In the Shadow of the Guillotine
Whatever the exact nature of Maries’ royal connections, they almost cost her life. During the Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety ordered the arrest of Marie and her mother as royalist sympathizers. For three months, they were imprisoned in the Laforce Prison, Paris. Then, Marie was found guilty of being an enemy of the revolution and sentenced to death. She had apparently just been prepared for execution, when she received an eleventh-hour reprieve, organized by Collot d’Herbois, a member of the Committee of Public Safety and an associate of her mentor, Pierre Curtius.
Since the revolution, Curtius had wisely trod a conciliatory path with the new regime, courting its leaders as he had once courted the fallen royal family. This attitude helped keep him alive. He must have cautioned the newly released Marie to do the same. She needed to show her loyalty to the revolution to preserve herself. So, like Curtius, she put her art at its disposal. Working with her mentor, she began to make death masks of the enemies of the revolution executed by the guillotine.
Marie and Curtius either ‘rented’ the heads from the executioner or else had them delivered by the authorities. Either way, it must have been profoundly unpleasant work for Marie. Firstly, she was dealing with severed heads, which aside from anything else were a constant reminder of her own near fate. But this apart, she knew many of the people she was forced to cast. They had been her employers; maybe even people she liked. Amongst them were Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and later, the disgraced revolutionary Robespierre.
However, it wasn’t just the victims of the guillotine Marie was casting. She and Curtius were also producing wax portraits of many prominent revolutionary leaders. One of the most noteworthy for Marie was the death mask of the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat. An opponent, Charlotte Corday, stabbed Marat while taking a bath for a skin complaint. Marie was immediately called to the scene of the crime.
Madame Tussaud later recorded the incident in her memoirs: “Gens d’armes came for me to go to the house of Marat, just after he had been killed by Charlotte Corday, for the purpose of taking a cast of his face, ” she recalled. “He was still warm, and his bleeding body and the cadaverous aspect of his almost diabolical features presented a picture replete with horror, and I performed my task under the most painful sensations.”
In 1794, Curtius died, leaving Marie his entire collection of waxworks and his two wax museums. The following year, she married. Her new husband was a civil engineer, Francois Tussard. The couple had three children: a young daughter who died in infancy and surviving sons, Joseph and Francois. The marriage, however, was not a success and in 1802, Marie Tussaud took her four-year-old son Joseph on what was to be a brief tour of London. It was a tour that was to last 33 years.