Marie Tussaud was born 1 December 1761 in Strasbourg, France. Her father, Joseph Grosholtz, was killed in the Seven Years' War just two months before Marie was born. Surviving a dangerous and singularly gruesome past, she had made herself a household name in her adopted country and Madame Tussaud's has remained one of Britain’s most popular tourist attractions to this day. The gruesomeness began even before Madame Tussaud was born in Strasburg late in 1. She never knew her father, a German soldier named Grosholtz, whose face had been hideously mutilated in the wars and whose lower jaw had been shot away and replaced by a silver plate. This nightmare figure died two months before Marie was born. Her young widowed mother, Anne Marie, brought the child up at Berne in Switzerland, where she went to be housekeeper to a doctor named Philippe Curtius, who had a talent for wax modelling and ran a museum of his waxwork heads and busts. It was from this . As a result, she met many of the leading French aristocrats and intellectuals of the day and she modelled both Voltaire and Rousseau from life. In the 1. 78. 0s she was employed to teach Madame Elizabeth, Louis XVI’s sister, and met the King and many of the royal family. Curtius later developed Jacobin sympathies and Marie met Robespierre and other revolutionaries in her uncle’s circle. As the Terror took its toll, Marie was forced to make casts of the heads of victims of the guillotine, many of whom had been her uncle’s friends and dinner guests. In one episode, the leaders of the mob that hacked the Princess de Lamballe to pieces stood over Marie while she took a cast of the severed head, its auburn hair horribly smeared with blood. Marie had known the princess and liked her. She made a mould of the head of Louis XVI himself after his execution. When Marat was stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday, the National Assembly instructed Marie to make his death mask and sketch the scene exactly for the painter David. She took a cast of Charlotte Corday’s face, too, after her execution, and later modelled the severed heads of both Marie Antoinette and Robespierre. Curtius died in 1.
Marie his collection of waxworks. A year later she married a man named Fran. They had two sons, but the marriage was not a success and Marie never saw him again after 1. Channel and began years of successful touring round the towns of England, Scotland and Ireland before settling down in London in 1. Baker Street and Portman Square. The Duke of Wellington was a regular visitor and liked to look at the effigies of himself and Napoleon, and when Queen Victoria was crowned in 1. Madame Tussaud’s put on a magnificent display of the scene. The following year Marie’s memoirs were published, but contained little about her private life. She was a talkative person, but was always reticent about her experiences during the Terror. Besides the waxworks, historical relics on view at Madame Tussaud’s included one of the blades from the guillotine obtained from the executioner Sanson himself and objects associated with Napoleon. There was also the Special Room devoted to murderers and bloodshed, which from 1. Chamber of Horrors. Madame Tussauds (UK / t u Marie’s sons, Joseph and Francis, joined her in the business, but well into her eighties Madame herself liked to sit at the entrance to her exhibition rooms and collect the public’s shillings. A painting of 1. 84. Towards the end, as she began to suffer from severe asthma, she rediscovered her Roman Catholic faith. Her sons were at her bedside when she died and her last words were to beg them never to quarrel. She was buried in the Catholic chapel in the Fulham Road, where many French exiles had gone before her. Her coffin was subsequently moved to St Mary’s in Cadogan Street.
The Gifts of Madame Death. Death and Birth at the Bellefontaine Cemetery, St. Louis, MO. Image by William Scott. Madame Death’s dressed all in black and seated next to a battered metal table. We do not look at her, or touch her, or do anything else to acknowledge her. For her part, she says nothing, but only watches our circle while we partake in the first communion of the night: water and crackers, nothing else. We chew on this meager harvest, and for a moment, at least, we forget that we stand in the backyard of a house in St. Louis, Missouri, a house with electricity, heat, and more food waiting in the kitchen than we could possibly eat in one night. The ritual takes us to a darker place, a hungry place, a pit in our collective unconscious that knows that the coming months bring a time want and death. We know that we travel through a gate tonight, a gate on the road between bountiful autumn and desperate winter, and the gate is called Samhain. For me, this Samhain cuts deeper. I expect it is the same for the rest of Sabbatsmeet, too . I have been a part of one of those covens, Pleiades, since I was born. We range from infants . Most of us have been a part of Sabbatsmeet for decades. This is my family, the same or more so than my legal relatives. And this year, our family has been visited by Madame Death. He sets the cup and the plate, now barren even of simple grain and water, on the battered table. Sometimes we mention someone better known: a writer, or a musician. She arrived after a lengthy correspondence, the culmination of many years of cancer. We had barely seen her in years . Louis for the sabbats. But still, we missed her . Her absence felt like January wind through a broken window. I do not cry in the moment’s silence that follows. Instead, just as Barb’s name is called a second time, a memory floods in. There was no traditional ritual that year, but instead a sort of haunted house. I can’t remember the things they said anymore, except for one. I remember walking into the bedroom, lit in sensuous, dangerous red. A woman with wild auburn hair sits on the bed, dressed all in black. She smiles, and it’s Barb’s smile, but possessed by the spirit of the night. She curls a finger, beckoning me to come closer. It’s not quite the same for me, being younger, a child of the second generation of Sabbatsmeet. I loved Barb, but I knew her entirely from Sabbatsmeet. I knew of her life outside . And her death, the third loss our circle had suffered in as many years, forced me to confront an inescapable truth: our family was aging. Some day Madame Death would come to my elders. Someday I would call their names at Samhain. When we are finished with the calling, my parents tell us to join hands and close our eyes. I take their hands, feel the bones of their fingers twined into mine. I doubt it would do much good to describe my meditation- visions; they were largely darkness, a dance between night and the ritual fire. Sometimes I thought I could see some of those we had lost: Tom, or Kurt, or Image. Once I thought I saw Barb, dressed forever in the Samhain black of memory. But mostly I felt the heat of the fire, and the cold of the air, and the warmth of my family’s hands pressed to mine. My father’s voice called me back to consciousness. Beneath her hood, she is a redheaded woman, smiling. In her lap sits a serene infant . You will have heard this all before, in books and speeches and rituals. But it’s good to be reminded of it on Samhain, reminded of why, to Wiccans, this is the most important night of the year. I appreciate that, but it’s what my father says next that strikes me clean to the heart. I can’t say how true that is. Life here in Missouri still feels quite entrenched in the culture the media pundits tell me has begun dying away. But still. I look at Julian, with the serious eyes and the inviting cheeks, Julian, who is the child of my brother in Coven Pleiades, Julian, whose father and father’s father have stood in this circle before him. I look at this child, and in him I see everything I have ever been given and everything I have it in me to give. I look at him, and I see the future of our religion. Even more important than our religion, I see the future of our family, of us. Someday my parents will be dead. Someday Julian will be an old man, and if I am lucky, he will call my name at Samhain. Someday Julian himself will have taken the hand of Madame Death, and some other child, a child whose face I can barely imagine now, will be standing in the circle that her great- grandparents once knew. We drink at last the second communion, the honey wine and delicious cakes, singing . We remember the dead, but we celebrate the living. In the lap of Madame Death, the little baby stares at the ritual fire, and then lets out a sharp and vital shout. It is a good thing.
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