The Queen's Dollmaker
Page 35
Marie was in fact forced to dress the newly piked head of the Princesse de Lamballe, and to create death masks for Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. She also made death masks for Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat and other prominent figures, including the Bastille’s governor, de Launay. Like so many others, Marie spent time in prison during the Revolution, but was released just before her scheduled execution. Dr. Curtius died shortly after the Revolution, and she took over the exhibition they had established. After marrying François Tussaud, she took her exhibition on tour for thirty years across Great Britain, eventually settling her growing wax collection in a spot near where it is presently located.
You can still see the death masks for King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, and Robespierre at the Madame Tussaud’s exhibition on Marylebone Road in London. The oldest piece in the collection is an animatronic of Jeanne du Barry, a favorite mistress of France’s King Louis XV. Really, it is well worth a trip to London just to go to this museum.
Count Axel Fersen was indeed a special friend of Marie Antoinette’s. Were they actual lovers? Many historians think so, but I am not certain Marie Antoinette was of a temperament to engage in an actual illicit affair. She was well aware of her position in life as mother to the heir of the throne. However, it is certainly possible that an affair occurred, and there are incriminating letters left behind that suggest it was a physical relationship. Fersen did travel to England during the time I placed him, and he was goggled at by the smart English, who nicknamed him “The Picture” for his handsome looks. In 1810, seventeen years after the death of the queen, Fersen was torn to bits by a mob. The count had incurred the wrath of the Swedish crowd at the funeral procession of Christian, heir to the throne of Denmark. The mob was incited to believe that he had poisoned Christian. It was a fate he had often predicted for Marie Antoinette.
The Princesse de Lamballe was one of the queen’s dearest friends, and most certainly was not her lover, much as the harsh royal critics of the time wanted to portray her as such. I consider her one of the most tragic figures of the time, because she truly was without guile, and her devotion and loyalty to her king and queen are unquestioned. Her fate with the mob at La Force prison was as described in the story. On the day of her death, there were general massacres in prisons across Paris. Around 1,300 prisoners were killed, not including similar killings that went on at Versailles and Rheims.
Marie-Jeanne Rose Bertin was Marie Antoinette’s chief dressmaker, and became the first celebrated French fashion designer. Under the queen’s generous patronage, Bertin was able to charge very high prices for her fashions: her gowns and headdresses would easily cost twenty times what a skilled worker of the time earned in a year. During the French Revolution, with many of her noble customers fleeing abroad, Bertin moved her business to London. She eventually returned to France, where Josephine de Beauharnais became a customer, but there was little demand for Bertin’s excessive fashions of the ancien régime. She died in 1813.
As opposed to many others in the Revolution, who sought rebellion for their own personal gain, Maximilien Robespierre was a true believer in the cause. He saw the Terror impersonally, as a method of implementing “Virtue.” In an ironic moment of justice, he experienced the same fate as so many he had condemned. He was dragged to the guillotine in July 1794, in a drunken stupor and in acute pain from a shattered jaw resulting from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. It was he who wrote into law “Any individual who usurps the nation’s sovereignty shall be immediately put to death by free men,” and it was on this basis that he was executed.
Cordelier leader Jean-Paul Marat was a vicious journalist who used his extremist newspaper, L’Ami du Peuple, to fan the flames of hatred against anyone he deemed to hold too much power, whether they be royalists, the courts, or Girondists. He was stabbed to death in July 1793 by Charlotte Corday, a Girondist sympathizer.
The locksmith François Gamain, Governor de Launay, Madame de Tourzel, her daughter Pauline, Jeanne de la Motte, Cardinal Rohan, the jewelers Boehmer and Bassenge, and the dollmaker Pierotti were also real persons. John Sackville, the third Duke of Dorset, his mistress, Giovanna Baccelli, and her subsequent protector, Henry Herbert, the tenth Earl of Pembroke, were quite the scandal of late-eighteenth-century Kent.
The guillotine was first proposed as a preferred execution device by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. A physician and humanitarian, he was disturbed by the vulgarity of public executions and petitioned for a single method of capital punishment to be used for all crimes demanding the death sentence. The device was viewed as dispatching its victims with “swiftness and decency.” It wasn’t until after 1792 that it was adopted and nicknamed “Madame Guillotine” for its sponsor. During the Terror, it is estimated that an astonishing 40,000 people were killed: 17,000 with trial, 12,000 without a trial, and thousands more perished in prisons. The guillotine was used until 1981, when France abolished capital punishment.
The Terror came quickly to a close with Robespierre’s death. Riots in the spring of 1795 were now easily crushed by the National Guard, which gained control of the Convention. A new constitution was drafted, which placed the executive in the hands of a directory of five men. Before the directory was even in place, thousands of royalists marched on the Tuileries Palace to protest the new constitution. The regular army was called in for protection, and a young Corsican artillery captain named Napoleon Bonaparte was summoned to lead them. Bonaparte’s quick handling of the rebellion would propel him into the limelight, and begin yet another chapter of French and English history.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
I am indebted to a great number of historical references I have read over the years pertaining to Marie Antoinette and the era spanning her reign and that of the Terror. Listed below are the books that became permanent fixtures on my desk while writing this book.
Dobson, Austin. Four Frenchwomen. London: Chatto and Windus, 1890.
Editors. Horizon Magazine. The French Revolution. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.
Fraser, Antonia. Marie Antoinette: The Journey. New York: Doubleday, 2001.
Genet, Jeanne Louise Henriette (Madame Campan). Memoirs of Marie Antoinette. New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1910.
Hearsey, John E. N. Marie Antoinette. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1973.
Hyde, Catherine (Ed.). Secret Memoirs of Princesse Lamballe: Her Confidential Relations with Marie Antoinette. 1901.
Loomis, Stanley. The Fatal Friendship. New York: Doubleday, 1972.
Pilkington, Iain D. B. Queen of the Trianon. London: Jarrolds; Akron: St. Dunstan Society, 1955.
Schama, Simon. Citizens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.
A READING GROUP GUIDE
THE QUEEN’S DOLLMAKER
Christine Trent
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The suggested questions are included to enhance your group’s reading of Christine Trent’s The Queen’s Dollmaker.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
What were your assumptions about the use and manufacture of dolls during the book’s time period? What surprised you about dollmaking in the eighteenth century?
Do you think Claudette made a bad decision to go back to Paris for a second time to visit Marie Antoinette? What positive outcomes were there as a result of this visit?
Why was Jean-Philippe willing to imprison—and even approve of a death sentence for—his long-lost love, Claudette? Were his motives pure? In other words, did he believe in what he was doing, or was he merely angry at Claudette for rejecting him? Did you feel sympathy for Jean-Philippe? Would he have been less inclined to join the revolutionaries had Claudette returned to Paris and married him?
What factors in England and France during the time period of the novel made it difficult for women to learn a trade and become successful entrepreneurs? Where did tradesmen fit into the social hierarchy of English society? How did those social factors affect Claudette’s ability to start, maintain, and grow her business?
For
centuries the English appear to have had a love-hate relationship with the French, mistrusting them on the one hand, and following their fashions and their trends on the other. This was apparently at play when Mrs. Ashby wanted to impress her guests with a French maid. What skills (besides dollmaking) and personality traits did Claudette possess that helped her maintain her “elevated” position while in the employ of the Ashby family? How did those skills and traits help her in the growth of her doll business, and then through her ordeal in a French prison?
Was Count Fersen acting maliciously toward Claudette when he concocted the idea to use her dolls to smuggle valuables to the king and queen of France? Why did he think this was a good plan for helping the monarchs?
How do you think Marie Grosholtz’s experiences in the days leading up to the Revolution affected her future plans for a wax museum?
Compare and contrast William and Jean-Philippe. In what ways did they make poor decisions regarding Claudette? What was each man’s greatest show of love for her?
Did William’s position as someone favored by the king—but not yet made part of the peerage—make it more socially acceptable for him to fall in love with a tradeswoman? Would Claudette’s trade itself, dollmaking, have been more acceptable to the upper ranks than, say, that of household servant, actress, or dressmaker?
What were Lizbit’s real motives for everything she did to Claudette? Do you think her suffering at the end of the novel provided redemption for her activities?
What was the socioeconomic environment in France that caused the French Revolution? Could a convergence of such circumstances cause a similar political reaction in today’s world, or does the election system of a democratic society such as that of the U.S.’s give the populace enough voice to preclude such an upheaval?
Why do you think the revolutionaries were determined to execute their king and queen? Was it a personal vendetta against them, or did they represent something undesirable? Or was there another reason?
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Copyright © 2010 by Christine M. Trent
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ISBN: 978-0-7582-5633-1