Kate Berridge by Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax

rise to cruel jibes that he’d got two wives for one, but her eleven-year-old sister Elizabeth, who had been extraordinarily close to her, was bereft without her. A curriculum of embroidery, harpsichord and botany filled her days, and a pack of pampered greyhounds were objects of great affection, but not even a close bond with her lady-in-waiting, Angélique de Bombelles, could fill the great gap left by Clothilde. As time went on, faith emerged as Elizabeth’s solace and her preoccupation. Whereas many young women measured out their pre-married lives by making endless wax fruit bowls and flower baskets, devotional not decorative models were Elizabeth’s incentive for taking up wax modelling. Three years after her traumatic wrench from Clothilde, she is said to have enlisted Marie’s help.
    Marie’s elevation from the colourful world of show business in the entertainment quarter of Paris to the inner sanctum of court circles at Versailles has seeped into the bigger legend her life story has become. The story of her time at court is a primer for the impact of the traumatic experiences that she claims to have suffered subsequently, for the knowledge that she was making death masks from former friends and colleagues adds great interest, and elicits sympathy for her as a victim of the Revolution, rather than as a profiteer. Her memoir did much to crystallize the credibility of her court connections that her display of figures of the French royal family had already planted in people’s minds. It opens with an impressive display of her credentials as a reliable authority on the French royal family, being presented as ‘the recollections of an individual who was for many years the companion of the unfortunate Elizabeth’. The press lapped this up, as is evidenced by an 1839 article in the London Saturday Journal , which reported:
    So delighted was Madame Elizabeth with the young artist that she took lessons of her in the art of modelling, and at last obtained M. Curtius’sconsent to take his niece to reside with her at Versailles. Here, Mlle Grosholtz had an opportunity of appreciating the saint-like qualities of this unfortunate princess, who perished on the scaffold at the age of 30, and of witnessing that reckless extravagance of other members of the royal family which finally exasperated the minds of the people to open rebellion.
    Marie’s account of Versailles is filtered through the teacher–pupil relationship. Madame Elizabeth is described as blue-eyed and handsome, with a fair complexion and light hair. Hinting at the corpulence that ran in her family is the information that ‘Latterly, she became very stout, but ever remained elegant in her deportment.’ different sources all corroborate the picture of Elizabeth as a devout and conscientious child, who had more ambitions to enter a convent than to get married. Marie describes her as a paragon of affability and amiability, underpinned with self-discipline above her age. ‘She was very regular in her manner of living; dined at four, retired early and seldom gave parties.’ Another aspect of her maturity was her commitment to confession and communion: ‘She was remarkably strict in her observance of religious duties.’
    Marie’s responsibility was to teach her pious pupil how to model religious votive pieces, specifically anatomically correct wax replicas of deformed or diseased body parts. In what is in effect a Christian version of the pagan belief in the power of doubles used maliciously in voodoo ritual, these wax replicas were then suspended in the churches of Saint-Geneviève and Saint-Sulpice in the belief that the relevant patron saint would intercede and heal those so afflicted.
    Their closeness of age was at odds with the vast social chasm between protégée and tutor, the one cloistered in a rigid routine of court protocol, with around sixty staff to cater for her personal needs, the