Tussaud’s as educator—Queer questions—Wanted, a “model” wife—Quaint extract from an Indian’s diary.
Tussaud’s as educator—Queer questions—Wanted, a “model” wife—Quaint extract from an Indian’s diary.
An American visitor to the Exhibition once said to me, “You know, this show is a liberal education, a history of Europe in kind. I never learned so much history in any one afternoon. Why don’t you write your reminiscences?”
I told him that I probably should do so one day, and he replied characteristically:
“There is no time like the present. Get on with it, and put me down as a subscriber.”
A French Ambassador is reported to have said: “A day in Tussaud’s is worth a year at Oxford; it fixes history as no tutor could.”
On more than one occasion schoolmasters have made a similar remark with reference to the value of the figures and exhibits in Madame Tussaud’s as a means of impressing the minds of their boys with the episodes of history. Teachers often bring their pupils, and I am constantly receiving appreciative letters after a visit.
Schoolboys themselves, I have always noticed, take the keenest possible interest in all they see, and I frequently overhear them eagerly challenging one anotherconcerning the identity and lives of historical personages as they confront their models.
The Exhibition has been frequently consulted as an authority upon innumerable historical subjects, especially with regard to matters dealing with portraiture, biography, and costume, and many of the questions submitted might well have puzzled even the compiler of an encyclopædia. Queries are almost always coupled with an urgent request for immediate reply.
Peculiarities of well-known people are fruitful topics for inquiry. The following are a few of the questions put:
“On which side of Cromwell’s face did his warts grow?”
“Which was the arm that Nelson lost, and which was his blind eye?”
“Was Byron’s club-foot the right or the left?”
“Did Mary, Queen of Scots, have brown eyes or blue?”
Again: “What was the height of Napoleon?”—the most frequent question of all.
Other popular problems relate to costume:
“Did the Black Prince really wear black armour? Or to what was his cognomen due?”
We were consulted during the period when preparations were in progress for the late King Edward’s coronation so as to decide what was the correct tone of purple for the royal robes. As we have in our possession the robes actually worn by George IV at that King’s coronation, we allowed a broad hem on one of thetrains to be unstitched, thus revealing the original colour, unchanged by exposure to dust and light.
In this connection the following quotation from Thackeray’sThe Four Georges, published in 1861, is interesting:
Madame Tussaud has got King George’s coronation robes; is there any man now alive who would kiss the hem of that trumpery? He sleeps since thirty years.
Madame Tussaud has got King George’s coronation robes; is there any man now alive who would kiss the hem of that trumpery? He sleeps since thirty years.
The same author also mentions the Exhibition in the following extract fromThe Newcomes:
For pictures they do not seem to care much; they thought the National Gallery a dreary exhibition, and in the Royal Academy could be got to admire nothing but the picture of M’Collop of M’Collop, by our friend of the like name: but they think Madame Tussaud’s interesting exhibition of Waxwork the most delightful in London: and there I had the happiness of introducing them to our friend Mr. Frederick Bayham; who, subsequently, on coming to this office with his valuable contributions on the Fine Arts, made particular inquiries as to their pecuniary means, and expressed himself instantly ready to bestow his hand upon the mother or daughter, provided old Mr. Binnie would make a satisfactory settlement.
For pictures they do not seem to care much; they thought the National Gallery a dreary exhibition, and in the Royal Academy could be got to admire nothing but the picture of M’Collop of M’Collop, by our friend of the like name: but they think Madame Tussaud’s interesting exhibition of Waxwork the most delightful in London: and there I had the happiness of introducing them to our friend Mr. Frederick Bayham; who, subsequently, on coming to this office with his valuable contributions on the Fine Arts, made particular inquiries as to their pecuniary means, and expressed himself instantly ready to bestow his hand upon the mother or daughter, provided old Mr. Binnie would make a satisfactory settlement.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAYA Portrait Study by John T. Tussaud.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
A Portrait Study by John T. Tussaud.
On one or two other occasions our relics and historic pictures have been specially viewed by those who had charge of the arrangements, for the express purpose of settling points in regard to precedence and costume at royal functions.
Inquiries from members of the public often come about through a dispute which has ended in a wager, but many and various are the reasons that are assigned by the questioner for his query. Sometimes my correspondent is a writer of books, who wants to give a correct description of a character or incident.
This leads me to the subject of misconception, and it is surprising how deep-rooted are the inaccuracies that have crept into the minds of visitors with regard to the models they have seen in the Exhibition. Many of our patrons express themselves as absolutely certain that figures have done things which I am equally positive they never did and never could do.
WILLIAM COBBETTNoted English political writer.
WILLIAM COBBETT
Noted English political writer.
What is the use of telling individuals that the originator of Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, William Cobbett, who turns his head from side to side, does not take snuff, when they insist that they have actually seen him lift his hand from his snuff-box to his nose? Yet this is a widespread fallacy.
The figure of Marat dying in his bath never has breathed; it is the bosom of the Sleeping Beauty that rises and falls as she reposes in slumber.
Neither does Henry VIII turn his head to inspect his six wives. Those who think he does must be confusing him with the aforesaid Cobbett, although not a few readers of history think that the head of Bluff King Hal, who caused so many people to be beheaded, must itself have been “turned.”
Some years ago an elderly bachelor from the Midlands called to ask whether we could make him a modelof a lady based upon his own description and sketches and dressed in clothes designed by himself.
I should have attached no importance to the matter had I not, my curiosity being whetted, asked a few questions of the caller.
It then transpired that the model was to represent his ideal woman whom he had been unable to discover in real life. He was anxious to have a woman about the house “pleasing to the eye, but at the same time somewhat less loquacious than the usual run of females,” as he put it.
He proposed that the model should be placed in an adjustable chair and be jointed, so that at meal-times it could sit at the head of his lonely table and at other times could recline at ease beside the fire, opposite his own armchair.
Needless to say, the commission was not accepted.
It is very natural that such an institution as Madame Tussaud’s should include the “curious” among its diversified store of anecdote.
One quaint document in our archives is the published diary of an Indian officer, Jemadar, No. 1427, Abdur Razzak, of the 15th Madras Lancers, from which I give the following extract relating to a visit he paid to the Exhibition:
On the 5th June, 1893, we went to see the Wax Work “Madame Tussaud,” where we first saw a woman in red dress with a basket full of different kinds of flowers all made in wax with her, which was very difficult to make out that she was an image, but when we entered the building we saw lots of images of emperors and kings, and remarkable persons both men and women with rich and poor dresses on.I really say that I was very much admired to see these images, and was in many places in the buildings mistook the visitors to be of them when they were standing still, but when they moved was very much ashamed on account of my misunderstanding; by this we made our minds to be little far from both the images and the visitors and servants in the building.We saw the throne of Her Majesty just the same we have seen on the 9th May, 1893, besides this one more image in shape with Her Majesty in a room writing something on a table with a candle on it, and this too quite astonishing.We also saw a gentleman on elephant’s back in a jungle has hunted a tiger, the pair of which attacked the elephant round its trunk taking to him and the elephant putting its head down and a gentleman on it, aiming to fire on the tiger.We saw a room in which were the images of almost all the assassinators with the particulars of their deeds. We also saw a place in which all the weapons, etc., to take revenge of assassinators, such as scabbard, hanging, &c.
On the 5th June, 1893, we went to see the Wax Work “Madame Tussaud,” where we first saw a woman in red dress with a basket full of different kinds of flowers all made in wax with her, which was very difficult to make out that she was an image, but when we entered the building we saw lots of images of emperors and kings, and remarkable persons both men and women with rich and poor dresses on.
I really say that I was very much admired to see these images, and was in many places in the buildings mistook the visitors to be of them when they were standing still, but when they moved was very much ashamed on account of my misunderstanding; by this we made our minds to be little far from both the images and the visitors and servants in the building.
We saw the throne of Her Majesty just the same we have seen on the 9th May, 1893, besides this one more image in shape with Her Majesty in a room writing something on a table with a candle on it, and this too quite astonishing.
We also saw a gentleman on elephant’s back in a jungle has hunted a tiger, the pair of which attacked the elephant round its trunk taking to him and the elephant putting its head down and a gentleman on it, aiming to fire on the tiger.
We saw a room in which were the images of almost all the assassinators with the particulars of their deeds. We also saw a place in which all the weapons, etc., to take revenge of assassinators, such as scabbard, hanging, &c.
Stars of the stage in my studio—Miss Ellen Terry has a cup of tea—Sir Squire and Lady Bancroft—Sir Henry Irving and the cabby—We comply with a strange request.
Stars of the stage in my studio—Miss Ellen Terry has a cup of tea—Sir Squire and Lady Bancroft—Sir Henry Irving and the cabby—We comply with a strange request.
People sometimes ask me how my portraits are taken, and how my subjects sit to me.
It is very much with my work as it is with the work of a sculptor. There is practically only this distinction in principle—the sculptor reproduces his work in marble or bronze, and I execute mine in wax, both working from a first impression in clay. Added to this there is, of course, a difference in the matter of treatment.
Sitters have their own peculiar characteristics, and often require humouring.
I once wrote to Miss Ellen Terry, asking her to do me the honour of sitting to me; and she replied that she would be pleased to do so, making no appointment.
A few days afterwards the vivacious actress found her way to my studio door without anyone to guide her, and how she got there has always puzzled me. I was engrossed in some urgent work, when a rap came and Miss Terry sailed in, all smiles and animation.
She did not introduce herself. There was no need. I knew her instantly, as I supposed she imagined Ishould. It was a very hot day, and she said, “I am positively dying for a cup of tea.”
She told me she was just clearing off all her visiting arrears before sailing, and added: “You see, Mr. Tussaud, I have not forgotten you.”
The cup that cheers was very soon brewed, and Miss Terry saw that I noticed a gauntlet on her right hand as she raised the cup to her lips.
“I met with a slight accident on the stage,” she said.
I wish I could recall some of her delightful chat, and I regret that I did not keep a diary instead of trusting entirely to memory. However, I may derive some consolation from the conclusion, arrived at by an old and experienced literary friend, that it is seldom what has been forgotten would have been worth writing about had it been remembered.
When I had finished modelling, and not till then, Miss Terry apologised for being in a hurry, and as she took her departure I found myself wondering by what secret art or gift she could conjure up so much mirth and sprightliness when the thermometer was registering ninety in the shade.
After Miss Terry had gone my eye happened to catch the chair on which she had been sitting, and I discovered that the back legs were within an eighth of an inch of the edge of the high dais.
I trembled to think of what might have happened to the actress if the chair had fallen to the floor while she occupied it. I suppose the reason for its position having changed from that in which it was originally placed was that the actress, who could hardly be describedas a reposeful “sitter,” had shifted it in her restlessness.
The carpenter had omitted to fix the fillet which should have been placed to preclude any risk of the chair falling from its elevated position.
Only a few months ago Lady Bancroft, speaking at a matinée in aid of King George’s Pension Fund for Actors, made an amusing allusion to Madame Tussaud’s.
She had just been listening to the dialogue between Peg Woffington, played by Irene Vanburgh, and Triplet, and she said:
“When it was arranged that my husband should come from his retirement to play the part of Triplet, we were very much exercised where to find his old costume.
“Then, all at once, we remembered the last time we saw that costume was at Madame Tussaud’s.
“I said, ‘Of course you have been melted down by this time.’
“He said, ‘What do you think they have made of me? Perhaps Marshal Foch, perhaps President Poincaré, perhaps President Wilson. I only hope my figure has not been melted down to something in the Chamber of Horrors.’”
None laughed more heartily than the King at Lady Bancroft’s story.
It was in the spring of 1889, that the Bancrofts gave me several sittings. The merry laughter of the actress made the time pass quickly and my work a real joy.
SIR SQUIRE BANCROFTWhose model as Triplet, together with the model of Lady Bancroft as Peg Woffington, are on exhibition at Madame Tussaud’s.
SIR SQUIRE BANCROFT
Whose model as Triplet, together with the model of Lady Bancroft as Peg Woffington, are on exhibition at Madame Tussaud’s.
When the models of Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft were added to the Exhibition, in the characters of Peg Woffington and Triplet inMasks and Faces, reference to this was made in our Easter announcement.
Sir Squire Bancroft tells the following story in this connection:
“A young man from the country visited the Exhibition on Easter Monday of that year, and went straight to the Chamber of Horrors. He said he wanted to see the ‘squire who murdered a triplet’!”
They tell me that Henry Irving came to see his portrait a year after I had modelled him, but, unfortunately, I missed the great actor that day.
Mention of Irving takes my mind back rather a long way, to the time when I had the pleasure of introducing his model and that of Miss Ellen Terry to the Exhibition. They were on the eve of making their first journey across the Atlantic, and they cheerfully consented to enable me to let the public see them in their absence.
Irving was an ideal sitter, as might be expected of a great actor. He adapted himself to my requirements in every detail, and gave me to feel that he took great pleasure in my work. I very soon became aware of Irving’s kindliness of heart and his sympathy with an artist at his labours.
Conversation turned upon the question of insuring Madame Tussaud’s against fire, and Irving remarked that money would be a very poor compensation for the loss of our irreplaceable collection, especially havingregard to the relics of Napoleon and the heads of the French revolutionaries.
The actor told me of an alarming experience he had while acting at the Lyceum Theatre.
The play was nearing its most dramatic climax when he noticed that fire had broken out in the “sky borders,” and the fear of a panic in the audience rose in his mind lest any member of it should chance to see the flames.
He admitted that it was an ordeal that required all his courage to face without betraying signs of anxiety, but he succeeded in continuing to play his part without a single person in the front of the house suspecting that there was any cause for alarm.
Fortunately, the stage carpenters and attendants were able to extinguish the fast-spreading flames without any interruption. The curtain was eventually rung down on an applauding audience, quite oblivious of the danger that had threatened.
Irving lighted his pipe on his departure, which set me thinking that he would have enjoyed a smoke during the sitting, but was too courteous and considerate to suggest one. He told me he hoped, on his return from America, to visit the Exhibition and see his portrait. He came and saw it, but I did not see him.
Sir Henry used to employ the same cabman to take him to the theatre each evening. He asked him once if he had ever seen him act, and, the man replying in the negative, Irving gave him five shillings with which the cabman could procure seats for himself and his wife in the pit.
On the following day the actor asked the driver what he thought of him on the stage.
“To tell you the truth,” said the ingenuous jehu, “we didn’t go.”
“Not go,” said Irving, “when I gave you the money for the seats!”
“Well, sir,” said the man, “it was this way. It was my missus’s birthday, and I asked her which she would prefer to do—go to see you act, or go to Madame Tussaud’s, and she said she preferred the waxworks.”
Irving often related this story against himself with the greatest gusto, enjoying it quite as much as his hearers did.
On many occasions Madame Tussaud’s has been of service to the stage.
When the late W. G. Wills, the author ofJane Shore, a prolific playwright in his day, was at the height of his popularity, my father was approached by Mr. Coleman, manager of the Queen’s Theatre, Long Acre, to produce for him a figure of Charles I.
The reason of this request was, surely, one of the strangest that ever entered the brain of even the most enterprising of theatrical managers.
Mr. George Rignold was playing at that theatre a drama, written by Wills, entitledCromwell. This play was the successor of another by the same dramatist, namely,Charles I, in which Irving played the part of the King, and confirmed the reputation he had made inThe Bells.
A bargain had been struck that ifCharles Isucceeded,Wills should writeCromwellfor Mr. Coleman.Charles Iproved a great success at the Lyceum, butCromwellwas a comparative failure at the Queen’s.
I come now to the reason of Mr. Coleman’s request for a waxen model of the King.
He said he wanted it to repose in the coffin on the stage to stimulate the imagination of the actor, Mr. Rignold, when rendering the long oration delivered by Cromwell in the presence of the dead monarch.
The model was furnished with every detail, even to the clothing in which the body was attired. I was afterwards told that only the manager, the actor, and my father were aware of the realistic plan that had been devised to accentuate an actor’s eloquence.
Literary sitters—George R. Sims’s impromptu—His ordeal in the Chamber of Horrors—George Augustus Sala’s masterpiece.
Literary sitters—George R. Sims’s impromptu—His ordeal in the Chamber of Horrors—George Augustus Sala’s masterpiece.
Mr. G. R. Sims was a cheery, entertaining sitter; not, perhaps, what most artists would consider a helpful one. His active mind busied itself with every object of interest around him. He would know all about them, and tell each off with some droll quip or whimsical jest.
I have spent many a bright hour with “Dagonet”—yes, even including those spent with him in the Chamber of Horrors.
I once chanced to have a book of his (theDagonet Ballads) in my hand when he came into my studio, and I asked him to sign his name in it. Without a moment’s hesitation he wrote:
Dear Tussaud,I’m a model man.You’re a modeller.Yours truly,G. R. Sims.
Dear Tussaud,
I’m a model man.
You’re a modeller.
Yours truly,
G. R. Sims.
Soon after we had decided to add Mr. Sims’s figure to the Exhibition, Mrs. G. A. Sala happened to meet him, and questioned him as to the sensations he experiencedin picturing himself as a waxen celebrity.
“I feel very frightened indeed,” he promptly replied, “and more than that, exceedingly sorry that I ever promised to become a waxwork, for I have been told since that if the public grow weary of your presence, or the Tussauds get offended with you, they melt you down, and build up a more popular fellow out of your dripping. Nasty idea, very!”
Mrs. Sala said it certainlywasa very nasty idea; but if there were any truth in the melting-down story, G. R. could enjoy the satisfaction of thinking that he might have arisen in his waxen grandeur from the “dripping” of someone less popular than himself.
Mr. Sims said that so long as the public only stuck pins into him, or stamped on his toes, he did not mind; but he should feel it very much if they were to bang him about the head with an umbrella, or take him by the collar and shake him.
It must have been in the early winter of the year 1891, while I was modelling him, that Mr. Sims had the following interesting and somewhat unpleasant experience, which he himself describes. He says:
“I have been penetrating the secrets of Tussaud’s lately, and had a specially quiet half-hour alone with the murderers in the Chamber of Horrors, just to see what it was like.
“The idea came to me one night when I had been sitting late to Mr. John Tussaud. I wanted to see what it would feel like to be all alone with those awful people with only one dim jet of gas lighting up their fearful features.
“After the door was shut I walked about and whistled, and stared defiantly at William Corder and James Bloomfield Rush, and even went so far as to address M. Eyraud in French. But wandering about in the semi-darkness I stumbled and fell, and when I got up and looked around me I found I was in Mrs. Pearcey’s kitchen.
“Then I made one wild rush at the closed door, and hammered at it until the kindly watchman came and let me out. I never want to be shut up alone at night in the Chamber of Horrors again as long as I live.”
Humorously describing my studios at the time, Mr. Sims says:
“At Madame Tussaud’s I am at present in rather a curious condition. There is a good deal of the Thames mystery about me. It is not given to every man to see his legs in one room, his hands hanging up in another, and his head on a shelf, looking about anxiously for his body.
“I can’t say I quite like looking at my head on a shelf. It suggests decapitation and Madame de Lamballe’s head on a pike as Louis caught sight of it when the mob held it up at the window.
“But I am assured that I shall be put together next week, and that my limbs will once more be found together as Nature intended they should be.
“I don’t know what that Scotch sixpenny which refers to me in highly uncomplimentary terms about seven times in every column will say, but the exigencies of space at the Marylebone Museum have compelled the management to put me next to Lord Tennyson. Iam sure that this will be such a shock to my modesty that I shall go hot and melt the very first day that the weather is at all warm.
“Fortunately, I shall have a brother journalist to support me and keep me in countenance, for while Lord Tennyson is seated writing poetry in his study, Mr. George Augustus Sala inhisstudy sits next door to him, dashing off one of his brilliant leaders for theDaily Telegraph. It is in a study built up on the other side of Lord Tennyson that the visitor to Madame Tussaud’s will at an early date find himself face to face with ‘Dagonet.’”
There George R. Sims has been seated ever since. Twenty-eight years ago! Time has wrought many changes, but during the whole of that period I have uninterruptedly enjoyed Mr. Sims’s valued friendship.
GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALAThe bust of the eminent journalist, first exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1890, by John T. Tussaud.
GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA
The bust of the eminent journalist, first exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1890, by John T. Tussaud.
George Augustus Sala sat to me about the same time, and a very good sitter he was. The celebrated journalist lived in a flat at Victoria Street, Westminster, where I called on him, and I remember his saying to me with pride:
“I’m taking up modern Greek in my sixtieth year. What do you think I am reading? I am reading an excellent account in Greek of the Stanfield Hall murder.”
During the autumn of 1889 I had seen a good deal of Mr. Sala, for we were at that time discussing the details for the rewriting of our Exhibition Catalogue.
He had always taken a great interest in Madame Tussaud’s, and, like many other literary men, had found it useful as a place of reference on matters ofportraiture and costume. He entered upon the scheme for producing a better and larger Catalogue with great enthusiasm, but I soon discovered that the work was hardly likely to receive that equable treatment necessary for a book of the kind.
There were certain subjects his mind positively ran riot on, while others scarcely aroused the slightest interest.
Marie Antoinette and Mary, Queen of Scots, stirred his imagination most of all, and to the ill-fated Queen of Louis XVI he reverted so often that it seemed the book was likely to be over-weighted with matter dealing with her sad career, to the exclusion of so much else of vital importance to our handbook.
Whenever he stood in front of the decapitated head of Marie Antoinette he always contemplated it in silence—and invariably passed from it without making any remark, as if it were a subject too sad for ordinary comment.
“I have done the Marie Antoinette biography,” greeted me long before the work had been definitely agreed upon, and six or seven pages of essay were pressed into my hands as an accomplished undertaking that positively left no room for further consideration. This matter was printed in full in our Catalogue, and remained there until the difficulty in procuring paper during the war necessitated its temporary elimination. It is, perhaps, the best thing, from a purely literary point of view, that Sala ever wrote.
It is reprinted as the following chapter.
The Royal Family—The Queen—Her “trial,” condemnation and death—The Sansons—Sala’s impressions.
The Royal Family—The Queen—Her “trial,” condemnation and death—The Sansons—Sala’s impressions.
GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALAFrom a photograph.
GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA
From a photograph.
There are some stories so dreadful in the immensity of human misery which they reveal—there are some tragedies of which the catastrophe is one of such unmitigated horror, that the reader who has general impressions of what will be the end of the dismal tale, but who is unfamiliar with its particular circumstances, is unable to follow, without some kind of impatience, the opening scenes of the drama. He has continually in his mind’s eye the awful falling of the curtain on anguish and despair and death. Half unconsciously he hastens on in his perusal, and slurs over minor episodes and seemingly trifling facts, forgetting that these are subsidiary and auxiliary to the terrible consummation which he so anxiously awaits. “Toutes choses meuvent vers leur fin,” Rabelais has said; but the little things—the slender fibres of a story—are gathered up as it proceeds, into bundles; and, acquiring importance from consolidation, are ultimately merged in the final and tremendous whole.
Thus there have been many records of human lifeand action, now real, now artificial, in reading which we have to encounter an almost uncontrollable impulse to turn to the end, and ascertain whether that of which we have had, at the beginning, a vague forecast, will really come to pass. Who, if he will only have the candour to acknowledge it, has not had to struggle with such an impulse in reading, say, theElectraof Sophocles, theFaustof Goethe, and theBride of Lammermoorof Scott?—three of the most perfectly tragic dramas, I take it, ever fashioned by the hand of mortal genius. And so it is with numerous tragedies of superhuman structure and ordinance. In both cases we pant for the last scene of all, which is to end the strange eventful history. What will be the fate of Aegisthus, and the doom of Clytemnestra? Who, if anyone, will rescue Gretchen from a shameful death? How will Edgar Ravenswood bear his immeasurable sorrow?
These are the problems which agitate us in the study of fiction, and irresistibly impel us to hasten from the prologue to the epilogue—from the exordium to the peroration. And to speed as quickly is usually our desire when we are confronted with the tragedies of history, or with the vouched-for chronicles of human passion and crime. Throw down on the floor Clarendon’sHistory of the Rebellion, it has been said, and the volume will open, automatically, at the page where the execution of Charles I is described. Try to concentrate your thoughts on the history of Marie Stuart; and, coldly, clearly, sternly distinct in the midst of a whirligig of scenes and events—the Louvre, Holyrood,the Kirk of Field, Lochleven and what not—there stands out the image of the Hall at Fotheringay, the black scaffold, the block, the masked headsman; the Dean of Peterborough drearily homilising, and the Puritan Earl of Kent ranting; while the weeping tire-women disrobe the royal victim, her little pet dog snuggling by her, not without difficulty when the axe has fallen to be dislodged from the corse of the kind mistress he loved so well, and who has been stricken down by cruel men, he knows not why. See this, as I see it.
It is my purpose to write something on the eventful life and dreadful ending of Queen Marie Antoinette. I try, when I remember the sunshine of her early days—her youth, her beauty, her grace—to put myself in a cheerful frame of mind. I wish to look, at least for a little while, on the bright side of a career which began so splendidly and so happily. I would fain picture to myself the daughter of Maria Theresa, as Edmund Burke saw her at Versailles—smiling, radiant, adored. I would fain hear the clash of the thirty thousand swords which should have leaped from their scabbards to avenge the slightest affront to the peerless consort of the King of France and Navarre.
I take from my shelves theJournal de Madame Eloff—the ledger containing the milliner and dressmaker’s bills of a perhaps too extravagant young Queen—an endless catalogue of taffetas and satins, gauze and ribbons, high-heeled shoes and embroidered gloves, scent-bottles, reticules, feathers, artificial flowers and fans. From an old Boule cabinet I lift tenderly adainty little coffee-cup of Sèvres egg-shell porcelain, adorned with an exquisite miniature of her, painted when she had only been two years the wife of the hapless Louis. The cup is half embedded in a setting of velvetbleu du Roi; and, alas! when I draw the ceramic gem delicately from the case I see that the cup has no handle.
A maimed relic, this porcelain trifle, possibly of a priceless breakfast set, wantonly shattered by a howling mob ofpoissardesand red night-capped “patriots” who had sacked one of the Royal Palaces. A crowd of memories are conjured up by this morsel of dismembered Sèvres. I see, as in a glass darkly, the Galerie des Glaces and the Œil-de-Boeuf at Versailles. I see the toy Dairy at the Petit Trianon; the banquet of the Gardes du Corps in the Great Theatre of the Palace; the King and Queen: the Royal Princesses circulating among the guests and distributing white cockades among them; while the musicians make the hall resound with the strains of “Oh, Richard! Oh, mon Roi!”
No, surely, the age of Chivalry is not past, and thrice ten thousand glaives will leap into the light to vindicate the outraged Majesty of France. There’s no such thing! A confused picture—a panorama all torn to shreds and splashed with mud and flecked with blood flows before me. The Etats Genéraux have wed: the nobility sparkling in velvet and plumes and golden broideries; the clergy brave in copes and mitres and point lace: the “Tiers Etat,” all in sombre black, short-cloaked, slouch-hatted, grave, preoccupied, looking unutterable things. Among them looms, very real andportentous indeed, a thick-set, pock-marked man, with an eye of fire. This is Honore Gabriel Riquetti, rightly Comte de Mirabeau, but who has broken with his order, and styling himself “Mirabeau Marchand de Draps”—a retail clothier from Marseilles, forsooth! of about forty-eight hours’ commercial standing—stalks among country notaries and shopkeepers, farmers and shopkeepers as a Deputy of the Third Estate.
But all these fade away from my field of vision. I set to studying and balancing my rambling thoughts. I have to deal with Marie Antoinette, Josephe-Jeanne de Lorraine, wife of Louis XVI, and who was born, you will remember, at Vienna, on the 2nd of November, 1755, the very day of that earthquake at Lisbon in the occurrence of which Dr. Johnson for a long time so resolutely refused to believe. Would the doctor, I wonder, had he lived in 1793, have declined to place credence in a newspaper report of what is now to be narrated—an upheaval more dreadful and disastrous than any physical convulsion of the earth’s crust? The tattered, muddy, gory panorama fades into a murky nothingness. Then, out of the Valley of Shadows there arises, terribly distinct and substantial, THIS—
It is a raw, chilly, marrow-searching day in the month of October, 1793. A spacious hall, known in this new and blessed era of Universal Regeneration, and Unlimited Throat-Cutting, as the Salle de la Liberté, in the Palais de Justice, hard by the prison of the Conciergerie, has been swept and garnished for the trial of the discrowned and desolate widow of “Louis Capet,” murdered on the scaffold in the Place de laRévolution last January. In a dark and filthy dungeon of that same Conciergerie Marie Antoinette has been immured since August. The walls of the Salle de la Liberté have been newly whitewashed—no voluptuous frescoes or oil painting in this abode of Republican simplicity, if you please: only patriotic lime-whiting and democratic glue—and the almost blinding glare of the stark walls brings out in strong relief the dark green canopy suspended over the heads of the Judges of the Revolutionary Tribunal, who are five in number, the President being one, Hermann.
Above this precious conclave are the busts of Brutus—save the mark!—and two recent Revolutionary notorieties: the infamous Marat, deservedly done to death by Charlotte Corday and the member of the Convention, Lepelletier de St. Fargeau, who had voted for the death sentence on Louis XVI, and who immediately afterwards was stabbed to death by an ex-Garde du Corps in an eating house in the Palais National—once Palais Royal. The busts are crowned with scarlet caps of liberty, adorned with monstrous tri-coloured cockades, and are flanked by two huge oil lamps. There will be need of the lamps; for the deliberation of the tribunal will probably last far into the night.
The judges sit at a long table which, although shabby, is somewhat pretentious in its upholstering, since the legs are of mahogany, and fluted, and the brazen feet are fashioned in the shape of griffin’s claws, and exhibit some traces of bygone gilding. This table is yet extant, and forms part of the furniture of the Court of Cassation, which at present holds itssittings in the old Salle de la Liberté. The Public Accuser has his place in front of the President; the jury—yes, this monstrous tribunal has a jury!—is to the left of the judges; and to the right is the desk of the Counsel for the defence. Behind him is the seat for the prisoners. A breast-high balustrade separates the Court from the space set apart for the public, which is ample enough, and is thronged, this dreary October morning, by a motley crew ofsans culottes, mechanics, lamplighters, bargemen and coarse, loud-voiced women from the markets, some of them known as “Tricoteuses” and “Furies of the Guillotine.”
Between the balustrade and the body of the Court runs a long gangway, at one extremity of which is a door, communicating by means of a narrow staircase with the Gaol of the Conciergerie.
Up this staircase and through this door, and along this gangway, and so through an opening of the balustrade into the criminal dock, there is brought, between two gendarmes, a woman of middle age, with abundant hair which has turned quite grey lately, and features which retain a few—a very few—traces of former comeliness. She is barely eight-and-thirty, and she looks full fifty. She is miserably clad in an old, patched, threadbare gown of black serge, which has been mended for her innumerable times by a compassionate girl named Rosalie, the daughter of the gaoler. Her shoes are old, full of holes, and down at heel. She wears black cotton stockings, and about her shoulders is arranged a kind of tippet, or pelérine, of frayed white muslin. As yet she wears no cap; and her longtresses have been carefully dressed and oiled this morning by the pitying Rosalie. Obviously, she is in mourning for her husband, sometime King of France and Navarre; but the Revolutionary Tribunal knows nothing of such titles, and in the Act of Accusation, which is read in a monotonous sing-song by theGreffier, the prisoner is arraigned as “Marie Antoinette, of Austria and Lorraine, widow of Louis Capet.”
The indictment goes on to say that the widow Capet has by her crimes rendered herself the worthy compeer of Brunéhaut, Fredegonde, and Catherine de Medicis; that since she has had her abode in France she has been the scourge and bloodsucker of her adopted country; and that even before “the Happy Revolution which gave the French their sovereignty” she entered into political correspondence with “the man calling himself King of Bohemia and Hungary”—this is the Emperor of Austria her brother—that, in conjunction with the brothers of Louis Capet, and “the execrable and infamous Calonne” she had squandered the resources of France (the fruit of the sweat of the people) in a dreadful manner, “to satisfy inordinate pleasures and to pay the agents of her criminal intrigues.”
In another count of the indictment she is charged with being “an adept in all sorts of crimes.” One of these “crimes” is, that on the evening of the famous banquet to the Garde du Corps, and the Regiment de Flanders, in the Opera House at Versailles, she, with the King and a numerous and brilliant following, had passed between the lines of tables, distributing white cockades to the officers and encouraging them to tramplethe national or tri-coloured cockade under foot.
“Prisoner,” thunders the President, “were you there when the band played the air, ‘Oh, Richard, oh mon Roi’?”
“I do not recollect,” replies the Queen.
“Were you there when the toast of ‘The Nation’ was proposed and refused?”
“I do not think that I was.”
“Did not your husband read his speech to the representatives to you half-an-hour before he delivered it?”
“My husband had great confidence in me, and that made him read his speech to me; but I made no observations.”
Fancy cutting a poor woman’s head off because her husband read her a speech which he was about to deliver in public! Does Mr. Gladstone, does Lord Randolph Churchill, does Sir William Harcourt, I wonder, ever favour the domestic circle with such “fore-lectures” as Dr. Furnival might call them?
A remarkable witness against Marie Antoinette is a ruffian named Roussillon, who deposes that on the fatal Tenth of August when the Tuileries was stormed by the mob, he saw under the Queen’s bed a number of empty wine-bottles, “from which,” adds Roussillon, “I concluded that she had herself distributed wine to the Swiss soldiers, that these wretches in their intoxication might assassinate the people.”
Another witness testifies that among the effects of the ex-Queen found at the prison of the Temple was a satin riband bearing the gilt image of a Heart with the inscription “Cor Jesu miserere nobis.” Other testimonyis to the effect that while the Queen and the children were incarcerated in the Temple, after the execution of Louis, the poor little Dauphin was placed at the top of the table by his mother, and was served first; thus justifying the inference that she ignored the Republic, One and Indivisible, and recognised her young son as Louis XVII, and the successor of his murdered sire.
Another charge, an abominable charge, and one so monstrous as to make it scarcely credible that it should be launched against a woman and a mother, is that she had systematically sought to corrupt the mind of the poor young prince. To this horrible allegation she makes at first no answer. At length, when the charge is repeated, she is moved to noble indignation, and exclaims: You accuse me of an impossibility: “J’en appelle à toutes les mères.” I appeal to all mothers. But the instinct of maternity seems to be dead in all that hall of blood, and the beldames in the public tribunes only yell and gibe at her.
Less revolting, but equally preposterous, is the evidence of one Renée Mullet, a chambermaid who has been in service at Versailles, and this hussey swears that one day, “in a moment of good humour,” she asked theci-devantDuc de Coigny whether the Emperor still continued to wage war against the Turks; as in that case France would soon be ruined, the Queen having sent her brother no less than two hundred millions of livres, wherewith to carry on hostilities. To this, according to the gossiping waiting woman, the Duke made answer: “Thou art right enough. Twohundred millions have already been spent, and we are not at the end of it yet.”
It is on such evidence as this—evidence not heavy enough to detach a feather from a pigeon’s wing, not convincing enough to prove a forty shilling debt, the wretched Marie Antoinette is at length convicted. The President sums up, furiously, against her. The advocates who defend her, Chauveau and Tronçon-Ducoudray have little to say, to the point, and can only feebly plead for clemency to be extended to her; and the jury, after deliberating for fifty-five minutes, return a verdictaffirming all the charges submitted to them. Hermann calls on the accused to declare whether she has any objection to make to the sentence of the law demanded by the Public Accuser. Marie Antoinette bows her head in token of a negative.
Then the tribunal, putting their bloodthirsty heads together for a few minutes, condemn Marie Antoinette of Austria and Lorraine, widow of Louis Capet to the punishment of Death, “and the confiscation of all her property for the benefit of the Republic, the sentence to be executed in the Square of the Revolution.” The confiscation of all her property! When she was dead, an inventory was taken of the few rags which she had left behind her in her cell in the Conciergerie, and they were appraised at the magnificent sum of nine livres, about seven and sixpence sterling. Nine livres all told! In the second year of her marriage it was computed that the roll and butter served every morning to each of her ladies of honour, cost two thousand livres, or eighty pounds a year; and five thousand livreswas the annual charge for the bouillon, or beef-tea, kept hot by day and by night for Madame Royale, who was a weakly child. During the earlier portion of her imprisonment the unhappy Queen had been supplied with body linen by the compassionate care of the Marchioness of Stafford, the wife of the British Ambassador in Paris, but there was no kindly Ambassadress to succour her in her last and darkest days, and the only hand held forth in pity to this forlorn daughter of the Cæsars was that of a gaoler’s daughter.
It was half past four on the morning of the sixteenth of October when this infernal tribunal adjourned, and the Queen was conducted back to her prison. Throughout the whole of her trial she had not ceased to maintain a calm countenance; but at times she seemed to be giving way to a feeling of sheer weary listlessness, and moved her fingers on the bar of the dock before her, as though she was playing on the harpsichord When she heard the sentence pronounced, her features did not shew the slightest alteration; and she walked from the hall erect and seemingly unmoved, gendarmes with drawn swords before and behind her, and the beldames of the fish-market and the rag-shops cursing and shrieking at her, just as you may see them in Paul Delaroche’s noble picture.
So they took her back to a dungeon twelve feet long, eight feet broad, four feet underground, with a grated window on a level with the pavement. Into this wretched hole some scraps of the coarsest food were brought her; but she was left under the incessant supervision of a female prisoner and two soldiers. It issaid that she snatched a little sleep. On waking she asked one of the gendarmes who had been present at the trial whether she had replied “with too much dignity” to the question put to her. “I ask,” she added, “because I overheard a woman say,See how haughty she still is.” The woman who could have made such an observation must have been one of the hags that Delaroche has painted.
At seven o’clock in the morning, the entire garrison of Paris was under arms. Cannon were placed in all the public places; and at the foot of every bridge from the Quay of the Conciergerie to the Place de la Révolution, that magnificent area between the gardens of the Tuileries, originally called the Place Louis XV, and now know as the Place de la Concorde. At half-past eleven Marie Antoinette, dressed in a white linen déshabille, was brought out from the prison. As though she had been the commonest of malefactors she was made to mount the charette, or open cart, the appointed tumbril of infamy. At least the murderers of her husband had had the decency to allow him the “luxury” of a hackney coach, when he was taken from the Temple to the scaffold. Her hair had been cut short ere she left the gaol, and what remained of her formerly luxuriant tresses was tucked under a white mob-cap. Her hands were tied behind her back.
Of the Queen in this deplorable plight there exists a very beautiful statue executed by Lord Ronald Gower. On the right, in the tumbril, was seated Sanson, the executioner, and on the left a “constitutional” priest, that is to say, one who had taken the oath offealty to the Republic. To the ministrations of this “patriotic” cleric, who was dressed in light grey coat and a bob-wig, Marie Antoinette had in the first instance declined to listen; but she occasionally spoke to him on her way to the fatal Place de la Révolution.
An immense mob, in which women were revoltingly numerous, crowded the streets throughout the entire line of route insulting the Queen and vociferating “Long live the Republic!” She seldom cast her eyes on the populace, but from time to time looked with some curiosity on the prodigious military force surrounding the cart. Otherwise her attitude throughout this last dismal pilgrimage was one of half torpid indifference.
As the cart traversed the Rue St. Honoré, the numbed faculties of the Queen seemed momentarily to revive; and she examined with some attention the multitudinous inscriptions of “Liberty” and “Equality” over the shop-fronts.
It was as the vehicle turned the corner of the Rue St. Honoré into that which is now the Rue Royale that the famous painter, David, who, during the Reign of Terror, was a furious Jacobin and a friend of Robespierre, but who was destined to become a Baron of the Empire, and to paint the Coronation of Napoleon at Notre Dame, was able from the balcony which he occupied in company with the wife of a member of the Convention to make a sketch of Marie Antoinette. The drawing has come down to us. The features of the Martyr Queen are sharp and pinched, exhibiting no traces whatever of former comeliness, and she looksfifty years of age. It may here be mentioned that the illustrious and pure-minded English sculptor, John Flaxman, when he visited Paris, after the Peace of Amiens, resolutely refused to meet the artist who made the last sketch of Marie Antoinette, and always spoke of him disdainfully as “David of the bloodstained brush.”
The historians are divided in opinion as to the demeanor of Marie Antoinette on the scaffold. Some say that she laid herself down on the fatal plank with calm deliberation, and met her death with noble fortitude, recalling Andrew Marvell’s superb lines on the execution of Charles I:—