Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. All right, let's bango. Well, hello, and welcome to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. My name is Lindsay, and I'm your host for this monthly ish podcast about art history. I am so happy to be back in your ear because it means that I just submitted the first chapter of my dissertation, which is kind of cool. But it also means that there's three more to go. Hence the monthly ish posting schedule of this podcast, which is what I do in my free time because I'm crazy. First things first, I want to say a huge thank you to the people who responded to my plea last episode for you to rate and review the podcast. A few of you came through for me, one person in a big way by leaving a written review, and I genuinely appreciate it. For those of you who have not yet rated and or reviewed the podcast on iTunes or, you know, wherever you listen to it, I would really, really appreciate it if you would just take two minutes out of your day to do that. Please, and more importantly, thank you. I am so excited for today's episode, and yes, I do know that I say that every episode, but I'm especially excited for today, because I am finally getting around to talking about someone and something that I have been wanting to talk about since before the podcast even began. I have had a long time fascination with the topic of today's podcast since I was a teeny tiny girl. And by teeny tiny I mean very young because I've never been a teeny tiny person. Today's episode is about an artist and an art form that everyone knows, but very few people talk about, especially art historians who are, I would say, too cool for school, but we love school, so I don't know about that. I am talking about the artist and entrepreneur Anna Maria Grohl-Schultz, though you may call her Madame Tussaud, even better known, at least in English, as Madame Tussaud. In this episode, we are going to cover a little bit of everything: the history of waxworks, the horrors of the French Revolution, celebrities, and the woman who transformed it all into a legacy. This is the part where I tell you stuff about a person and a thing. Madame Toussaud and her empire of wax. Much of what we know about Madame Toussaud's life, be it early, middle, or late, comes to us in the form of her memoirs, which she wrote in London when she was in her eighties. Although a very useful source of information, Madame Toussaud certainly took many of what we shall call factual libertes when retelling the story of her life. It's difficult to say what's true, what's sensationalized or exaggerated, and what is just plain false in her memoirs. But if we take her origin story to be true, the woman that we know as Madame Toussaud was born in Strasbourg, France in 1761 as Anna Maria Grohl-Schultz. Her mother was Anne-Marie Grohl-Schultz. Yes, Anne-Marie named her daughter Anna Maria, which, as I'm sure that you can recognize, has the potential to be very confusing. As such, baby Anna Maria would quickly become known simply as Marie. According to Madame Tussaud herself, her father was allegedly a soldier who had died fighting in the Seven Years' War just two months before Marie was born, which was ongoing in France at this time. But little Marie was not without a father figure for long, because when she was six, she moved with her mother to Bern, Switzerland, where her mother had found work as a housekeeper for a man named Philippe Certuse. Which looks like it's spelled Curtiuse, but I'm gonna go with Curtiuse because Forvaud told me to. Philippe Curtiuse was a very important figure in young Madame Toussaud's life. So important, in fact, that some scholars have even speculated that Madame Toussaud's father was not a soldier at all, but Curtiuse himself. Bum bum bum. Now I can't quite figure out why people think that Philippe Curtous is Madame Toussaud's father, but it seems to come down to the fact that the man exhibited a special affection for the young girl in a, as far as I can tell, non-cree fatherly way. In fact, Madame Tussaud would even call him Uncle, and regardless of whether or not they were actually related, he certainly was the foremost fatherly figure of her life. Philippe Curtus is the one who taught Madame Toussaud everything that she would come to know about wax and business. Curtuse was a Swiss doctor and anatomist who began a career as a sculptor making wax anatomy models. As one can certainly imagine, the 18th century did not have refrigerators or sophisticated embalming techniques, which made working with the anatomical sciences very difficult, smelly, and gross. Because if and when corpses were available, they decomposed very quickly. Wax, however, could be used to recreate anatomical forms, which physicians could then use to learn and teach their craft without having to worry about decomposition. No one wants to have to worry about decomposition. Perhaps wax wasn't ideal, but it was the next best thing when the best thing is a rotting corpse. So there's that. Wax is one of the oldest artistic materials that there is. It has been in use since at least 3000 before the Common Era. That's 5,000 years ago. Of course, very little survives of wax models of yesteryear, given that wax is more fragile than other sculptural materials, both to heat and to impact. If a wax sculpture hits the ground, probably not gonna fare that well. Wax is, however, the ideal material through which to convey likeness, because wax can be manipulated to closely mimic the texture of skin. It's also very pliable, so a talented sculptor can achieve a certain degree of lifelikeness that would be unattainable in a material like stone, for example. Over the course of history, this ability to use wax to achieve lifelikeness was primarily deployed in religious and funereal circumstances, such as the creation of wax death masks. Of course, death masks were made in a variety of materials, just think of King Tut's solid gold death mask that we talked about in, I don't know, a couple episodes ago. But wax and plaster death masks are often called, quote, true death masks, because the material actually comes into contact with the deceased's face. Unlike, say, a bronze death mask, which requires a wax, plaster, or clay intermediary to create a mold into which the bronze is then poured. If that makes sense. I hope it does. Wax is also a very, very popular material from which to make votives or religious offerings. In the Renaissance, for example, if I had a broken foot, I could commission or buy a wax foot, perhaps even complete with toe hair. Who knows? I would then take the wax foot to my church of choice, where I would pray to God, Jesus, a chosen saint, Satan, etc., depending on my mood. And I would ask these higher powers that be to please, please, please heal my foot. I would then leave the wax foot somewhere in the church so that it would both act as a proxy for my ailing foot as well as an offering to the forces that be to heal me. This practice of votives was outrageously popular during the Renaissance, and it's hilarious because we actually have records for churches like the Santissima Annunziata in Florence and Westminster Abbey in London, where votives took over the churches. The interiors of these churches literally looked like wax museums, with wax votives ranging from individual body parts to entire figures just consuming the church. In Florence, there were so many votives that the church eventually built a space for them known as the Chiostrino dei voti, or the little cloister of votives, which filled up with literally hundreds of wax figures. Now, virtually none of these votives survive into the present day because wax, in addition to being fragile, is highly useful to make things like candles, which are always needed in liturgical contexts. As a matter of fact, in 1786, the Church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence melted down that collection of effigies to create what I imagine was an enormous quantity of candles. What had once been a very religious, respected practice had literally been reduced to candle wax. As time went on, wax left the realm of the spiritual andor religious and entered into the realm of the secular andor scientific. And that's certainly the case for Philippe Curtuse and his young protege, Madame Tussaud. As I said, Curtuse had started his work as a wax sculptor in the name of anatomy, of creating didactic materials through which to teach people about the body. And it's not as if Curtuse was the only one doing this. The practice of using wax to create anatomical models was already well established at this time, including the work of individuals such as Guillaume Desnous, Felice Fontana, and Anna Morandi, an anatomist and wax sculptor who preceded Madame Tussaud as a gifted and badass lady doing her own thing. Curtouse, however, transitioned from sculpting anatomical models to creating portraits and small dioramas in wax. He even took these practices one step further by then exhibiting the figures and dioramas that he had made. Again, he was not the first to exhibit wax figures. There were several other individuals who were also doing that, but the practice was still relatively novel, and Certuse's work caught on fast and well. Certuse eventually sought more renown in Paris, which he claimed that he did on the imitation of a French prince, which, I mean, may or may not be true. What is true is that Certuse put on exhibitions of wax figures all over the city. These exhibitions became known as the Salon du Cyr or the Salon of Wax. These exhibitions were not yet up to par with what we might expect of a wax museum today. Not even close. The figures that were exhibited at these salons were not nearly as sophisticated or lifelike as the ones that would follow. They were usually comprised of a wax head stuck onto a cloth body that had been stuffed into clothing, sort of like part wax figure, part dummy. But even so, they were super popular. Curtous displayed his works all over the city, including the famous Palais Royal in Paris, which is located right by the Louvre. In the 18th century, the Palais Royal was inhabited by the House of Orléans, a branch of the royal family. Now it isn't the official royal palace, that's in Versailles, and the Palace of Versailles will come into our conversation shortly. At this point, it's good enough to know that Philippe Curtous was making a name for himself in Paris as a talented wax modeler whose services were sought after even by members of the royal family. Curtouse even famously made a wax portrait of the Madame du Barry, the mistress of King Louis XV, whom you may have seen in the wonderful episode of Doctor Who called The Girl in the Fireplace, which just happens to be one of my favorite Doctor Who episodes of all time. The point here is that Curtuse was doing very well in Paris, and he invited the young Madame Toussaud and her mother to join him in the city, where little Marie, who was still a teen, became his assistant and protege. And Homegirl reached for the stars. She was a baby genius in wax, and according to her, her first wax portrait was none other than Francois Marie Arrouet, also known as Voltaire, a super famous French philosopher whose writings were instrumental to the progression of French Enlightenment, and ultimately were a cornerstone of the philosophical ideology of the French Revolution, an event that we will discuss shortly. Madame Tussaud learned more from Philippe Curtus than how to model wax. She also learned how to sell oneself, how to brand oneself, and how to anticipate and capitalize on trends. Curtous was a master of all of those things. He was equal parts artist and entrepreneur, which were precisely the two hats that Madame Toussaud would wear on her way to greatness. As Kate Barridge writes in her book on Madame Toussaud, Curtuse's exhibitions were the embodiments of cultural taste in Paris. The figures displayed reflected the values and desires of the people who flocked to see the exhibitions. And Certus was a master of both anticipating and reacting to those changing desires, which could and did change very quickly in a city like Paris. Certuse was known to quickly cut the head off a figure and replace it with a newer, more popular head as a way of sort of changing out the stock. There's a late 18th-century cartoon that shows just this that I will post on the website. Certuse even capitalized on the newfound interest in true crime, creating wax models of those involved in murders, such as the notorious Antoine Francois Desroux, an infamous French master of poison, who was executed in 1777 for murder. Curtouse, however, also knew his audiences, and he knew which venues would attract different types of people and what those types of people most wanted to see. The displays at the Palais Royal, for example, tended to skew more aristocratic in their offerings, with popular tableau featuring members of the royal family and other individuals of high society Paris. The exhibits also featured very popular non-murdery figures in Parisian society, such as aeronauts or hot air balloonists who had taken Paris by storm in the late 18th century. Regardless of who was on display, these exhibitions attracted a huge number of people, and in doing so, common people were able to stand in the presence of individuals who they would never ever meet in real life, much like how we do today if we visit a Madame Tussaud's wax museum. Even though those quote-unquote people were wax figures, there's this weird sense of presence that still to this day comes with encountering a wax figure of someone, at least if that figure is any good. And in pre-revolutionary Paris, that sense of presence, of access to these high society individuals, was a very strange and powerful thing. It is difficult to say how Madame Tussaud factored into Curtus's work in Paris. What we do know comes from Madame Toussaud herself, who was an unreliable narrator of her own life. Her memoirs should thus be read with a grain or even an entire salt shaker worth of salt. But it would make sense that she would have some kind of role in Curtise's empire. She definitely helped him make figures, and she was likely a staple presence in Curtis's day-to-day business of running the Salon desire. According to her, her social circle included regular contact with some of the most famous people of Paris and even of France. This including, again, according to Madame Toussaud, the royal family itself. Madame Toussaud claimed that at the age of 19, she was offered work as a tutor to Princess Elizabeth, the sister of then King Louis XVI, and sister-in-law to the famous Queen Marie Antoinette. Madame Tussaud alleges that she was hired to teach Princess Elizabeth wax modeling, and as a result of how well they got along, being relatively the same age, Madame Tussaud was invited to live at the Palace of Versailles for eight years as a tutor and confidant to the princess. This seems too good to be true, and it probably was. It would have been pretty normal for a young princess to take lessons, maybe to sculpt some Madonnas and Jesuses from wax, but there's no record of Madame Toussaud actually living at Versailles. And by the time she wrote her memoirs, no one was really alive to correct her account of things. So why not say that you lived at Versailles? I do it. When I'm writing my memoirs in my 80s, I too will make a ton of stuff up. But the fact of the matter is that Madame Tussaud likely did have some kind of contact with members of the royal family, just not nearly to the degree that she claims. She writes about this period of her life as if she was a royal confidant who knew everything that was going on at the time. I laughed out loud while reading Kate Barridge's book on Madame Toussaud, where Barridge corrects this assertion by calling Madame Tussaud, quote, less fly on the wall than flunky in the corner. From where I'm sitting, it was better to be a flunky than a fly, because by the 1780s, the rail family wasn't flying so high anymore. To continue this use of fly-related words, they were about to get swatted by a fly swatter called the Guillotine. I am, of course, talking about the French Revolution. The French Revolution is a fascinating period in history, about which you can learn all of the things by listening to the third season of the Revolutions podcast, which I highly enjoyed myself. I will, however, give you a brief crash course given that the Revolution is so instrumental in Madame Tussaud's development as a young woman and a young artist. The Revolution was, first and foremost, about King Louis XVI and the royal family being really, really bad with money. Specifically, Louis XVI put way too much money into supporting the American Revolution. Thank you. And his wife, the famous Marie Antoinette, had the 18th century equivalent to an addiction to online shopping and poker tournaments. Now that's obviously very broadly speaking, and there are a lot of intricacies that go into these massive cultural problems. So the royal family is really, really bad at money management, go figure. And as the result of that poor money management and, you know, a few bad ecological events that happened, there was a shortage of food. And have you ever heard the expression hangry? Which is to say that one is so hungry that they are now angry? Well, the French Revolution is hanger, hungry anger du zeneximum. The common people are pissed and they are hungry, which makes for this explosive and very violent combination in the name of, you know, not being hungry or oppressed anymore. How dare they? There's also the fact that this is all happening during the period known as the Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason. This was a time in which people were coming to terms with a growing interest in science, reason, logic, and the belief in the ability of man. This included overcoming superstition and centuries-old traditions that no longer served the people. This was the time of John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Benjamin Freakin' Franklin. This spelled bad news bears for the royals, who had enjoyed centuries of a supposedly God-given right to rule, and who had never, ever had to go hungry. And the common people were sick of it. To say that there was royal disenchantment is an absolute understatement. In a matter of only 10 years, the landscape of Paris had changed dramatically. Despite Philippe Curtiuse and Madame Tussaud's former loyalties to the royal family, the French Revolution brought new opportunities, the business. Revolutionary politics had infiltrated even the Salon desire, and Curtiuse, as I have said, Was very sensitive to what the public wanted. And what the public wanted was the heads of the royals on sticks. I mean, you know, maybe not at first, but at second, yes. Heads on sticks. In fact, during a series of revolts, mutinies, and riots in 1789, the first year of the French Revolution, a bunch of very angry people, probably hangry people, gathered at Curtius's waxworks workshop. Say that five times fast. Waxworks workshop. And this mob demanded wax heads of the two people who had angered them the most, Jacques Snecker and the Duc d'Orléans. And Curtius couldn't say no to an angry mob. I mean, he's not stupid. And so he gave these wax heads to this, you know, angry mob who carried them off on sticks. Now, as I'm sure you can imagine, neither head returned in mint condition. And fun fact, the mob also wanted the full life-sized figure of King Louis XVI. But Certuse managed to convince them that the figure would just fall apart if carried, you know, by a bunch of angry men. And they were like, okay, we'll just we'll just take the two heads then. And off they went. Curtus and his protege, Madame Tussaud, had once depended on royal patronage. Now, however, they depended on remaining afloat with the status quo of the revolution. In 1789 Paris, the royal family was losing, and Curtus was more than willing to cash in his loyalty in exchange for continued success and, you know, survival. Curtis capitalized on these changing tides. By 1791, he had already stashed away all of his royal figures and busts, instead, devoting space to a tableau that represented the storming of the Bastille, which was a critical event in the revolution that is still celebrated in France as one of the nation's major holidays. Curtous would also change out his displays every month to display relevant events happening in Paris, namely those connected to the Revolution. Many of these displays included gruesome replicas of severed heads, and it's this gruesome marriage of wax and revolutionary Paris in which Madame Toussaud would begin to make her name. But first, her loyalties had to be tested. One of the more well-known facts about Madame Toussaud was her involvement in modeling wax replicas of decapitated heads brought to Curtuse's studio by the mob, and the fact that she created death masks for those killed at the guillotine, a tool of execution designed to cut off heads in a single descending slice. These heads included that of the Duchess of Lambal, who was famously killed by a rioting mob, her head removed from her body and placed on a stick, much like those wax heads of Nacaire and the Duke d'Orléans that the mob had taken from Certuse's studio. But this weren't no wax head. This was a real decapitated head that was put on a stick, which the mob famously brought to the prison where Marie Antoinette was being held before her own trial. The mob held the Duchess of Lomball's head up to a window, and it's not believed that Marie Antoinette actually saw the head of her best friend on a stick outside the window, but she certainly knew what was happening outside, even if she didn't see it. Command ditz-vous horrifying. I like French because it lets you do the sound. Pretentious in my Frenchness. Marie Antoinette and her husband, King Louis XVI, were brought to the guillotine themselves in 1793. Madame Toussaud was responsible for modeling their decapitated heads and wax just years after she taught the craft to the Princess Elizabeth, who herself would fall victim to the blade in 1794, just a year after her brother and sister-in-law, the former King and Queen. It's safe to say that Madame Toussaud saw her fair share of terror in the days of the Revolution. She was even one of the first people on the scene following the famous assassination of Jean-Paul Merat, which is a very difficult name to say in French, so I'm just going to go with Morat. Morat is a famous French theorist and politician, though his main claim to fame is the fact that he was murdered in his bathtub, stabbed to death by a woman posing as the maid. Madame Tussaud not only took a cast of Morat's face as his corpse continued to languish in its bloody bathwater, but she also sketched the scene in detail, already of a mind to produce a wax model of the scene as closely as she could. The murder would also be immortalized by another famous figure in art history, Jacques-Louis David, whose version of the Grizzly scene is so popular and well known that we teach it in art history survey courses today. So if you take an art history 101 course, you will probably see David's painting of the death of Murat. Madame Toussaud would even claim that David used her drawings and the death mask that she made in the creation of his masterwork. Though, hmm, it's like probably not. Good try-in, though. It wasn't only decapitated royals and murdered revolutionaries who Madame Toussaud sought to, or more accurately, was forced to render in wax. Others were also to come. In 1793, the French Revolution entered a particularly dark period known today as the Reign of Terror. The war had assumed new battle lines, with the revolutionaries no longer just fighting against the royal family, which had all but been dismantled, but also among themselves. As of the summer of 1793, a man named Massimillon Robespierre was in charge. In the one year that he held political supremacy, hundreds of thousands of people died, most of them in Paris, but some of them outside the city as well. Public executions were the new norm, and operators of the guillotine had steady work on their hands at the expense of, you know, other people's heads. Luckily for Cortuse, he managed to stay on the good side of Robespierre. Business was struggling. Few people had the time or the inclination to attend the Salon du Cieux, given that the streets of Paris provided enough spectacle and blood for a lifetime. Much of Certus's and Madame Toussaud's work in this period was completed in the service of the revolutionaries. Even that, however, did not make them safe. In the summer of 1794, Curtus left Paris on a revolutionary mission of some sort, leaving Madame Toussaud and her mother home alone in Paris. One night there was a knock at the door, and I will editorialize this and say it was a pounding, a pounding at the door. The then 33-year-old Madame Toussaud answered the door to find a group of policemen waiting for her outside. Madame Toussaud and her mother were under arrest, suspected to be royalist sympathizers who were no friends of the Revolution, even as Philippe Curtus was away in service to the cause. This story about Madame Toussaud's imprisonment comes from her memoirs, and therefore, again, may not be entirely factual. Neither Madame Toussaud nor her mother's names appear anywhere in the prison records of Paris for that year. If true, she and her mother were not in prison very long, though, as far as I'm concerned, any amount of time in prison is far too much time in prison. Madame Toussaud claimed that she was let out of prison due to the fact that the painter, Jacques-Louis David, found her wax models so helpful to his paintings, he couldn't operate without her. Uh huh. If she was imprisoned during Robespierre's reign of terror, she certainly had the last laugh, or, you know, the terror equivalent of laughing, given that it was Robespierre and not Madame Toussaud who faced the guillotine in the end. Madame Toussaud rendered the dead revolutionaries head and wax shortly after his death, in the same month that Madame Toussaud alleged to be imprisoned. And with that death, the reign of terror was over. Life, however, has a sneaky way of getting worse before it gets better. Two months after her alleged imprisonment, Madame Toussaud lost her father figure and mentor Curtuse, who died of an unspecified illness at the age of 57. Madame Toussaud would later claim that he had been poisoned, aka murdered, but this was never confirmed. As the result of his death, Madame Toussaud inherited Curtis's business, his property, as well as his reputation. She became the preeminent maker of waxworks in Paris. In the wake of the revolution, the Salon du Sieur once again reacted to the trends of the time, packing away the heads of decapitated revolutionaries to display a collection of revolutionary victims, including Murat's murderesse, Charlotte Corday, and Madame Tussaud's One Time Toute. Life did carry on, though, bringing with it new challenges. In October of 1795, Marie Grescholtz, aged 34, married 26-year-old civil engineer Francois Toussault. There's still time for me yet. The marriage contract between them was highly unconventional, given that Madame Tussaud, as she now well and truly was, retained all of the rights to her property. Lizzo would be proud. I just took a DNA test, turns out. And she did have boy problems. Because her husband sucked. He was a spendthrift, which, contrary to what I thought for 29 years of my life, does not mean that he spent thriftily, but spent copiously. In other words, Homefry liked to spend money. He also liked making babies, as you know, one does. And Madame and Monsieur Tussaud had three children in less than five years, though their eldest child, a girl, died shortly after being born. As part of her mourning process, Madame Tussaud made a model of her deceased daughter in Wax. Now, while incredibly creepy by present-day standards, wax modeling was Madame Toussaud's art, and I'm sure it was just part of her processing her grief. By 1800, she had had two more children, sons named Joseph and Francois, both of whom would become incredibly important to the development of her empire. At this point, however, the wax business wasn't good. People weren't flocking to the Salon du Cyr as they used to. For someone who would eventually build an empire of wax in England, Madame Tussaud didn't seem to put that much effort into saving this floundering business in France. But she had two young kids and a crappy husband to look after. Her husband was so crappy, in fact, that Madame Tussaud took the first opportunity she could to get the heck out of Paris. That opportunity came in 1802, when an old friend of Philippe Protusse invited Madame Toussaud to tour England. She capitalized on this opportunity, taking her oldest son, the then four-year-old Joseph, and leaving the toddler Francois with her mother and aunt. Madame Toussaud left her waxworks business to her useless husband, and, you know, why not? The business was failing anyway. Let it be run to the ground by a fellow failure. Madame Tussaud didn't seem to care. She boarded that boat for England and she never looked back. And she would never, ever return to France. In England, Madame Tussaud became a business partner of Paul de Philador, an old friend of Curtuse's whose own methods of entertainment gave Waxworks a run for their money. Philador is famous for his Phantasmagoria, which deserves an entire episode on its own, but basically was a spooky stage performance featuring lantern effects that were like the IMAX of the 1800. He was even called a quote stage magician. But we aren't going to focus on him because he is, and please do excuse my French, a total d with predatory business practices. And Madame Tussaud got the short end of the stick, though at least this particular stick didn't have any heads on it. Speaking of heads, the wax figures and costumes that Madame Toussaud brought with her from France to England had not fared well in transit, meaning that she had to do a ton of work by herself to get them back into shape, sometimes literally. These included the heads of the king, the queen, and all of the other people who had become about 10 inches shorter after their meeting with the guillotine. Now, can you imagine if someone carrying that trunk happened to take a little sneaky peek inside? Or I'm imagining someone dropping the trunk and then just like these heads literally rolling across the floor. Again, horrifying. The people of England were particularly drawn to the violence that these figures and heads conveyed, given that England, for all its imperial activities, hadn't seen war on its own soil in some time. The French Revolution thus held this particular mix of fascination mixed with fear, mixed with revulsion. There's also a particular fascination that came along with Madame Tussaud's figures specifically, given that they were based on first-hand knowledge of the living and even more titillating, the dead. She was a witness to the horrors that had racked Paris, and these waxen figures were artifacts of that time. Being a wax modeler and exhibitionist in Britain, however, was a different game than in Paris, where Madame Toussaud had benefited from her close relationship with Philippe Curtous. Now I don't want to say that she wrote his coattails or anything like that, even though she kind of did, but she had greatly benefited from the foundation that he had set for her, and she had capitalized on that legacy. In Britain, she had to make a name for herself. This is the time in which Madame Toussaud began to reinvent herself, to curate her own story and present herself in the best particular light. She was creating a brand that centered on herself, the results of which we can read in her memoirs, where she presents this recreated version of who she had been. Madame Toussaud claimed to have operated within the high society echelons of Paris, including the royal family. She portrayed herself as a victim of the revolution rather than a participant in it, even telling that tale of her alleged imprisonment. In many ways, I do think that Madame Toussaud was deeply affected by the French Revolution. I mean, how could you not be even just seeing it happen, much less making models of decapitated heads? There is, however, the fact that Curtous and Madame Toussaud have capitalized on the opportunities brought to them by the French Revolution. That alone certainly does not negate victimhood, of course it doesn't. But Madame Tussaud likely was not the staunch loyalist to the royal family that she presented herself to be in her memoirs, though it's pretty clear that she was nostalgic for that period of her history. In England, Madame Tussaud took advantage of the French Revolution once again, creating what would become known as the quote Chamber of Horrors, which was by far her most popular display in London. People flocked to see the heads of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette alongside those of the people who sent the king and queen to their deaths before meeting their own. But M. Toussault took the trauma of that time and put it on display, turning it into something lucrative and, and I can only guess at this, but also something cathartic, a way of grappling with the things that she had seen and gone through, even as she profited from them. The new myth that she spun for herself allowed her to maneuver through London society. In particular, her alleged ties to the French royal family legitimized her in the eyes of rich patrons who might solicit commissions or models from her. As she was courting these higher society individuals, though, Madame Toussaud also showed herself adept at appealing to lower classes as well, much like Curtuse did when he was first exhibiting in Paris. Much like Curtus, Madame Toussaud knew her audiences and how to relate to them. She made herself into what she needed to be, not only to survive, but thrive in this new place. Now it took many years for her to achieve that, but once she did, there was nowhere to go but up. Madame Toussaud left Britain within a year of her arrival to travel to Edinburgh, which happens to be my favorite city in the whole world. She wouldn't return to London for 13 years. But the move was not only beneficial, it was also kind of necessary. The only reason that she was allowed to travel to England in the first place was because there was a pause in the decades-long war between England and France. That war started up again in 1803, and Madame Toussaud, a French woman, needed to GTFO, get the freak out. So she goes to Scotland. As Pamela Pilbeam writes in her wonderful book about Madame Toussaud, London was also way too close to Paris, where the foul smell of Madame Toussaud's highly disappointing husband continued to waft across the English Channel. Home Fry was screwing everything up, and Home Girl wanted to put as much distance as she could between him and her. Madame Toussaud did pretty well in Edinburgh. She made high society contacts, she opened a successful wax exhibition, and it was in Edinburgh that she really came into her own as a businesswoman. But it took time as all things do. Madame Tussaud also didn't stay put anywhere for too long in the first decade or two that she was abroad. She moved from London to Edinburgh, Edinburgh to Dublin, Dublin back to Edinburgh, Edinburgh back to London, and so on and so forth. Her exhibition was a traveling one. She set up shop wherever the winds took her. Wherever she ended up, however, she always made sure to emphasize the family nature of her business, which included a wax model of her son Joseph that welcomed people into the exhibition, which I think is hilarious. This emphasis on family would form the foundation for the Madame Tussaud empire that we know today. It truly became a family affair, and this was where it started. No matter where she went, Madame Tussaud knew what the public wanted. They wanted to see things and people that they otherwise would never encounter in quote-unquote real life. This included being voyeurs to the past horrors of the revolution, as well as seeing popular and oftentimes famous contemporary figures, such as members of the English royal family. As Pamela Pilbine describes them, Madame Tussaud's shows were education-laced with entertainment. People came to see figures from history, yes, but they also wanted to be entertained. Madame Tussaud provided both. Her work also inspired a series of copycats, though she always edged out the competition in the end. She was so talented, in fact, that there are several accounts of people actually mistaking a waxwork for a real person. And if that's not the ultimate compliment to a wax worker, I don't know what is. But Amtousod spent just under two decades moving all around the United Kingdom touring her waxworks. As I'm sure you can imagine, this kind of itinerant lifestyle took its toll, even if it also had immense payoff. As a woman in her 70s, the itinerant life of a traveling businesswoman and artist was quickly becoming impossible to maintain. As a result, Madame Tussaud sought out a more permanent space in which to display her figures. She rented the top floor of a large building in London known as the Baker's Street Bazaar. At this point, her youngest son Francois had joined her and Joseph in England after a 20-plus year separation. That family dynamic must have been awkward. Regardless of what the interpersonal relationships were like or how fractured they were by mommy issues, Madame Tussaud's sons proved highly loyal, if not to their mother, than to the business that she had almost single-handedly built for herself. The family put a great deal of money and effort into revitalizing their space at the Baker Street Bazaar, hanging velvet from the walls and commissioning columns to decorate the space. This new exhibition proved incredibly successful, attracting some of the most important figures in all of England to its doors. These included Prince Augustus Frederick, the son of then King George III, and Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington renowned for beating Napoleon's butt at Waterloo. Both, it seems, were Madame Toussaud fans. Despite their major successes in London, the Toussaud family had only taken out a short-term lease at the Baker Street Bazaar, which signaled that there was still the potential to take the show back on the road. However, an event in 1836 convinced the Toussauds to remain in London. An opera singer died after complications of falling off a horse. Complications of falling off a horse. I say complications because the Spanish opera singer Maria Malibron refused to get medical attention after falling off her horse, decided the show must go on, went out on stage to perform, and then collapsed. She spent a week in agony in the hospital, dying a very slow death, all because of a freaking horse. Maria Malibron was a super popular opera singer, and her death was a cultural shock that resulted in a wave of public mourning. Now it's unclear to me whether or not there was a pre-existing Maria Malibron figure in Madame Toussaud's Baker Street Bazaar, or whether or not Madame Toussaud made one very quickly in the wake of the opera singer's death. I would assume the former, but I'm not positive. In any case, there was a figure of the now late opera singer that attracted a massive wave of visitors to the Waxworks exhibition. These visitors paid their respects to the wax figure as if it were the singer herself. There were so many visitors during this period that ticket sales literally doubled, and this was enough to convince Madame Tussaud and her sons that London was the best home base for their business. In addition to these lucrative opportunities that tended to arise, there was also the fact that London was the best place to buy authentic costumes and artifacts for displays. The Toussaud sons were, for example, very successful at procuring actual artifacts from the Battle of Waterloo to incorporate into a diorama of the battle. Madame Tussaud thus bought a house nearby the Baker Street Bazaar and settled in for the long haul. She was 75 years old, and for the first time, she was settling down. Marie Tussaud died in her sleep at the age of 88, which to me seems like a fitting end for a woman who remained active until the very final years of her life. So I cannot even fathom what she was feeling. Madame Tussaud isn't really dead at all. Although, you know, she's she's literally dead. I'm not saying that. She's not a zombie. But her legacy lives on in a series of wax museums that now bear her name all over the world. The first of these, of course, emerged in London from that very Baker Street bazaar where her and her sons set up shop in the 1830s. For a very long time, the Toussaud brand remained a family affair. Apart from Joseph and Francois Toussaud, who remained active in the business their whole lives, several generations of Toussauds oversaw the development of the franchise, including Madame Toussaud's great-grandson, John Theodore Toussaud. Although the business itself has survived, most of the original wax statues have not, and that's not only because of the passing of time. There were a series of disasters that struck the collection of wax works in the early to mid-20th century, including a fire in 1925 and the 1941 bombing of London during World War II. The oldest surviving work is the one I mentioned earlier, the portrait of Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV, not by Madame Toussaud, but by Curtus. Madame Toussaud, though, had paid the figure some attention, going so far as to install a device in the figure's chest that moved up and down, thus making it appear as if the king's mistress was breathing. Ever the innovator. As many of you will know, the culture of Madame Toussaud's wax museums is now heavily focused on celebrity culture rather than historical framework, though one may see any number of historical figures on display in the museums. It's just not the focus anymore. I don't necessarily think, though, that the real heart of things has changed. In the early 1800s, the figures displayed in Madame Tussaud's exhibitions were the celebrities of their time. Yes, she included some historical figures here and there, but most of the figures that she made were of public interest, recently deceased or still living. The nature of celebrity is now different, of course, but what remains is still this deep-seated fascination with encountering a waxed figure. The emotions, I imagine, are very much the same now as they were in the late 18th century. It's human nature to be fascinated by things that look like us. It's human nature to want to see people who are famous, to become voyeurs without the consequences of being caught. And none of that really has changed. And I don't see it changing anytime soon. Madame Toussaud's wax museum is no longer confined to the Baker Street Bazaar or even to London. In 1860, after nearly 30 years at the Baker Street location, Madame Toussaud's grandson commissioned a brand new building on Marlebone Road. That location continues to be the flagship Madame Toussaud's Museum, though there are now two dozen such museums across four continents. The first of these satellite museums opened in Amsterdam in 1972, though the list of locations now includes Istanbul, Hollywood, Sydney, Tokyo, New Delhi, Washington, DC, Bangkok, Prague, Nashville, and Shanghai, in addition to many more cities. In 2005, the brand Madame Tusodes changed ownership, selling for, get this, $1.5 billion to a company in Dubai. Just two years later, another company, the Blackstone Group, purchased the brand for $1.9 billion. In just two years, the brand had generated $0.4 billion more worth. The various museums remain incredibly popular tourist destinations, though a ticket for entry will cost you. A standard entry ticket for the Madame Tussauds location in London will cost you at least $25, if not much more. Now, to me, a poor graduate student, that's really steep. That's asking a lot of my pocketbook. But the cost of making new figures is astronomical, as I'm sure is the cost of upkeeping the museum as well as all existing figures. Now that begs the question: how does one go about making a Madame Tussauds wax figure? Well, I'm glad you asked, because I am here to tell you. First, the company decides who it wants to make a figure of, and you best bet it's probably a celebrity. Typically, that celebrity is first brought in for a consultation and a sitting, during which over 250 measurements are taken to ensure the greatest lifelikeness possible of the final figure. These measurements include finding matches for the celebrity's eye color, skin tone, and hair color. A sculptor then uses these measurements to sculpt a clay head, ensuring that everything matches up perfectly with the given measurements. That clay head is then used to make a mold. Molten wax is poured into the mold and allowed to set for about 170 hours, which is the equivalent of about a week. After being taken out of the mold, the wax head is then outfitted first with hair. And get this, each strand of hair is placed by hand in a process that typically takes about six weeks. Can you even imagine? Like, you're the person responsible for placing hair follicles in a wax head for six weeks. After all of the hair is in place, artists then paint the wax figure in order to achieve the highest possible degree of likeness to the celebrity in question. This includes the effort to mimic the textures and translucency of their skin. Now, once all that is said and done, eyes and teeth, if necessary, are inserted. These are not typically made of glass as they were in the olden days, but from acrylic resin. The final figure is then outfitted in a costume, ideally one provided by the celebrity him or herself, actual clothes that he or she has worn. Though of course, many times replicas of a certain costume are substituted. The entire process to make a figure usually takes a team of about 20 workers several months to complete, and costs about $200,000. Each of these wax figures is still made in-house at the original London location before being shipped to its destination. And you best bet that after several months and hundreds of thousands of dollars, those figures are packaged very well indeed. In fact, each one gets its own foam-lined crate specifically designed for that statue. Once it reaches its destination, each satellite museum is then responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the statue. This sometimes involves daily touch-ups to ensure that each figure retains the highest degree of likeness possible. As the result of this very cost and time intensive process, each major branch of Madame Toussaudes only installs about seven new figures each year. Which doesn't seem like a lot, but when you consider that each one of these figures is made in-house in London, that means that the Madame Toussauds artisans are putting out about 200 to 250 new figures each year. Impressive. As of 2011, the Madame Tussauds franchise celebrated its 250th anniversary, clearly taking Madame Toussaud's birthdate as its own. Each museum bearing the name of its badass lady founder still adheres to the core tenants that made Curtuse's and later Madame Toussaud's exhibitions of wax so popular in the late 18th century. 250 years later, the franchise continues to respond to public interest, and visitors continue to seek out that strange sense of presence that comes from standing beside a wax figure. But it's this sense of supreme lifelikeness that often sees waxworks demoted to a lesser form of art, given that it seeks to imitate life rather than supersede it. Now, as you can probably tell from my own personal fascination with painted sculpture, I've never understood this distinction between, quote, high arts and quote, low or popular art. And again, pardon my French, I think it's elitist bullshit. Just because something appeals to everyone doesn't make it any less admirable, doesn't make it any less worthy of being called art. If anything, wax figures are an art form guaranteed to get a reaction out of people, even if it's the inherent creepiness of the wax statues, with that push and pull between the appearance of lifelikeness and the inherent lack of life present in each figure. I think that that's what fascinates me the most, that odd sense that you are standing in someone's presence while knowing that you are the only person entering into that momentary quote-unquote relationship. It's real creepy, real fascinating, and I am totally here for it. Knowing what we know about the success of Madame Toussaud and all of her museums, it's difficult to imagine what must have been going through her head when she arrived on foreign soil with her young son in a case full of decapitated wax heads, just as it was impossible for her to know what the future had in store. But in the end, Madame Toussaud didn't just build a business, she built an empire. That is where I will leave this fascinating topic of Madame Toussaud for today. I really loved being able to do this episode, and I hope that you enjoyed listening to it. As always, I will post a list of all my sources and related images on the podcast's website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. I can hear my voice getting more frye as I go. I've been talking for like eight hours. I am especially thankful to the books by Kate Barridge and Pam Pilbean, which are two of the very few volumes dedicated to Madame Tussaud, despite her roaring success as both an artist and a businesswoman. I will post some other great articles, websites, and even fun reading, what I call fun reading, which is to say novels, on the website. So check that out if you're looking for a place to learn more. As for Gus Corner this week, I haven't touched base with the little rascal in a while, on account of me being in St. Louis, working myself to the bone, while he and my dog nephew Ziggy monitor activities up in Wisconsin. I will be reuniting with him in about two weeks, and I am so excited to see his big puppy face. Since the last episode, I have managed to post Gus's infiltration of Rosa Bonnie's The Horse Race to the podcast's Instagram and I think Facebook pages. I think Facebook. If you want to see those as they come out, you'll be able to find them by searching Stuff About Things Podcast on whatever social media platform you prefer. It should just come right up. I hope to have another episode up in about a month or so, though my upcoming travel plans may interrupt my usual four to six week posting schedule. It makes me sound so lazy, but honestly, it really does take that long to get everything in order for a single episode. It's ridiculous, I know, but I assure you that the episodes will continue because I genuinely love making them. You can catch new episodes when they do drop by subscribing to the podcast wherever you are currently listening to it. I would also so appreciate it if you would rate and review the podcast on iTunes. Hearing from listeners always makes my day, my week, my month, my life, and I appreciate you all taking the time to get in touch with me, either by leaving a review or dropping me an email at stuffaboutthingspodcast at gmail.com. I would also love to hear any ideas from you about what you'd like to hear about for future episodes. I've got a working list, but I'm always open and eager to hearing any suggestions that you might have. So get in touch with me if you have any ideas for a future episode. Si vous play et merci. The usual thanks to the usual suspects for providing the royalty free music that you hear in the episode that includes freemusicarchive.org and hooksounds.com. The first song that you hear is a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto Numero 4 by Kevin McLeod. And the second tune is called Success Dreams. That is all from me this time around. I thank you heaps and oodles for listening. I hope you enjoyed the episode, but more than anything, I hope that you take the time to look at something beautiful today. It's not hard. Get out, stretch your legs, and something beautiful will find you. I promise. A la próxima amici. And yes, I'm going to say to seau and not too so insert joke about R. That's appropriate. Bye bye.