by Edward Carey
Marie Charlotte Grosholtz, baby.
The world is broken, I said, cracked. Some things are missing from the world and they will never be replaced. They can never be. Only then did I truly understand, as the widow had always understood, that the world is full of gaps, and these were mine. Perhaps I couldn’t make anything living. I’m sure it’s my fault I can only ever create lifelike and lifesize. What do you expect from a father who was more mannequin than man? What do you expect from a mother who spent more time with imitation people than real ones?
I went back home.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
There’s not a bone.
I stayed deep inside. All angles, all crooked. There was a knock on the door. I thought it was the local children come to taunt me again, so I didn’t answer, but the knock kept on. It wasn’t a loud knock like the children gave; it was a little gentle knock, an apologetic knock. It wasn’t like the little knocks of industry that Louis the locksmith made at his forge; it was a knock, I began to understand, of sympathy. A loving knock. I went to the door. I opened it a crack.
My master Curtius.
Doctor Curtius and his pupil together again. We stood there, at opposite ends of the wooden plank I’d laid down after the steps had come away. Looking at each other, just looking, he by the broken stones of the old courtyard, me on the threshold of the ruin I lived in. Perhaps only for a few seconds, perhaps longer, perhaps minutes, tens of them. Such food for eyes! He’d been at the hospital of the Hôtel-Dieu, a place that Mercier had told me of during our kitchen walks of Paris; that was why it had taken him so long. He’d been so ill they’d taken him away from the prison for fear he should infect the other prisoners, lest they should die before they could be guillotined. He was removed to the Hôtel-Dieu, where he rotted with other starving men, but, contrary to all expectations, he did not die. Day after day he did not die. At last, very slowly, as others died beside him, he began to recover. And when he was well enough to walk a little he was sent home, a free citizen. My dear old man, very thin of course, not well at all, but living; a shriveled, stretched root, juiceless, but able to make movement and sound.
“Hello, sir,” I said.
“Can it be . . . my Little? I so hoped it would be.”
“Yes,” I said, “it’s she. Surely.”
“Here we are then: you and I.”
“Will you come in, sir?”
“Yes, yes, I think I will.”
He came in. I closed the door. It did not shut properly.
“It’s very dark, Marie,” he said.
“I’ll fetch a candle.”
“Ah, light! Light in the darkness.”
Something else was on his mind; I saw the panic upon his face; but he did not ask it then. We sat down together, and we talked of nothing much to stop the silence. After half an hour, he had courage enough to ask, very quietly, the important thing:
“Little, Marie, where’s everybody else? Have they gone out? When will they be coming back?”
I shook my head.
We were silent a very long time.
“Where is Edmond, surely . . . upstairs?”
“No, I wish that he was. That would be something indeed.”
“Oh dear,” he said, and sighed. “An excellent mannequin maker.”
“Yes, sir.”
“My poor girl.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you, Marie? What about you? There was to be . . . a new life.”
I shook my head.
“There’s no bone,” he said, his expressive fingers moving on their own, “not a bone that can be comfort enough.”
There was a silence. Then:
“Not her then too?” he said very, very quickly. “At least not her. Tell me, not the widow, tell me.”
“Yes. Yes, even the widow.”
He closed his eyes.
“But she was cracked, she was broken.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I thought she might have. I didn’t like to wonder . . . I thought she might not . . . What a thing, oh what a thing it is.”
He sat hunched over in his chair. There was a slight tremor in his face, a wave of nervous reaction, a twitching of an eye, his lips pursed. And then what followed I can only describe as the noise of a whole building collapsing, floors falling in upon floors, a great heaving of rubble, a crashing, a sliding of heavy material, tumbling in a heap, only these sounds were coming from inside my master. But he stayed sitting, and though there was sweat on his forehead and a little black liquid coming from one of his ears and though one eye seemed to lose its sight, still the ruin breathed on. It may have been the cold in that room, but when his mouth opened it seemed to me a strange cloud of dusty air came out.
There we were, in the wretched Monkey House.
“Was it good for us, in the end, Little? The body bits, I mean. Not our models, not our wax, the human bits. Did we live with them too long? Perhaps they’re calling to us.”
But that is not the end. Not quite. We went on, Curtius and I, just a little farther. We kept very close to each other. We didn’t like to move alone, lest singly we come across some ghost of our lost people, here in this house where they had all been. We went on, and we stumbled, but we went on. We tidied, we swept up, buttons there among the rubbish. Where there were holes in the house, we made canvas walls. After a while, we felt brave enough even to open some of the shutters. We started work upon the plaster room, which being so solid had survived well enough; we chipped into it until we reached the tarred canvas, all those molds safe and sound. Even then, the king’s head, taken from death, would remain uncast.
It had begun with Curtius and me; it continued that way. Two months after my master returned, we opened again for business with a handful of mangy wax likenesses. We were given permission to use the molds of the heads of Robespierre and his followers. Doctor Curtius had a hunger for people; he had always had it; it kept him going.
“You have been with me all this way,” he told me. “What companions we are. You do the widow’s work, and almost as capably as she. It is not right that you call me sir, not anymore. I’m ashamed of it. And so perhaps, if it suits, Little, if it doesn’t repel, Marie, if it wouldn’t stick in the throat, since after all you’ve no mother but a doll of pegs, nor any father but a metal jaw piece—perhaps you might come to consider me an uncle. And even address me as such.”
“Uncle?”
“Yes.”
“No, sir, I don’t think I could.”
“No, well, perhaps in time.”
“Sir, shall I be paid now?”
“Well, I should like that.”
The busts of Marat were smashed; people were ashamed to have them in their homes. Marat’s body itself was disinterred from the Pantheon and thrown upon a dung heap. We still exhibited our waxman, murdered in the bath; Edmond and I had made him. We painted a large sign:
YOUR MONSTERS WITHIN
Not so many people came. We could not blame them. Everyone had had enough of monsters. We invented a new name for ourselves:
JUSTICE HOUSE
Still, only a few came every day. “Why,” they asked, “should we pay to see the head of Robespierre, when it was Robespierre who had our mothers, fathers, sons, daughters put to death?” We were not certain how to answer that, so my master let many people in without charge, a gesture the widow would never have allowed. We no longer had a guard dog, so we had no shield when people jeered at us on the street; all we could do was keep going; children threw stones at me, Curtius was tripped up. It seemed that some people considered us not without guilt.
Yet my master never lost his faith in his work. “Only mirrors, Marie,” he said. “Only mirrors. That’s what we do. That’s what the shop has ever been. They do not like the look of themselves. They are ashamed of what’s in the looking-glass.”
Our business crawled on until the last hours of September twenty-fifth. In the first hours of the twenty-sixth, I heard Curtius clapping in the night; otherwise the event should have been as quiet as Father’s. He didn’t come down in the morning. I sat on the steps for a while, just as I had when Mother died. Finally I went to him.
“Up you get, sir, up you get. Don’t you know the time?”
He wasn’t listening.
“Open your eyes at least. You could do that, couldn’t you? It’s not so much to ask. Let me see your eyes again. They’re blue I know.”
Stubborn man.
“A sound. A little noise, sir. That’s all I require, then I’ll tiptoe out and leave you till later. Did you say something? Try again. I think you moved. Didn’t you? Don’t leave me alone, sir. You must not leave me alone. It’s not a kind thing to do. What if I shook you a little? Oh, sir, sir! To be so still! What am I going to do?”
But all along I knew. I washed his face, combed back his remaining hair, put on the soft soap, mixed the plaster, no need for straws. How odd it was, the head still connected, the body rather in the way, I’d forgotten that. Death mask of Philip Wilhelm Mathias Curtius, born in Berne in 1749, died in Paris in 1794, greatest of Parisian showmen, chronicler of history, maker of people, lover of a widow, who knew the human body better than almost any other, but never shared his own with anyone. Great Curtius.
“I shall call you uncle after all,” I said. “Uncle.”
The funeral, under revolutionary law, was held at midnight, without any religious ceremony. It wasn’t well populated. Just a few sodden mourners. One man came pushed in a wheelbarrow; it was Louis-Sébastien Mercier. After Robespierre’s death, Mercier, like so many others, had been released from prison. The light of Paris shone on him, but the poor man was blind to it. His eyes worked well enough, but they could see only the past; he could no longer make sense of Paris. This new place, he said, was not known to him.
Throughout his long imprisonment, Mercier had never removed his beloved shoes. At first he had walked them around his cell floor every day, but after a while he took to sitting in corners, and neither he nor his shoes had any exercise. The room was damp, it dripped, his straw was never properly cleaned out. And over his long indolence, when his past walks grew increasingly confused in his mind, and he got lost in his thoughts, his shoes began to fester. The skin of their leather grew into the skin of his feet. His swollen ankles spread over the tops of his shoes, and over time shoes and feet became one. The pain he felt when they touched the floor of Paris was excruciating. He had to be carried from his prison cell.
The doctors had called for surgery to remove his shoes from his feet, he told me, but he wouldn’t allow it. He had come to see Curtius off. He invited me to live with him, to be his shoes, tell him what I saw walking about the new Paris. I thanked him but declined.
My master’s lawyer, Gibé, a vole of a man, was the person who told me that there was a will, and the details written therein. “Everything to one person,” he said, “to you.”
To me? To Little? To Anne Marie Grosholtz? Are you sure? All of it? No, that is not right. Let me see the paper again. It cannot be. Tell me, now, are you not lying? I am very easy prey, you should not lie to me. It would be no great victory. Read it out, will you?
“To Anne Marie Grosholtz, my equal in art.”
Hand to my mouth.
“That’s me! I’m her! I’ve been paid! I’ve been paid at last!”
I had a home. Uncle gave me one.
“There are,” said Gibé, “debts.”
My master owed a doctor-surgeon, two tailors, a locksmith, wax wholesalers; he had not paid his previous year’s tax, a debt of fifty-five thousand livres in all. Such a sum, it didn’t seem possible. Such a sum you could drown in.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
Portrait of A. M. Grosholtz (by Louis David, Year III).
I am nearly at the end now, with small business to attend to. I looked around for anyone I knew; they were all gone. Once, it’s true, a pie was left upon the broken doorstep of the Monkey House. I knew Florence Biblot had left it there. Was that an apology? I kicked it into the mud. I never saw her or her pies again. I was the owner of a business, a person of note. I even had my portrait painted, by Jacques-Louis David, while he was imprisoned at the Luxembourg Palace.
I was one of his few visitors; there was very little else for him to paint. I didn’t mind. A little woman dressed in black. I had Marta on my lap; it should have been little Marie Charlotte, but Marta would have to do. I insisted that I be shown with my hand over my face, I wasn’t quite ready to be looked at yet.
He protested that he could not see me properly, that my face was covered up.
“Ppppleashhhh!”
I insisted. As blank as that doll on my lap. Any number of faces underneath it.
So then: how to fill in the blank. Fifty thousand livres.
I borrowed money. From the plaster wholesaler; his business was, after all, my business. It was not enough. I must be clever. I was thirty-four, with a business. It seemed that I should lose everything if I did not move fast. The Monkey House, crooked place, was not attractive to look at. I sold back the land either side of the old house; they hauled the rubble away. Given time, I thought, I could probably display some of the old people again, given time, their popularity might come back.
I sat on my own, with a shop doll in Edmond’s shape. I thought, I shall keep this way. With my own cloth cap done up. But then, in the end, I am not like the widow. There was too much to be done, I was on my own. I could not keep still. Desperate people make bad decisions. And so.
To save myself, I committed a common enough union: I married.
Word had got about. People still supposed that Curtius must have been worth several fortunes. It wasn’t true, but he was worth one Monkey House, and now so was I. Men called for me; people were starving, opportunities scarce. One showed me figures in a notebook, and little architectural drawings spidered in ink. Perhaps.
On the fifth of October, 1795, there was fighting on the streets again. On the twenty-sixth, Jacques-Louis David was given amnesty. On the twenty-eighth, at the Préfecture du Département de la Seine, Ville de Paris, in a dirty little room without any decoration, with lines of benches where the witnesses, the unadorned brides, and the unadorned grooms waited to be called upon to be registered, here were married Anne Marie Grosholtz and François Joseph Tussaud. “This is a business matter,” I said to Citizen Tussaud, and Citizen Tussaud, tucking his notebook inside his breast pocket, agreed.
Citizen Tussaud, my husband. It is not a happy story. His parents are perhaps to blame. When he was a child they had taken him to the theater, and he had fallen in love with it. It made François dream, and François as he grew up did not manage to forget his dream. Like countless others who are taken in by stage landscapes and stage characters, he was slowly smashed by the prettiness and light. He never really knew what it was like behind the stage. He’d never troubled himself to go beyond the door marked PRIVATE. He loved cardboard theaters and played with them. A nice enough man, perhaps, but useless.
I do not recall the feel of his mustache; I do not recall the sound of him on the corridor; I do not recall his knocking at my room door, the door of the room that once belonged to my master. I do recall viewing his bank figures and the horror of that. Simply, he had lied to me, and I had been stupid enough to believe him. A most unfortunate marriage.
I lived through it somehow. I got up every day; I had to. Citizen Tussaud and I did not sleep in the same bedroom, but he lived in the Monkey House with me, and he came to me every now and then and, so help me, I did not send him away.
He expected me to earn the money. He expected me to have money all the time. I gave him pocket money as parents do their children. He spent it on elaborate business cards. “Now,” he said, “all will go well, you’ll
see.”
François Joseph Tussaud
L’architecte des théâtres
Grand atelier, 20 Boulevard du Temple
That too was made of cardboard. He went out in the morning full of great ideas, but came back in the afternoon defeated and drunk. And there was by then someone new growing inside me. I did not expect it to live, I gave it barely any thought at first, I didn’t dare. I rationed François, but he ran up further debts. I tried to instruct him in the making of wax people, but wax people were not interesting to him. He would not work for the Cabinet; he would only take its money. He found where I kept that money, no matter where I hid it—if he had a talent, that was it—and he spent it, and wept or bellowed in front of me afterward. The Monkey House needed more people, but people cost money. Perhaps I thought I should grow my own army. It was dangerous certainly at thirty-four to have children, but then it was dangerous at seven to have been left with Doctor Curtius, and it was dangerous of Doctor Curtius to have come to Paris.
And then the new flame, the new incredible great luck. The new fire.
One, and then, in time, two!
{Little F.}
Little François was born in 1798. Little Joseph came in 1800. They both had unmistakable Waltner noses and Grosholtz chins. Here was company again! I taught them, as Edmond and Curtius had taught me, what I knew of the world, what the widow taught me too. Citizen Tussaud wept and cooed at them; he was in love too. They moved, those little boys, and they made noise, and I nursed them in front of wax people.
We were even happy for a little while with such new and splendid company. But the business was failing.
The Monkey House had to be secured, and the children too. By the age of four Little François was already working for me, inserting hairs into wax heads, mixing plaster dust and water, setting up the fire as I had for Curtius.
{Little J.}
