BELINDA LYONS-LEE Tussaud. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Belinda Lyons-Lee’s debut novel takes the life of Marie Tussaud, creator of the famous waxworks, and adds magic, plots and madness.
Sometimes, it seems, the truth really is stranger than fiction.
Marie Tussaud really was rescued from the guillotine during the French Revolution and forced to make death masks and wax models of the guillotined heads of aristocrats, many of whom she knew, including Queen Marie Antoinette. She did move to London and exhibit her wax models in performances staged by the successful illusionist and pioneer of phantasmagoria, Paul Philidor.
William Cavendish, fifth Duke of Portland, was a notable eccentric, and the 15 miles of tunnels and rooms, including a 160-foot long underground ballroom, that he had excavated under his manor and grounds at Welbeck Abbey are still there. And Mrs Druce was acquainted with all of them through her husband’s father, Thomas Charles, who owned the Baker Street Bazaar.
In Tussaud, Belinda Lyons-Lee weaves their lives together in a tale of mystery, mesmerism, magic and madness. She develops their characters, and, as she says in her endnote, ‘tweaks some of their ages and life-events’ to immerse them in an intriguing story of her own, which could, almost, be true.
In Tussaud, Philidor is shown to be the jealous brother of the well-known ‘Professor of Natural Magic’, Giovanni Pinetti. He steals the drawings of a mechanical bird made by Pinetti and plans to make animated figures for his own magic shows. He needs someone with special skills to help him create lifelike heads and bodies, and Marie Tussaud, who had been taught by the notable anatomist and wax model-maker Phillipe Curtius, seems ideal. Marie had inherited Curtius’s business and his anatomically precise wax creations, and she had been exhibiting these, along with her gruesome wax heads, in a window in the heart of Paris, but she had left her husband, and had little money to support herself and her two small boys. Philidor visits her and offers her a business proposition:
‘A shared love of art and theatrics,’ he said easily. ‘Your windows were the entertainment for most of Paris. My business is of similar nature … And so I wonder, madam, if you still dream of the thrill of creating for a crowd? Not just a head, but something more, something that would make them swoon again. What if I offered you the chance for a much greater audience?’
‘You have my attention,’ she said.
‘I am going to create something myself. Something like the world has never seen before. But I can’t do it here, I need to go to London. Once I am there, I will send you the necessary information to complete the construction, if you understand.’
Marie accepts his offer and follows him to London where they take lodgings in the house of Mrs Druce and set to work to create an animated figure of Marie Antoinette.
The figure they create is magnificent. It can walk, sit, move its mouth, and nod and shake its head in reply to questions from the audience, but things go drastically wrong when Philidor keeps the model onstage too long, the wax melts in the heat, and the show is a disaster.
However, William Cavendish, the Duke of Portland, had been in the audience and was inspired by the idea of creating another figure to his own specifications. He invites Marie and Philidor to Welbeck Abbey, where he lays out strict rules for their brief stay in this grand mansion while they undertake his commission. They are to live in rooms far distant from his own; they may not explore the manor and are restricted to certain areas of the grounds; he will communicate with them only by letter, never in person; they may not have visitors; and the commission is to be kept secret.
Cavendish, it turns out, requires an automaton made of a young woman, Elanor, who had been his childhood playmate but disappeared under mysterious circumstances. It is clear that he feels guilt for something that happened, but the reason for this is not revealed until late in the book. When he provides drawings, clothes and samples of hair and eye colour, Cavendish stipulates that ‘Elanor is to be made in every particular a woman. Every particular.’
Marie is disgusted by the implications of this and suspects that the Duke wants to use the automaton ‘for his own debauched purposes’ but she makes the model and Philidor installs the mechanism that creates the impression it is alive.
Elanor will stay in the Duke’s rooms, but Marie also recreates her figure of Marie Antoinette, which is to be part of a performance the Duke is allowing them to put on in his underground ballroom. Philidor advertises this in his usual way as introducing ‘PHANTOMS OR APPARITIONS of the DEAD’, ‘SPECTROLOGY’ and ‘GHOSTS or DISEMBODIED SPIRITS’. The audience is primed for a scary evening, so the unplanned, terrifying, interruption at the end of the performance is seen as intentional and the event is hugely successful.
Cavendish, however, has begun to believe that ‘Elanor’ is alive, and he becomes afraid of her. He is already mentally unstable. He has nightmares about his disastrous early war service, and he lives at Welbeck in absolute seclusion. But he keeps rooms in London, where he meets people who sell him antiques and curios – and the stories that go with them – for his Baker Street Bazaar. He meets prospective clients in rooms rented by Mrs Druce. There, he is known as ‘Thomas Charles’.
It was always hard for William when he was at the threshold of his two worlds. The Baker Street Bazaar took enormous energy to run, and there were times when simply arriving and opening the door blew it all away. And he was always mindful of the incessant nosing and snooping and watching and listening of his landlady, the Druce woman. She was a pest, an insect that bumped against his head, her wings of chatter agitating the fine hairs in his ears… She had little intellect but plenty of mental space and she’d decided that he and his Bazaar were just the objects to occupy it.
Marie and Philidor complete the commission but their business partnership is marred by Philidor’s arrogance and his wish to control everything. Marie is an astute businesswoman and she resents the fact that men assume women are incompetent and weak, so she constantly challenges him about this control. Philidor plans to get rid of her and when he introduces her to a Bethlehem Asylum doctor, she suspects that he intends to try and prove she is insane, but she, too, has her plans, especially involving the man she has been encouraging to be her suitor.
As the story comes to its close, ghostly presences and madness become more frequent, and multiple conspiracies, plots and counter-plots are revealed. Pinetti turns up to take revenge on his brother, and dramatic events lead to surprising disclosures and deaths.
If all this begins to seem far-fetched, it is as well to remember that Welbeck Abbey does have underground tunnels, secret passages and hidden rooms, a grand ballroom with a magnificent sunset painted on its domed ceiling, and the stables, which once held ‘over a hundred horses that the duke never rode but kept in good condition at the ready’ and once included a riding house ‘lit by four thousand gas-jets’. It is also true that the claim Mrs Druce makes in the final pages of this book was actually made and caused widespread public scandal, which was reported in popular newspapers like The Tatler and The Penny Illustrated Paper. The subsequent investigations went on for years before the claim was disproved, appropriately, in a graveyard.
As Marie determines in the final paragraph of the book: ‘This daughter of an executioner would, after much running, now finally make her living from death… It was time to send for the guillotine.’ The first exhibition of Madam Tussaud’s waxworks with its Chamber of Horrors opened in London in 1835, and there are now branches of it in major cities around the world.
Belinda Lyons-Lee Tussaud Transit Lounge 2021 PB 352pp $32.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.
You can buy Tussaud from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.
If you’d like to help keep the Newtown Review of Books a free and independent site for book reviews, please consider making a donation. Your support is greatly appreciated.
