00:07:15.120Even just when I was researching this,
00:07:17.740like every picture in the Madame Tussauds biography,
00:07:20.740i was reading was a picture of a wax um of a wax work but some of them are so gruesome they're so
00:07:26.900realistic looking yeah yeah yeah so it's kind of like well like halloween you know like people put
00:07:33.480decorations on their lawn it looks gruesome but really it's just fun it was gruesome but one thing
00:07:38.140and we'll get to this in a minute and you mentioned like you know the the museum has kind of moved
00:07:42.560away from presenting itself as a historical institution an institution dedicated to
00:07:48.740historical instruction. In Tussauds' lifetime, these grisly relics of the French Revolution0.51
00:07:54.480were seen as instructive. They were seen as tools that were teaching Victorians about what it was
00:08:01.800like to live through the French Revolution. Yeah. And for them, it was recent history.
00:08:07.500Yeah. It was people who they... We'll talk about this. We'll talk about this as we go. I found it
00:08:11.760also fascinating this story really um she lived for a long time spoiler and she um her life inter
00:08:19.440like she lived through so many major historical things and she captured them all in wax and it
00:08:26.620was sort of like like when she really settled in england later in her life it was sort of the
00:08:31.880you know there wasn't instagram there wasn't um tmz but it was a way that people like everyone
00:08:37.840was talking about a famous celebrity or a royal or something but she made it so you could go to
00:08:42.360Madame Tussauds and see what that person looked like like it was really like of the moment it was
00:08:46.920a way I'll just say one thing because I'm I'm working on writing this book about Caroline of
00:08:52.080Brunswick and um so like when Caroline of Brunswick when she was on her adultery trial Madame Tussauds
00:08:57.820had a Caroline of Brunswick figure she had a figure of Caroline's husband Prinny and she made
00:09:01.620a waxwork of Caroline's alleged lover this Italian man because people just wanted to see what these
00:09:06.740what they look like like she just knew this is what the audiences were interested in and
00:09:10.760yeah she really whatever was going on she made a waxwork of it it was very impressive
00:09:14.640yes a little erotic intrigue there as well exactly so you're gonna sort of guide us through
00:09:22.460this story and i'm just gonna i'll just pop in with questions and fun facts but so can you start
00:09:29.160us off gavin with like madame t as a girl what where was she born what was her situation what's
00:09:34.320what's her childhood like? So, Madame T is born Marie Grossholz in 1761 in Strasbourg.
00:09:42.240The birth certificate names Joseph Grossholz and Anna Maria Grossholz as her mother and father.
00:09:49.680Her father ends up dying roughly two months before she's born, so she never meets him.
00:09:55.540And not long after her birth, she and her mother move to Bern, Switzerland, which is where Anna
00:10:02.620Maria, so Madame T's mom, gets a job as a housekeeper in the household of a guy named
00:10:08.500Philippe Curtiou. And if you want to know about Madame T's rise to fame, you have to know a
00:10:14.780little bit about Philippe Curtiou and who he was. So Curtiou was a practicing physician in Bern.
00:10:22.160Now, back in the 18th century, medical students needed to know the human anatomy inside and out,
00:10:28.340Right. But the problem was that there were limited ways of actually studying the human anatomy, because the ideal way to gain that kind of knowledge would have been to look at fresh cadavers.
00:10:40.980Right. Actually open up human beings and see what it looks like in there. But they had limited access to refrigeration.
00:10:46.660So there were obvious problems. So what they did as an alternative is that medical students and medical professionals would create wax anatomical models of the human body.
00:10:58.340And that was part of how they learned where everything was inside the human body.
00:11:03.120So Philippe Curtiou not only studies anatomical waxes, but he gets really good at making them.
00:11:09.860And once he realizes that he has this talent as a wax modeler, he starts to branch out
00:11:15.100and he starts to make wax portraits of wealthy people in Bern.
00:11:19.460He also starts to make kind of more erotic wax models, some that were outright pornographic.
00:11:26.280And he kind of makes a name for himself.
00:11:28.340And eventually, he comes to the attention of a member of the French royal family, the Prince de Conti.
00:11:35.640He allegedly visits Curtiu at his home in Bern, Switzerland, lays his eyes on all of his waxwork, and is so impressed that he just pledges his patronage right then and there.
00:11:48.080He's like, listen, I want to support what you do.
00:11:51.280This stuff is amazing, but there's a condition.
00:12:20.760And so the mom, Madame T's mom, she's like a servant in the household.
00:12:25.340Exactly. Yeah. So she would have cooked meals, would have kept the house tidy. By all accounts, she could whip up a mean casserole, you know.
00:12:33.440But Curtiou's decision to invite them to live with him in Paris has fueled speculation about the exact nature of his relationship with Madame T's mother.
00:12:44.200Some people have wondered if there may have been some kind of romantic relationship because, you know, he could have hired a new housekeeper just fine in Paris, right?
00:12:54.260Why would he invite her to join him there?
00:12:57.960So the exact nature of that relationship
00:19:11.680It's definitely geared toward anyone who has time and money to pay to enter the wax museum.
00:19:17.680But the Boulevard de Temples did combine people from all strata of Parisian societies. So you can see courtiers and courtesans, but you could also see lower income people. The street was actually rife with crime. It was known as the Boulevard de Quim.
00:19:35.280So there was a lot of money floating around in the area and there was also, you know, some more impoverished people there as well. So I think it would have been a mixture of rich and not so rich patrons at the Wax Museum at the Boulevard de Temple.
00:19:52.280Now, they also opened another wax museum at the Palais Royale in 1784 or thereabouts.
00:19:59.760And that definitely catered to a classier, more upper class clientele.
00:20:16.740Because I want to just mention, so we've been slowly similar to what you did with your Madame Tussauds season.
00:20:22.280I've been doing building slowly towards learning more about Marie Antoinette's life.
00:20:26.820Eventually, we've talked on the show about like Versailles and kind of the extreme etiquette and stuff that was going on there.
00:20:34.420So I can see that the the very wealthy, noble people were living in their own separate sphere.
00:20:42.060So now they kind of have their own wax museum that they can go to without having to go to this other boulevard to interact with like the everyday people.
00:20:48.660Yes. And since you mentioned Versailles, I think it's important to note that the royal family sort of had pride of place at the wax salon. So the kind of more upper crusty salon that was at the Palo Alto. And in a previous episode, you talked about what's called the Grand Couvert, that it's a weekly ritual where people could go to Versailles and watch the royal family eat dinner.
00:21:14.660dinner. That was something that you could do. It's called the Grand Couvert. And I wanted to
00:21:19.280bring it up because there was actually a tableau of Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, and assorted other
00:21:26.380individuals eating dinner as if at Versailles. That was a tableau that Curtiu introduced at
00:21:33.260the Wax Salon in the Palais Royale. I'm just fascinated by the very idea of the Grand Couvert.
00:21:38.920where anyone could go to see it at Versailles
00:21:41.420so long as they adhered to the dress code.
00:22:08.920Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, you'd go and watch Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette eat. And by all accounts, Marie Antoinette was always kind of like uncomfortable in the public gaze. She hardly ever touched her food. And Louis XVI, by contrast, just kind of chowed down with gusto. He was much more comfortable there.
00:22:30.880So anyway, if you didn't have the time to make a trip out to Versailles, which could take a few hours, you could go to the wax salon and see that, you know, the royal family eating in wax.
00:22:44.540so is this a good time to bring up madame so madame tussaud a lot of what we know about her
00:22:50.540is she wrote her memoirs and how truthful are those memoirs who knows but one of the claims
00:22:56.600that she makes is that she herself went to versailles um and hung out there for a while which
00:23:02.380did she or did she not i don't know but can you explain like what she claimed she was doing there
00:23:08.080Sure. Yeah. So Madame Tussauds claims to have developed a really intense friendship
00:23:14.500with a member of the royal family named Madame Elizabeth, who was Louis XVI's younger sister.
00:23:20.680And we do know for a fact that Madame Elizabeth modeled in wax. She made all kinds of religious
00:23:26.320figures like crucifixes, things like that. And supposedly they developed this close bond and
00:23:36.180Madame Elizabeth invited Tussauds to live at Versailles with her, sort of as a surrogate
00:23:42.580sister, but also as a teacher, someone who would help her learn how to model and wax.
00:23:49.000And Tussauds claims to have slept in an adjacent bedchamber and they were just inseparable.
00:23:55.000You know, they would rise early in the morning, go horseback riding, do everything together,
00:24:29.720Because, you know, if you were paid to like empty a chamber pot at Versailles for any extended period of time, there is a record of it somewhere. Like they really recorded this stuff meticulously. And there is no record of Madame Tussauds in any where it should be, where we'd expect to find it.
00:24:51.500And she claims to have lived there for eight years.
00:24:54.880So that definitely casts doubt on this story.
00:40:02.080So there were other relics, like there was a model guillotine that would eventually go on display.
00:40:07.120you had the severed heads on the walls um and then you had a tableau of the assassination of
00:40:12.760Jean-Paul Marat yes so we're gonna talk about that and I want to say that um that is one of
00:40:18.260the things I remember from when I was nine years old and I went to the chamber of horrors I like
00:40:22.760I went in there I was just like oh my god this is great and also spooky and like I'd heard of
00:40:26.720Marie Antoinette but most of it I was just like I don't know what any of this is but I remember
00:40:30.220the bathtub scene yes I didn't know who it was or what it was and when I started doing this season
00:40:37.100talking about the French Revolution, I was like, I need to look up that bathtub. What was that
00:40:40.860bathtub scene? Like, it was so impactful. That's amazing. And you're here to tell this story. So
00:40:47.120please. Yes, here we go. So Jean-Paul Marat rose to notoriety as a journalist, really.
00:40:54.240He was the editor of a publication called The People's Friend. So he was very much revolutionary
00:41:00.780in his politics. And he was extremely violent in the rhetoric that he used. And he was infamous
00:41:07.120for this. He called for decapitations. He said, you know, we cannot... He accused some of his
00:41:15.460opponents of practicing what he called a false humanity. And it's like, listen, if we want change
00:41:21.480to happen in France, some heads are going to have to roll. You know, that was kind of his philosophy.
00:41:25.320He eventually becomes a politician and is elected to serve as a deputy at the National Convention. And at this point, there are two factions that we have to keep track of. The Jacobins, who are the most radical revolutionaries, and then the Girondins, who are more moderate revolutionaries.
00:41:45.480So Marat has no party affiliation, but he allies himself with the Jacobins. So he's like the hardest of the hardcore. And even while he's serving in government, he starts to write like he basically incites rebellion against that government because he claims that there are enemies within and they're actively trying to undermine the revolution.
00:42:06.540And I should say, too, that his base consists largely of the Saint-Coulotte. So like these workaday, ordinary Parisian folks. And he's extremely popular among them.0.61
00:42:18.840So eventually he leaves the National Convention. And the reason he is in a bathtub at the time of his death is because he had a debilitating skin condition that has never definitively been diagnosed.
00:42:33.740but um whatever it was it caused him to break out in boils and they were quite unsightly and
00:42:41.200one way that he had of kind of alleviating some of the pain that came with this was to wrap his
00:42:47.380head in a vinegar soaked towel and also yes i'm just remembering that the bathtub guy had like a
00:42:53.420turban on yes exactly that's what he would do and he would also do a lot of his work in the bathtub
00:42:58.980because it kind of soothed some of the pain.
00:43:01.960So Murat is not exactly a beloved figure
00:46:52.740Kingdoms were reduced to cinders, and armies scattered like bones in the dust.
00:46:58.160Now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world, praying the darkness chooses someone else tonight.
00:47:05.700But in the shadow dark, the darkness always wins.
00:47:09.960This is old school adventuring at its most cruel.
00:47:13.200Your torch ticks down in real time, and when that flame dies, something else rises to finish the job.
00:47:19.400This is a brutal rules-light nightmare with a story that emerges organically based on the decisions that the characters make.
00:47:26.960This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s, and man, it is so good to be back.
00:47:31.700Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the shadow dark every Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on youtube.com slash the glass cannon with the podcast version dropping the next day.
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00:48:38.360and we're back and madame t is well i'm picturing charlotte corday is running through with the0.55
00:48:47.860green ribbon and i'm picturing madame t is like there's better murder i need to make a wax work
00:48:52.480like she's running to the crime scene that's basically it right yes that's that's the story0.99
00:48:57.460is that she is summoned again by the national assembly so if she refuses you know she could
00:49:02.380be put to death or something she goes to mirage bathtub makes sketches there and then works1.00
00:49:06.800from them. And that's how she creates this tableau. Listeners might be familiar with a0.93
00:49:12.980painting by Jacques-Louis David. It's a really iconic image. It also depicts Marat dead in his
00:49:20.180bathtub. And it's made in the same year. And Madame Tussauds claimed to have inspired the0.75
00:49:27.040composition of that painting with her tableau, which is a claim that it's really hard to confirm
00:49:33.360or refute but it's it's something that she claimed but yeah so she unveils a tableau of
00:49:38.120of the slain marat in the wax museum and people kind of go there almost on a kind of pilgrimage
00:49:43.740to like you know view the fallen champion of the people and and all that and it's i i mean again i
00:49:51.660have not been to the chamber of horrors since i was a child but it's back there and it that was a
00:49:55.440memorable part of the chamber of horrors was this bathtub tableau yeah so the french revolution is
00:50:02.460like it's happening it's there eventually she leaves france yes to go to england why did she
00:50:09.400leave okay so this is another perfect part of the story because this is the halloween episode
00:50:14.600so in 1802 she goes into business with this guy who has various names paul philidor paul de
00:50:21.440philip stahl i'm just going to call him philip stahl but he was a phantasmagoria performer and
00:50:27.960So what the phantasmagoria was briefly was an art form that revolved around an instrument called the magic lantern, which is basically a precursor to the modern day slide projector.
00:50:37.920So the phantasmagoria was a bunch of images projected on a projection surface, like a wall, of skeletons and ghosts and other spooks.
00:50:48.900And indeed, in Paris, toward the end of the 1790s, when things had cooled down just a little bit, they would project images of like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.
00:50:59.760And they were supposed to be like ghosts, because obviously they had died earlier that decade.
00:51:05.120But these performances were held in complete darkness, and they freaked people out.
00:51:11.080people literally fainted in the performance venues and sometimes they would project these
00:51:17.140images on columns of smoke so you have to imagine like seeing the projected image of a ghost on
00:51:23.800billowing smoke would kind of give it this illusion of you know insubstantiality and it's like it's
00:51:30.760like the late 1700s like there's not tv there's not like people like this is crazy it's crazy
00:52:33.540um her she has two young children will they both be able to go with her her mother at this point
00:52:39.760is still around and is quite aged what will happen to her eventually she decides to leave and she
00:52:45.340takes her older son joseph with her and leaves her younger son francis who's two behind and when she
00:52:53.340leaves she never sees her husband or her mother again nor does she ever return to paris so she
00:53:00.580doesn't know it when she's leaving, but she is never going back. So it's just a huge moment in
00:53:05.160her life. And you have to imagine a decision that she would not have taken lightly. So she moves to
00:53:09.800London and quickly learns that Philip Stahl is a total snake and a jerk. So he has made a pretty1.00
00:53:19.260tough bargain with her. She has to cover all the cost of her own transportation. And then on top
00:53:25.400of that, he is entitled to 50% of all of her earnings, plus whatever he makes, right? Because
00:53:32.000he has kind of a bankable name in London at this point. And beyond that, Tussauds does not really
00:53:38.980know a word of English when she moves to the British capital. So she's relying on him to help
00:53:43.400promote her waxworks, right? He does not do that. There's like not a word to spare about her wax
00:53:50.560museum in the press. Instead, he's touting his own phantasmagoria and the automata that he was
00:53:57.540exhibiting. And then on top of that, they open up shop in a venue called the Lyceum Theater.
00:54:04.360He takes the ground floor and then he makes Tussauds exhibit her wares in the basement,
00:54:08.800which I think is just like, you know, it's just not cool. It's not cool. And so life is really
00:54:14.260hard for Madame T in the British capital. She's living in extreme isolation, can barely say
00:54:21.220anything in English apart from please and thank you. She's homesick. Her youngest son is still
00:54:26.600with Francois Tussauds. Her husband's business is not doing well. Then finally, she gets a big
00:54:33.900break. And again, as you mentioned, she is nothing if not a massively astute businesswoman. She
00:54:41.840knows. She has her thumb on the pulse of public opinion. A big cause celeb captivates London.
00:54:49.040It's the execution of a guy named Colonel Marcus Edward Despard, who is a traitor. He was basically
00:54:57.000found guilty of participating in a conspiracy to assassinate the king. And I go into detail about
00:55:03.620his life story, which is absolutely fascinating on the podcast. But for now, we'll just say he
00:55:08.880was a really interesting figure and his execution was kind of a hot topic. So she makes a figure of
00:55:15.440him and then suddenly business booms. Everyone wants to come see what he looked like in real
00:55:21.080life because he is just the talk of the town. Right. No, it's like what I was saying before.
00:55:25.080It's the whole sort of like there's not Instagram, there's not tabloids, there's not people want to
00:55:30.200know like this famous person. What did they look like? Like what did they look like? Exactly. Yeah.
00:55:35.060Yeah. And even beyond that, I would say, too, that part of it is wanting to know what they look like.
00:55:39.340But also one of the things that I think is so interesting and creepy and slightly off-putting, but also cool about wax figures is that they almost seem alive, right?
00:55:48.240Like wax figures offer an illusion of proximity to power or fame or wealth, or in the case of people in the Chamber of Horrors, infamy, right?
00:55:58.860it feels like you're almost in the presence of them
01:01:09.420work it has to be said maria manning flees to edinburgh and then george manning flees to the
01:01:16.020isle of jersey and the english channel the police capture both of them even though the mannings have
01:01:20.900a you know a head start of several of several days and have covered a lot of miles they're
01:01:26.100brought on trial um and maria manning really causes a sensation in the press she's strongly0.99
01:01:32.720associated with lady macbeth shakespeare's famous character because she's just so ferocious
01:01:38.800and she's also seen as kind of masculine and domineering in ways that recalled the character
01:01:44.780of Lady Macbeth. And she also, maybe you're going to talk about this, but she wore a shiny black0.98
01:01:50.720dress. Exactly. Yeah. And that became sort of like Charlotte Corday's green hat. You know,
01:01:57.740this black shiny dress became like a real thing. Yes. So she was famous for, she looked good. She
01:02:05.280dressed really sharply, and she appeared in court wearing black satin. So part of why this is
01:02:10.300important is, and as I mentioned, they lived in Bermondsey, which was a working class district,
01:02:14.520but black satin was in many ways associated with like the middle class and a sense of
01:02:21.280respectability. So some of the classist journalists who reported on this trial
01:02:26.080saw this as evidence of Maria Manning's trying to rise above her station, right? And if people know
01:02:33.880the play Macbeth, they know that it's all about ambition, right? Macbeth wants to ascend the
01:02:38.480throne as king and Lady Macbeth wants to help him get there. So there's this ambition, this desire
01:02:43.300to rise there. And then in the case of Maria Manning, she was trying to climb the social0.96
01:02:48.460ladder by masquerading as like a middle-class woman. So that was part of why Victorians1.00
01:02:54.100associated her with the character of Lady Macbeth. So she's really ferocious. She looks0.93
01:02:58.940devastating and black um and in the courtroom there's this amazing sequence she does not get0.95
01:03:05.220a fair trial um because the only evidence really against her comes from george manning but anyway0.87
01:03:10.880when the guilty verdict comes down she loses her mind and stands up and just launches into a
01:03:18.240diatribe against everyone present the judge the jury everyone and it's extremely fluid and it's
01:03:24.480She's just in a rage, you know, and in front of her and the doc are sprigs of rue, which was this herb that was thought to like, it was basically like a public health measure.
01:03:37.420She picks up sprigs of rue and casts them into the courtroom, just this display of pure, unalloyed contempt, very theatrical in a way, right? And everyone is just shocked by it. But they're also kind of obsessed with her because she is larger than life. They can't stop talking about her.
01:03:56.880So they're executed. Shortly after they're executed, Tussauds does what Tussauds always did. And they actually procured the clothes that George and Maria Manning had worn in court. And then they use those clothes to dress wax figures of them at the Chamber of Horrors.
01:04:18.860So she gets the black satin dress, basically.