Kate Berridge by Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax Page B

politics of the day.
    Less fly on the wall than flunky in the corner, Marie’s vantage point allows us intimate glimpses of the private life of the royal family. The King’s closeness to his sister was such that he often sought her out to discuss confidential matters. Marie relates how on one such occasion when he was consulting Elizabeth on a private matter, and she diplomatically rose to leave them alone, the King would not allow her saying, ‘Restez, restez, mademoiselle.’ Marie interpreted the ensuing sotto voce dialogue as a request to borrow money. The request denied, she relates how the King suddenly arose from his chair, and turning round upon his heel, said, ‘Alors je suis tracassé de tous côtes’ (‘Then I am disappointed on all sides’).
    That the Crown was strapped for cash at this time is well known, but official records do not suggest that cash flow was so poor that the King was reduced to appealing to his young sister for handouts. Even Marie, as the handicraft teacher, was not immune from being asked financial favours, for apparently Elizabeth’s charitable nature was such that ‘she generally anticipated her allowance, and frequently borrowed from Madame Tussaud rather than reject the appeal of an individual who she thought merited relief.’ One such supplicant was Rousseau’s long-suffering mistress, who regularly approached Elizabeth, in floods of very genuine tears, with appeals to help the debt-oppressed writer, and one of the extra-curricular activities thatMarie says fell to her was to courier the requisite cash by carriage to Rousseau’s lodgings in Paris.
    Marie’s reminiscences reveal the protagonists of the royal household as flawed and fallible human beings. She conveys the King’s weakness in restraining his wife’s hedonistic excesses, and gives an impression that the hapless monarch was as unable to stand up to his wife as he was to the Third Estate later on. ‘After all his entreaties that the Queen would renounce or diminish the gorgeous fêtes and entertainments she was giving proved in vain, with a despairing air he would exclaim “Then let the game go on” and extravagance and pleasure and dissipation resumed their reckless fling.’ This corroborates other accounts of the King’s pathological inability to be assertive. A lack of authority is a dangerous failing in a monarch, and with Louis XVI it was a fatal flaw. The straight-talking Duc de Richelieu confronted the King with an unflattering comparison of his ineffectual style with the authority of his predecessors. In a killer summary of the decline of the French monarchy he said, ‘Under Louis XIV one kept silent, under Louis XV one dared to whisper, under you one talks quite loudly.’
    It is almost poetic irony then that, in the absence of iron will and nerves of steel, the King had a passion for metalwork. One of Marie’s more striking images of him is as an obsessive lockmaker, constantly leaving the revelry around him to pursue his unusual hobby in private. ‘He was so partial to making locks, that he was engaged in that occupation for some hours each day, and many of those now on the doors of the palace of Versailles were made by him.’ There is further irony in the figure of the King imprisoned by destiny, unable to escape his dynastic duty, having this particular preoccupation. This is one example of a memory corroborated by Madame Campan, who relates how the King’s hobby irritated the Queen. ‘His hands, blackened by that sort of work, were often, in my presence, the subject of remonstrances and even sharp reproaches from the Queen, who would have chosen other amusements for her husband.’ Other records provide fascinating through-the-keyhole views of the royal lockmaker. Hidden from public view, he was never happier than when forging and filing in his private workshop under the expert tuition of the