Madame Tussaud: A Legend in Wax

-Allez-y, mon cher. Ecrivez.

-Mm-hm.

Madame Tussaud serait nee en Suisse a Berne...

At the age of nearly 80, a remarkable woman set out

to dictate her memoirs.

-TRANSLATION:

-Madame Tussaud was born in Berne in 1761.

Since coming to England,

she has taken full advantage of its benefits.

Her talents have been appreciated by a generous and enlightened public.

In an astonishing life,

that spanned both of the French and Industrial Revolutions,

this extraordinary mother and entrepreneur

travelled across the Channel to England to create a unique brand

based on famous people, modelled in wax.

Ecrivez, ecrivez!

Determined to leave an account of who she was,

and the time she lived through, her memoirs, letters and papers

offer a unique insight into the creation of the world-famous empire

which bears her name - Madame Tussaud's.

Madame Tussaud, I think, was an amazing businesswoman.

To me, Madame Tussaud represents a creative force.

..epargnee par les massacres, liberee de la prison...

'But what she said about her life is not necessarily the truth.'

So I feel that in her hands, the truth itself is as molten as wax.

In 1838, at her home in Baker Street,

Madame Tussaud dictated her memoirs to her friend, Francis Herve.

Written in the third person, she sought to create a lasting legacy.

-TRANSLATION:

-Her father, who died before her birth,

was of the military profession,

and his name, Grosholtz, was renowned.

Marie Tussaud seemed to mind about her social status

to the extent that she rather embellished her family background.

So, for example, even something as straightforward as place of birth,

and parentage, as presented by her,

proves to be incorrect.

Marie Tussaud's story begins in Strasbourg,

not the well-to-do Berne as she claimed,

where she was born into a far from illustrious family.

When Marie's father died before she was born,

her mother turned for support to her brother-in-law,

a local doctor and anatomist turned wax modeller in Berne.

Philippe Curtius is crucial to her story for the following reasons.

He employed her mother as a domestic housekeeper.

He became very attached to the young girl,

and he clearly taught her her skills.

Philippe Curtius was something of a celebrity in Berne.

He was consulted for his magical and anatomical knowledge,

and his wax models were very much in demand.

Philippe Curtius had learned anatomy,

and taught himself to make wax anatomical models because,

in the mid-18th century, it became less easy to secure dead corpses

to chop up. So people started to make wax models

to learn about anatomy and to teach about anatomy.

In the Tussaud Museum's workshops in London,

the same techniques are still in use today.

First, the head is sculpted in clay.

Then the modeller makes a plaster mould and pours in hot wax.

After the wax has set, the mould is broken open,

and the wax head removed.

Finally, the head is painted to give it a realistic, human appearance.

The techniques we use are the same techniques employed

for the last 200 years.

We've tried different materials to sculpt in,

using sort of Plasticine materials,

but they just don't have the same flow that clay has.

And, also, using the techniques

that have been employed for the last 200 years,

means that there is a pride in the craftsmanship and, I think,

that's reflected in the quality of the figures.

And it's fantastic to be part of a tradition which stretches back

right from the...

from the first days of sculpture.

'During that period, modelling in wax was very much in vogue.

'Representations were often most beautifully executed,

'and to such perfection.'

So Marie, as a small child in Paris, watched Curtius,

he allowed her to try out working with wax,

found that she was a very apt and quick learner,

and taught her the trade.

He was an extremely accomplished modeller,

and the tinting of the wax so that it replicated flesh,

he passed that skill on to her, so she was an apprentice, almost,

to this enigmatic man.

As his fame grew,

Curtius decided to open a second exhibition

in the Boulevard Du Temple.

Alongside the criminals,

Curtius placed busts of the celebrities of the day,

a formula that would later make Marie Tussaud world-famous herself.

'During Madame Tussaud's residence with her uncle,

'she had early imbibed the greatest taste for that art

'in which he so much excelled.

'To her, was confided the task of taking casts

'from the heads of the principal characters of that period,

'who most patiently submitted themselves

'to the hands of the fair artist.

'The cast which she took from the face of Voltaire

'was only two months before he died.'

There is only one surviving example

of the wax models made by the young Marie,

at the Musee Carnivale in Paris.

Now an accomplished model maker, Marie was fully involved

in the making of the waxworks.

As her skills increased, so too did her reputation,

at least according to her memoirs.

Francis, je continue.

Parmis les membres de la famille royale...

-TRANSLATION:

-Among the members of the Royal family,

who would often call in at the apartments

and admire Curtius's works and those of his niece...

..was Madame Elisabeth, the King's sister.

CONTINUES IN FRENCH

Wishing to learn the art of modelling in wax,

she asked the young Marie to teach it to her.

The Princess ended up liking her so much,

that she asked Monsieur Curtius to permit her to join her

at the Palace of Versailles.

So she could permanently enjoy her pleasant company.

This seems extremely unlikely.

She appears nowhere in official records, Marie Grosholtz,

the name is nowhere.

Even a cursory look at the formality

of this very codified and controlled hierarchal system

which was the household,

someone who was making money out of a commercial exhibition

in Paris with Curtius, would never have access to that intimate circle.

But it's very amusing in her memoir,

because she says things like,

"The king is said to me, 'Don't get up, my dear.'"

Well, you know, again, this is extremely unlikely,

to put it mildly.

The memoirs then take a dramatic turn.

The young Marie's life was about to be turned upside down.

'Few events in history have ever caused so intense and permanent

'a sensation throughout Europe as the French Revolution of 1789.

'The records of this short but exciting period teem with examples

'of the most diabolical ferocity.'

Rumours of trouble brewing soon reached the waxworks workshop.

Like Marie, Philippe Curtius was a monarchist,

but, as a savvy businessman,

he knew he had to change his style to survive.

On the 14th of July 1789, the Bastille was stormed.

It was now too dangerous for Marie and her uncle to keep

the busts of the Royal family on view.

'The first event that may be cited

'as the sanguinary commencement of the revolution,

'Madame Tussaud but too well remembers.

'The public began to assemble in the streets,

'demanding the busts of the idols of the people.'

SHOUTING OUTSIDE

WINDOWS SMASH

'They were persuasive petitioners, whose appearance was certainly

'such as plainly indicated they were not to be denied.'

This was the way in which people knew what was happening

in the revolution.

It was a bit like the ten o'clock news on television today.

Instead of having that, you would go to a wax exhibition

to see who was in charge now in the revolution.

It was a fast-changing environment as well.

So he had to keep swapping their heads around.

In January 1793, Louis XVI himself was guillotined.

In March, the Revolutionary Tribunal was created.

In September, the Reign of Terror began,

with mass executions plunging France into a bloodbath.

Encore une fois. Voila! Parfait!

Merci. Bon!

'A decapitated head would be immediately taken to Madame Tussaud

'whose feelings can be easier conceived than described.

'Shrinking with horror, she was compelled to take a cast.'

Marie tells us, in her memoirs,

how she sat on the steps of the exhibition,

making wax models of decapitated,

guillotined victims of the revolution.

It sounds amazing that Marie could do that.

And you think, this is a tall story. Load of rubbish.

But actually, it's substantiated by accounts that other people gave.

And we know that the exhibition did, indeed, include the heads of...

wax models of the decapitated revolutionaries.

And somebody had to make them.

And who was going to make them if Marie didn't?

Although in her memoirs,

Marie claims to have been forced to make death masks of the executed,

no doubt the grisly displays of the most famous victims would have

attracted even more appreciative crowds to her exhibition.

Marie was ever the opportunist.

This was all part of a very elaborate self propaganda

of suffering and hardship.

She very much casts herself as the victim of terrible,

terrible trials.

And imprisonment,

and being forced to have bloody heads on her lap to make models of.

Also, she gave people, through her own account,

a vicarious experience of proximity to celebrity.

And it's that vicarious experience of proximity to celebrity that's the

foundation of the whole thing.

In 1794, Robespierre, chief architect of the Reign of Terror,

was himself guillotined.

The country was at war, both internally and beyond its borders.

As the chaos in France worsened,

Marie's uncle was called to serve as a translator with the French army.

Voila!

Au revoir, Marie.

LOUD KNOCKING

After a few months, Curtius returned, very ill.

He died shortly after, leaving Marie as his sole heir.

Curtius left his entire estate to Marie,

which meant a house in Versailles,

and the Boulevard Du Temple establishment.

The Palais Royale having gone, you see.

And Marie became then the chief of the business.

Without her mentor, Marie would have to cope alone

in a France in turmoil.

Fortunately, the waxworks exhibition she had inherited was still

a profitable business.

And she wasn't alone for very long.

She married an engineer who lived locally,

presumably she'd known him for some time. We don't know.

What he liked to do was to buy shares in,

invest in theatres, and he was, frankly, as a husband, a liability.

He'd married her unquestionably not for her looks, but for her money.

Marie could finally lose the name of a family of executioners,

as Mademoiselle Grosholtz became Madame Tussaud.

She didn't make a very good choice of husband.

He's wasting her money, he's not interested in running the waxworks.

He leaves her to that.

Marie was already 37 when her first child, Joseph, was born.

But her married life wasn't a happy one, and thanks to the revolution,

the waxworks business was in trouble, too.

The revolution made a waxwork far less attractive because,

for tourists, Paris became rather a dangerous place to be.

And people had less money.

Parisians had less money.

The economy of Paris was rundown during the revolution as well,

and the wealthy people,

who might have gone to the waxworks to have a look at each other in wax,

were no longer there.

Marie lost her second child,

a little girl to be called Marie, at birth.

A second son, Francois, was born the following year.

The salon's fortunes continued to decline.

That could have been the end of the Tussaud story,

but one morning in October 1802, a meeting with a family friend

was to change the course of Marie's life.

Paul de Philipsthal was an entertainer from Germany

who claimed to conduct seances.

Exposed as a charlatan there, he had come to Paris

to look for a much more susceptible audience, keen to contact the dead.

The Magic Lantern was a development of the camera obscura,

the forerunner of today's slide projector.

During the 17th century, it became a fascinating distraction

for Europe's well-to-do.

Paul de Philipsthal was quite well off.

He travelled around all over Europe

presenting these Magic Lantern shows,

which he called the phantasmagoria.

If we look at the word phantasmagoria, it means, basically,

a gathering of ghosts.

What happened was an audience would be invited into a room,

plunged into complete darkness,

and they'd be bombarded with a whole series of images of ghosts

and evil spirits.

HE MAKES SCARY NOISES

C'est parti!

CHILD LAUGHS

Encore! Encore!

Philipsthal was looking for other elements to add to his show,

and thought Marie's wax portraits were just what he needed.

He asked Marie to go with him to England.

Marie, who was at the end of her tether with her husband,

accepted the offer of Philipsthal,

who said he would take his Magic Lantern show to London,

and she could go with him with some of her models,

and he would pay the costs.

He'd take half of her profits,

but she'd be better off than struggling on in Paris.

Philipsthal was very much a kind of salon magician to begin with.

And it was during the time of enlightenment, certainly,

when there were quite a lot of Freemasons around who had these,

kind of, private clubs.

They were very keen to entertain anybody who had any interest

in the new sciences.

And, of course, Philipsthal could puff himself up,

and say he was really a professor of science and, he was a charlatan,

in many ways. And not particularly a good man, inasmuch as, really,

his only focus was on money.

Marie decided to take Joseph with her.

He was five, but, obviously, her younger son, Francois,

was barely two.

So she left him with her mother and her aunt, and her husband,

instructing her husband that he must run the waxworks

and look after the family.

When Marie arrived in England in 1802

with her young son and her waxworks, there was little in her favour.

She did not speak English,

and only read and wrote French with difficulty.

But what she did have was a real talent for wax and business,

and a sheer determination to succeed.

She discovered in the England of the 1800s,

a country in total transformation.

And one with a fascination and disgust for all things French.

The French were depicted by British caricaturists

like Gillray and Cruickshank,

very much as the enemy.

Murderers, hostile to the church,

hanging churchman, eating babies...

The cartoons are utterly horrific.

And Napoleon, as the Emperor of France between 1804 and 1815,

was the absolute central figure of detestation for the British.

He created this huge empire on the Continent,

he fought Britain at sea,

he was a real threat.

So the British saw him as their chief enemy,

but they were also fascinated by the power that he exercised in France.

Because he was, after all, a dictator.

The revolution had been rolled up in a man of five foot six.

Napoleon's wax figure became the centrepiece of her exhibition.

As always, the importance of conveying character

was top of her mind.

'As Napoleon once said, it is not the exactness of traits,

'a wart on the nose, that makes a likeness, it is the character,

'what animates a person, that it is necessary to portray.'

When she arrived in England,

one of her unique selling points was that with the Napoleonic Wars,

the fascination with Napoleon,

she acquired a lot of relics of Napoleon's.

For example, Napoleon's actual carriage was a sensation.

And I think it can be said that the main man in her life,

the best relationship with a man, was with Napoleon,

because he's served her very well, for richer, for richer, for richer.

But Marie's relationship with Philipsthal

had become a different matter altogether.

'He holds my nose to the grindstone,

'seeking only to flout and ruin me,

'so he can take all.'

In 1803, when the Lyceum season was considered to be finished,

Philipsthal decides that he's going to move into the theatre circuit

of Britain, and Edinburgh will be their next stop.

'It's a beautiful little city from which one can see

'snow-covered mountains.

'I have discovered some compatriots at the castle,

'and one lady-in-waiting has spent all her life in France.'

Why Edinburgh?

Edinburgh is obviously the Scottish capital,

it's also a big centre for emigres,

that's where the French emigres have gone for preference.

And so the idea is that a show that is exhibiting the King and Queen

in all their glory, Napoleon as a real villain,

and the revolutionaries as decapitated former villains,

will be attractive to the emigres.

Marie soon heard about the performances of Henri Charles,

a renowned French ventriloquist, and went along to see his show.

Allez! Venez, venez! Approchez!

Henri and his puppet had already established a strong following

amongst the many French emigres living in Edinburgh at the time.

And Marie, whose son Joseph loved the show, saw an opportunity

for her to do the same.

When Madame Tussaud arrived in Edinburgh,

discovering that Philipsthal had not actually paid for the actual freight

of her exhibition, she met up with Charles,

and asked him to loan her some money.

I think he loaned her something like £30,

which was quite a lot of money.

And Charles really did befriend her in a big way,

and there was another move to Ireland.

Marie tours in Ireland,

and she follows the pattern of the theatre companies,

how they toured during the season.

During the season of the wealthy elite, who in the summer months,

would go to Dublin and to Limerick, and to different cities in Ireland.

These fairs were markets of trade, they were commerce,

people went from all over Europe to sell their wares,

you could go and buy cloth, and there was always a rule that

the entertainment cannot commence until the trading has stopped.

There was also the selling of livestock, alongside theatre shows,

magic shows, illusion shows, waxwork shows.

Marie learned not only from the fairs,

but from the theatre trade as well.

Marie learned very quickly from how the theatre companies operated.

She was very careful when she moved from one town to another,

to only move when she was not making money.

Until 1808, she continued to call it the Curtius' Cabinet of Curiosities.

And when she arrived, she would produce, have posters produced,

saying that, "Specially for your town,

"here is the Curtius' Cabinet of Curiosities, for your enjoyment.

"But only for a very limited season."

She would always say that. She didn't say,

"We're here until we ain't making any money,"

which is what she really meant.

Marie had carriages in which she transported all the equipment.

But the move, of course, was itself, a good advert,

because each of the carriages had your name on them,

and it would indicate where you were going next.

So there were travelling adverts.

As she travelled around the country, Marie was careful to always consult

the showman's almanac.

'Owen's Book of Fairs, the complete and authentic account.

'Newark. Friday in Mid Lent, May 14th, Whit Tuesday, August the 2nd,

'and every other Wednesday for cattle and sheep.'

There was a book published every year called the Owen's Book of Fairs

which was actually an almanac of all the fairs that take place

in the United Kingdom.

It tells you what date they're in, it tells you when they move,

it tells you the distance in miles between each place.

And that's what Tussaud would have used to get from place to place.

The new moneyed middle classes were the people Marie Tussaud wanted

at her exhibition, and she needed grand venues to attract them.

She was always careful to pick the very best rooms,

unlike many of the other travelling shows of the time.

'A nice salon, well furnished and decorated,

'for £2 a month.

'Everyone is astonished by my figures,

'the equal of which no-one has seen here.

'I am regarded as a great lady here, and have everyone on my side.'

Her exhibitions would be in the assembly rooms.

Big, high-ceilinged, large rooms, where you could set out the models,

and people could walk amongst the models

and have a feel of the material, and touch the headdresses,

and sit down and natter to each other.

Listen to the little orchestra that was playing,

but if there was not an assembly room,

she would use a local theatre and the theatre would be boarded over,

and the models would be set up there.

In choosing well-appointed exhibition halls,

Marie Tussaud stole a march on her competitors who worked the fairs.

Waxworks were commonplace when Marie Tussaud came to this country.

But they were much more associated with the popular entertainment of

the fair, and anatomical waxes, sensational things.

And she very much raised the timbre of how waxworks

could be for a much more middle-class, educational,

aspirational form of entertainment and information.

When she went on the bad roads,

you could say she was a travelling tabloid.

She was taking sensation to parts of the country

where they were desperate for news.

Marie knew how important good marketing was.

She would take particular care over the announcements and catalogues

for her exhibitions, which went into remarkable detail.

When you see the catalogues that Marie Tussaud does,

she's looking for an educated audience.

She's looking for an audience that can read and write.

A lot of the people who went to fairs

at that time weren't able to read or write.

The advertisements you get for the fairs at that time are quite cheap,

are more illustrative.

But the tradition that Marie Tussaud is going into is more

the exhibition tradition, rather than the fairground tradition.

She's quite an innovator with these catalogues,

would give quite a lot of detail about the different characters.

Several pages on Marie Antoinette, for instance.

Catalogues could run to 80 pages.

Not the sort of single sheet that tell you nothing,

that you get today.

It was really informative.

The cost of producing these catalogues was underpinned

by a very clear pricing policy.

The price that she charged was a price that would only be tolerable

for a comfortably-off, middle-class elite.

So, 6p to look at the exhibition,

another 6p to look at the separate room, the Chamber of Horrors,

another 6p for the catalogue, which was very good value,

you got your money's worth for your 6p.

She was criticised for her appealing only to elite,

and there's a funny poster that you can see,

where she says that for a special moment...

..poorer people, working class people,

can come to the exhibition for half price,

but only between 9:15pm and 10pm.

The exhibition closed at 10pm.

Marie's tours around the United Kingdom

were becoming ever more profitable.

She continued to send money to her husband,

who had remained in France

to look after their younger son's education.

But he was spending the family silver

with little regard for their son's future.

The letters he exchanged with Marie were more often about money

than anything else.

Eventually, the money ran out,

and, in 1812, Francois was forced to sell the waxworks exhibition

in the Boulevard Du Temple to one of his creditors.

'We shall not write to you about our plans. Adieu, adieu.

'We can each go our own way.

'Je suis pour la vie, ta femme, Tussaud.'

Five years later, her youngest son

decided to join his mother and brother.

Marie hadn't seen him since she left for England with Philipsthal

and Joseph 15 years earlier.

He turned up at the studio, carrying a keepsake to confirm his identity.

Marie's second son, Francois, arrived in London in 1817,

when he, himself, was 17.

And then both sons helped in making models.

Francois had been trained as an apprentice carpenter in Paris.

This gave him a ready-made role in his mother's business.

He would get the job of making arms and legs in wood,

to add realism to the waxwork busts.

They had to do what she said.

They had to obey her instructions,

and they were paid virtually nothing.

They were virtually her slaves.

To recognise their skill and business sense,

the waxworks exhibition took the name Madame Tussaud and Sons.

Marie Tussaud kept a very tight control on the purse strings.

And the apron strings of the business.

Ie, she established a matriarchal business.

Her sons worked for her, but right up until her death,

she was a presence at the exhibition,

and very much involved in counting the money.

And in the ledgers, keeping absolute careful track of expenditure.

And she kept a little account book, where she wrote down every day

what she spent on candles, what she spent on repairing gowns, etc.

What she spent on these special adverts,

and this is what she spent most money on, on the adverts,

the posters and the adverts in the newspapers.

By 1835, after three decades

travelling the roads of the United Kingdom,

the Madame Tussaud and Sons exhibition

had become a prosperous business.

Marie finally had the means to hire an exhibition hall,

right in the middle of London in Baker Street.

Marie had toured from 1803, she'd constantly toured,

adding to the family more and more grandchildren,

and they must have got really fed up with the touring.

And when Madame Tussaud's moved to Baker Street in 1835,

she didn't, at the time, know it was going to be a permanent centre.

But to her it was sort of an apex of being in a fashionable,

growing, bourgeois cultural area.

The assumption was that they would maybe only stay in Baker Street

as they'd stayed in other places, for a few weeks.

But because they continued to make money, they stayed.

For the 27 years that she was a travelling exhibition,

she was so skilful about publicising her exhibition

that when she decided she could settle in London,

she had established, through all that promotional...

all the posters, and her trail in the newspapers,

it meant that she'd established herself as a brand.

When she settled there,

where she arrived was a very fashionable centre for London.

Oxford Street, the shops were beginning to be constructed.

Central London is changing very much at the time.

Railways are beginning to be built.

It's a time of real transition.

Ever inventive, Marie was determined to keep the public coming in.

And she knew exactly what to do.

'The most extraordinary relic in the world,

'a melancholy relic of the French Revolution.

'The original knife and lunettes,

'the identical instrument that decapitated 22,000 persons.'

Marie might like to talk about education and history,

and her general catalogue,

but what most people went to the waxworks for was to be shocked

and frightened and look at the dead villains.

When Madame Tussaud came,

she introduced an incredibly fine tradition,

that her workmanship and her knowledge, and I think

also the subject matter.

The Terrors in France had created an appetite for death

and sensation in early Regency London.

Marie's Chamber of Horrors combined the bloody violence

of the French Revolution with figures of renowned murderers.

There's nothing like a good murder to attract the crowds.

So the Chamber of Horrors, by its very nature, is about murder,

and it's all about the great criminals.

When you read the catalogues throughout the 19th century,

the Chamber of Horrors becomes even more detailed,

it becomes really the reason people go.

She packaged the gore so that it was cautionary or moral.

She dressed it up so that it wasn't just making people feel

they are voyeurs of horror. It was, erm...

moral.

These are murderers.

Bad men. You know, it had an ethical packaging, somehow.

So it wasn't just cheap thrills, is the point.

Her exhibition allowed visitors a glimpse into the hidden world

of crime and punishment.

And what made that particularly interesting,

was when actual executions were no longer public.

So if you were going to see someone who'd been a particularly nasty

murderer, it was at a waxworks that you'd see them.

And you could be fairly sure that the model had been made

from the dead head.

Marie had adapted well to the revolution in France,

but at heart, she was still a monarchist.

Now, in 1837, a new queen sat on the British throne,

the young Victoria.

Marie Tussaud saw an opportunity.

Queen Victoria was enormously important for Madame Tussaud

and her exhibition.

Perhaps because Marie was a royalist, the new Queen

allowed herself to be modelled on wax,

complete with replicas of her Coronation robes,

accurate to the last detail.

For Marie, it was the recognition she had sought all her life.

And whatever the truth about her stay in Versailles, this time,

it was for real.

Queen Victoria was undoubtedly among the monarchs, the central figure,

the apex.

She was so pleased with the result that she was not at all disturbed

when she appeared on the front of the 1841 catalogue.

And when she started to have children of her own

she took them to the exhibition.

This became a tradition with her.

She had a lot of children, as you know,

and apparently, they all saw the exhibition.

And she encouraged other royals, when they were visiting London,

to go to the exhibition as well.

Marie Tussaud undoubtedly epitomised Victorian ideas on recreational

education, on utter respectability.

She did typify all that was seen as positive and attractive

about Victorian life.

In the heyday of the waxworks, when it was...

It established itself as a major London landmark,

and leading attraction,

"a leading exhibition of the metropolis"

was how Punch described it,

it was a place of great sophistication,

a place of refinement,

a place that the Duke of Wellington would like to go to,

so it was a completely different pitch

from the serpentine queue

and looking at the waxworks today.

Surrounded by her sons,

Marie established what has since become a landmark for Londoners

and visitors from all around the world.

'Since Madame Tussaud's residence in the country,

'not only have her works received

'the mead of praise from its inhabitants,

'but her talents have been justly appreciated by a generous

'and discerning public.'

When you look at when she wrote her memoirs,

it was when she was promoting her permanent,

new exhibition in London.

So it was a brilliant celebrity memoir.

It's name-dropping, name-dropping, name-dropping.

And then about her early life...

'After 36 years of residence,

'including the last five in London,

'Madame Tussaud is more in fashion than ever.

'She has escaped massacres, been freed from prison,

'been spared the threat of the guillotine,

'and has now reached a peaceful retirement.

'Safe and sound, she here takes leave of her readers.'

It's, in a way, a load of tripe. A load of absolute rubbish.

On the other hand, it's a very good portrayal

of what she wanted people to think about her.

And that's the value of the memoirs.

We're all our own myth-makers, to degree,

but she takes it to a different level.

Every great showman creates a myth and a reality at the same time.

That's what makes them, stands them above anyone else.

Madame Tussaud is probably the earliest woman

who creates that myth at the same time as the reality.

Marie Tussaud died in her London home on the 15th of April 1850

at the age of 89.

She was laid to rest in the church of Saint Mary in Cadogan Street.

At the moment of her death,

she was obituaried in pretty well all of the journals and newspapers.

And they agreed, without exception,

that Madame Tussaud was a national institution.

Which may sound a bit odd,

but that was the highest praise you could give for someone,

to describe them as a national institution.

And to describe a foreigner, a Frenchwoman,

as a national institution!

That was praise indeed.