drink. Coffee wars broke out between the coffee women on the street corners, with their tin urns and earthenware cups, and the confectioners who sold the same coffee at more than twice the price in the mirrored splendour of cafés–although, as Mercier noted, workmen had neither the time nor the inclination to be looking at themselves while they drank. Whereas they were probably stoking themselves up for a whole day with their coffee, the leisured classes took a more ceremonial approach and even dedicated verse to the various drinks–‘la fève de Mokka, la feuille de Canton'. In private homes it became fashionable to employ young black houseboys to pour and hand round porcelain cups of coffee and tea–a ceremony contrived to create contrast with, and highlight, the milk-and-rose-petal pallor of the hostess's own complexion. This affectation was in marked contrast to the buzz of the public coffee house, which was emerging as a popular venue to discuss current affairs.

In her memoirs Marie makes mention of her mother's culinary skills, which take on a new significance when the food supply at this time is considered. Consumption of beef was the privilege of the nobility and clergy, and everyone else had to make do with cow meat.
As with clothes, appearances were deceptive, and the discovery of teeth in a steak was a common occurrence given that fragments of jawbone were commonly passed off as ‘cutlets'. The poor food of Paris was ammunition for Anglo-French rivalry, and after a tour of Paris in 1775 Dr Johnson joked that the French meat was so bad it would be sent to jail in England. An article in the
Oxford Magazine
described it as ‘so near to carrion that our butchers would throw it in the Thames; hence a variety of sauces and ragouts and every culinary trick is employed to hide what would otherwise be disgusting to the appetite.'

A good housekeeper was a prized asset, given that shopping and cooking required more initiative than one might think. Food was not stored but was bought daily, and the Parisian housewife needed her wits about her. Bad meat needed good seasoning, but it was common practice for grocers to make pepper go further by adding dog dung, ‘which being blackened and powdered blends perfectly, so that innocent Parisians savour their food not with the spices of Malacca but a very different product'. Savvy shoppers insisted on having their pepper freshly ground in front of them.

While the less well-off tried to avoid eating dog excrement, the wealthy were developing a taste for the affected non-consumption of solid food–restaurants originated in response to the fad for restorative and extravagantly priced soups. The word ‘restaurant' was coined from the ‘restorative' bouillon that was their speciality, and on which the first celebrity chefs staked their reputations. Picky eating was a pernicious fashion, and as one social commentator noted at a new restaurant in the Palais-Royal, ‘Even if he is not sick, a pretentious little fop often orders consommé because it gives him the aura of ill health.' The polarity of classes in pre-Revolutionary Paris is perhaps most clearly expressed by the perpetual struggle of ordinary people to keep body and soul together coexisting with the orthodox anorexia that was so fashionable among the well-to-do, and which did not impress Mercier: ‘At grand dinners and rich men's tables it is not rare to see women drinking only water and leaving twenty dishes untouched, yawning and complaining of their digestions and men following suit by disdaining wine in affectation of the fashion.'

Another hazard of buying everyday provisions was that the grocer doubled as the druggist and used one set of scales for everything.
Arsenic and cinnamon might be weighed one after the other, and the upshot of misinterpreting chemical characters on boxes was frequently a quiet burial. The adulteration of food led to the beginning of branding. In order to establish consumer confidence in the reliability of the product, and thereby win customer loyalty, sellers realised the advantages of the association of a specific name with a product. This set in train the dynamics of advertising and it was the mechanics of publicity that Marie witnessed at this time that stood her in such good stead when she came to England, later distinguishing herself as a pioneer of commercial advertising. The growing sophistication of consumer-targeted publicity is striking in Paris during the first half of her life. One aspect of this was that, instead of using documents, obsolete papers, and pages of old books to wrap products, suppliers began customizing wrappings. The biggest paper wrapping in the century was created when Réveillon publicized his name on the paper balloon that hovered above the city in 1783, but more generally commercial marketing was in the air.

Traders started to realize the cachet that a famous customer could bring to their products. Rose Bertin, from virtually the day she had the custom of Marie Antoinette, made a point of emblazoning ‘Milliner to the Queen' in large letters on all her bills. Similarly, Réveillon sought permission to refer to his wallpaper factory by the grand title of ‘Royal Manufactory'. The adult Marie was prone to embellish her own royal connections, and always incorporated impressive lists of noble patrons in all her marketing materials–unlike Réveillon, she was not shy of manufacturing royal patronage and name-dropping royals for her own ends.

From an early age, then, Marie understood the value of publicity and the mechanisms of marketing. Her eyes and ears were permanently attuned to commercial opportunities. Other girls from the newly affluent backgrounds of the self-made went to fee-paying convents, but Marie pursued a worldlier curriculum. Instead of a formal education–she was barely literate as an adult–she learned how to read what the public wanted to see, and how to translate curiosity into takings. Numeracy and bookkeeping were the household priorities. Attendance figures were carefully recorded, and at the end of each day she and Curtius totted up takings rather than counting blessings.
Under Curtius she mastered all these skills while still a child, and her grasp of them stood her in good stead for the rest of her life. From her exposure to the most brazen practices of the showmen she observed that how you hooked the public was ultimately more important than what you showed them. Potential customers could decide not to come in, but once admitted they would receive no refund for disappointment. As economic and political problems escalated and prising extra francs from individual purses became more difficult, marketing savvy was the distinguishing feature between those who survived and those who sank to precarious subsistence. In adapting to changing circumstances, whether the customary difficulties of the showman or the extreme conditions that came later and which saw even Madame de La Tour du Pin reduced to embossing pats of butter with the family crest at her American dairy, Marie could not have had a better teacher in the rules of commercial survival than Curtius. On many occasions in her life this grounding gave her the grit to overcome adversities that would have defeated most people.

Empty stomachs rather than greedy hearts were the basis of the social unrest that escalated towards the end of the 1780s, and food–specifically bread–was a vital element in social division. Bad harvests, government control of grain supplies, and fluctuations in the price of a loaf led to a very unstable bread supply. It has been estimated that bread accounted for a staggering 50 per cent of the average French worker's income at this time. When the price of a four-pound loaf rose from an average of nine sous to nearly fourteen sous in 1775 a flour war broke out, and the aggrieved small players of Parisian society ransacked and pillaged bakers, and ran amok in the flour markets. In response to this, the most dedicated followers of fashion, for whom bread was always in abundant supply, adopted a hairstyle called
à la révolte
, the white flour in their heavily powdered hair motivated not by sympathy, but by the desire to be seen to be up to the minute. Mercier observed this profligate use of a valuable commodity by both women and men: ‘Victims emerge with faces like ghosts, and as for the master's own coat it must carry three times its own weight of flour, six pounds at least. In addition to which if he is talkative he has probably swallowed something like four ounces.'

Light was similarly socially divisive. At one end of the social spectrum, a single candlestick with tallow was the meagre source of
light in the households of the poor; at the opposite extreme was the daily replacement, even if unused, of beeswax candles at Versailles under the supervision of a light-keeper. For a significant proportion of the population of Paris, daylight dictated their daily routine. Those with money conspicuously flaunted the fact by rising at noon and arranging their social lives until well past midnight. The later one rose, the greater the social cachet, and a woman keeping this pattern was called a ‘lamp'. Public lighting was limited, with a mere 8,000 candles in lanterns servicing the city in 1770, and these were frequently snuffed out by the wind. In the course of her life, Marie saw the city illuminated by more lanterns, and then the introduction of oil. Inventories from the Curtius household show that she herself grew up in a household with plenty of light, and the number of candelabras testifies to a background of affluence. Light was also a key element in creating atmosphere in the various branches of the exhibition.

The inventories' listing of the many candelabras, glasses, fine objects and furnishings testify to the privileges that Marie enjoyed in the 1770s and '80s, on the coat-tails of Curtius's impressively swift ascent to fame and fortune. He even acquired a second home, a coveted trophy of the rising middle classes, and had enough capital to trade in fine art, where he showed astute judgement. Marie writes, ‘In regard to pictures by the ancient masters he was most indebted for the fortune he acquired, frequently purchasing originals at a very modest price and disposing of them at a rate equal to their real value.'

In a cocoon of material comforts, the Curtius household had a very different perspective on daily life from the majority of Parisians, who were eking out an existence from one meal to the next. In fact Curtius's dining table was apparently the setting for an almost constant round of hospitality extended to the most illustrious public figures of the age. The house, we are told, was ‘a resort of many of the most talented men of France, particularly as regarded the literati and artists; and amongst those who were frequently dining at her Uncle's, Madame Tussaud most forcibly remembers Voltaire, Rousseau, Dr Franklin, Mirabeau and Lafayette.'

Marie's memories of childhood provide a view of notable figures strikingly different from how they are encountered in official histories–Mirabeau, for example, ‘much pitted with smallpox', and
the Duc D'Orléans, ‘disfigured by pimples and red pustules'. Though she divulges nothing about her own family, and we learn nothing of either their character or what they looked like, the foundation of her memoirs is famous people glimpsed in private, in close-up. Voltaire's public persona, all vitriolic attacks on Church and state–‘I should like to see the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest'–is in stark contrast to the kind man of Marie's childhood memories: ‘Voltaire used to pat her on the cheek and tell her what a pretty little dark-haired girl she was.' Later, however, in a catalogue she printed during her tour of Georgian England, she took a prudish stance in her assessment of the great writer. His biographical entry includes the warning: ‘His writing contains a considerable portion of wit and general learning, but is not calculated for the perusal of youth, being mixed with much indecency and profaneness. The dross wants separating from the gold.' Here, as also in her memoirs, Marie seems to be playing to the English gallery, expressing a view that would appeal to her audience.

Her reminiscences give a vivid impression of wine-fuelled arguments that went on long into the night between Voltaire and Rousseau, who would hurl accusations of plagiarism at his rival. ‘When Voltaire retired then Rousseau would give vent to all his rage against his arch rival, till he would exhaust all the abusive language of the French language in expressing his wrath, exclaiming “Oh! Le vieux singe! Le scélérat! Le coquin!”(Oh! The old monkey, the knave, the rascal!) until he was fatigued by the fury of his own eloquence.' She relates how Benjamin Franklin would attempt to remain on the sidelines when the philosophical fur was flying: ‘Dr Franklin would calmly regard them, merely a faint smile sometimes enlivening his countenance, as he coolly contemplated the infuriated disputants.' Through the unworldly eyes of her teenage self, the man revered as embodying the Rousseau ideal of natural man is recalled more prosaically, and is of more interest as a dancing partner ‘remarked for having particularly fine legs'. Indeed, many of these recollections assume the pattern of the song ‘I danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales.' Her name-dropping gives the impression of a constant procession of the rich and famous through the family home.

Given the clout de Conti had in Parisian society, it is reasonable to assume that his patronage secured Curtius private commissions from the privileged classes, and a network of influential contacts. However, on closer examination some glaring anomalies cast doubt on the veracity of some of Marie's stories. For example, Voltaire spent a considerable part of his life in exile from Paris, owing to the state's distrust of his writings. This meant that from 1759 he spent the bulk of his time at Ferney, his estate near the French–Swiss border, until he returned to a hero's welcome in Paris, at the age of eighty-three, in 1778. It is unlikely that he was a regular guest at the homespun salons that Curtius was supposed to have hosted, for he was not in Paris for more than a few weeks of Marie's entire lifetime, despite the fond childhood recollections of cheek-patting and petting that became such a potent and enduring part of the Madame Tussaud myth.