Does this time of year really go by faster than the rest of the year? Or, is it just my imagination that the holidays seem to sneak up on me even though I know they come the same time every year. It is hard to get my head around the fact we have just celebrated our 2012 Thanksgiving book club. This year, Lou hosted us at her home/bed and breakfast. It was warm and cozy and beautifully decorated for the fall holiday. Gene dutifully parked cars for us and Jennie enthusiastically greeted everyone at the door.
Even with our best attempts to accommodate everyone by changing the date - we had a few who couldn't make it and we missed Darby, Carla A and Laura.
This was our Thanksgiving event but we decided to forgo the traditional T-day fare and instead opted for food with a French flair in honor of our book Madame Tussaud. Quiche, French Onion soup with the trimmings, salad, a Black Truffle Brie, Cherry Dump Cake, Pear Tart, and Chocolate Croissants were all delicious!
Arnora recommended this months book and we were all glad she did. Of those who read it, everyone liked it without exception. I'll just say up front it rated a 4.7 with two "I really, really liked it."
Madama Tussaud's is the famous Wax Museum that's been around for a long time but none of us knew the history of it. Certainly not that it was started in the 1700's a few years prior to the French Revolution. The book opens with Marie Grosholtz working along side a Swiss doctor she calls her "uncle" to whom she has been apprenticed for many years learning his craft of making the wax figures.
Today we view Madame Tussaud's as a tourist attraction where we see the famous people of our day sculpted in wax. And, today it hadn't seemed as relevant to me because we have so much media and so many repetitive images of our actors, politicians and sports figures. When Diana and I were in London, we passed by MadameTussaud's on Marlybone half a dozen times but we had no interest in standing in line to see images that we are inundated with daily. Had I known the history behind it I would've been first in line to buy a ticket!
In it's beginning the Salon de Cire was a sort of visual "tabloid" of it's day providing visual images, before photography, of the Royal family and their consorts and the famous and infamous people who were starting a revolution. The "tableau" or scenes they created would change at a moments notice depending on who they knew were coming to see it. The family is connected to revolutionaries in high places and Marie is hired to teach the King's sister how to sculpt the wax figures. Marie and her family have to straddle both sides of the fence in order to survive and in the end Marie ends up making death masks of many of the people who are meeting their fate on the Guillotine. At first they bring the fresh heads to her and then she is required to go the Cemetery Madeleine to retrieve them herself. During the Revolution, Marie loses two of her brothers who are Swiss Guards and her true love, Henri, escapes to London when Marie refuses to go with him.
However, as she becomes familiar with the Royal family she paints a much more sympathetic picture of
King Louie and Marie Antoinette than the one with which we are familiar. She becomes very attached to the King's sister Elisabet. It is finally her head that she refuses to sculpt which brings about her own imprisonment and a narrow escape from the Guillotine.
The book changed our viewpoint of the French Revolution. I had always been taught the pheasants were angry because they were starving while the Royals were leading a live of excess. They wanted equality and were modeling their "constitution" on America's recently won freedom from England. Many of them did want a constitutional Monarchy and many wanted to abolish the Monarchy altogether. However, the men who were leading this revolt had their own agenda for power and in the end beheaded many more commoners than royals. It was a horrible genocide where more than 40,000 people lost their heads for no reason. The men who campaigned for "freedom" were greedy, power hungry tyrants who, in the end, finally lost their own heads bringing an end to this Reign of Terror.
Marie was freed from prison where she met and then married Francois Tussaud and had two sons. But the marriage did not go well. Fortunately for Marie she had the foresight to draw up what is now considered to be the very first prenuptial agreement. Ten years after the end of the Revolution she moves to London, is reunited with her true love, Henri and they travel Europe with the Salon de Cire.
Marie is a fascinating woman who had a long and dramatic life. She was centuries ahead of her time as a woman with a career she valued over marriage. She moved in a circle of powerful men who often listened and valued her opinions. She was an artist who made a good living in a day when the pheasants were starving due to lack of resources. Bu,t they would stand in line to pay see the was figures Marie and her uncle were sculpting. She was smart and observant and managed to literally "keep her head" while others were losing theirs.
Many of us were inspired to look for other information about the French Revolution while we read. I was astonished to find that France continued to use the Guillotine as their preferred method of execution until President Mitterrand abolished capital punishment in 1981! The last person actually executed by this method was in 1977. It was also employed in other countries. Germany used it during the Third Reich and it was used in the German Democratic Republic as late as 1966. Astonishing.
This book did for me what Nicolas and Alexandra and Isaac's Storm did for me. It made these historical events real, personal, and emotional. I knew going in how these stories ended but by the time I got to the end I was rung out and very, very sad for it all. Marie's story, however gruesome, was also a very hopeful one. She persevered and overcame incredible odds in a time when women really had no rights at all. She's an inspirational person and I'm very glad to have met her.
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