Little

Edward Carey

Gallic Books, £10.99

Review by Nick Major

There are some people who seem like ideal subjects for a novel. Anne

Marie Grosholtz, known to most of us as Madame Tussaud, is one of

them. She spent her life using wax to make exact replicas of

famous people - Jean Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, Louis XVI,

Voltaire - then putting them on display for the public, for a small

sum of course. She was so obsessed with capturing the faces of

history that it is not surprising she embellished the facts of her own

past so it could match the drama of other lives.

We do not know, for example, whether she was actually the sculpture

teacher to Louis XVI’s youngest sister, Elisabeth, as she claims, or

if she lived in a cupboard in the Palace of Versailles. But, in

Edward Carey’s wonderfully weird novel of Marie’s life (she was mostly

known as Marie, but Little to some) he rightly makes use of all these

possible truths for his fiction. It makes for some great scenes,

including one where the young Marie teaches Elisabeth that her

servants “have the same innards” as she does. The young princess looks

aghast and disbelieving. When she is at last convinced, she looks with

resentment at her servant, then says, “‘How horrid.’” Later, Marie

takes Elisabeth out to see the poor and downtrodden citizens of

Versailles. When revealed in all its gruesomeness, the human body is a

great leveller.

What adds further artistic credence to Carey’s novel is that it is

told in the first person and in the style of those great bulky

Victorian novels that sought to capture the fullness and variety of a

person’s life, from beginning to end, or in Marie’s case, from dirt

poor poverty to fame. It is apposite then that in 1850, the final year

of Marie’s life, Charles Dickens turns up at her house and waxwork

showroom in London to write about her: “A thief, of course. I tell him

everything.” In real life, Dickens had just finished writing David

Copperfield, often thought of as a veiled portrait of himself.

Dickens was an expert at capturing the human body in a few lines, and

using that body to shape a character’s personality. Carey is also a

great caricaturist. His novel is full of his own beautiful

illustrations (in this regard, Carey’s novelistic approach is similar

to that of Alasdair Gray). One of the first things we learn about

Marie is what she looks like. She has the large “Roman” nose of her

mother, and the jutting chin of her father. Marie’s persona is pointy

and feisty, and it shows: “I nosed and chinned my way into life.”

She is born in Strasbourg in 1761. Her father, a soldier, dies before

she is six years old. Not long after, she and her mother move to the

Swiss city of Berne. They are to be the domestic help of a master of

wax anatomy, Phillipe Curtius. After Marie’s mother commits suicide,

however, Curtius becomes Marie’s guardian and she becomes his

apprentice. They move to Paris - where Curtius makes a living

sculpting the heads of all and sundry – and live with a mean-spirited

and selfish widow. Curtius is shy and easily manipulated by the widow,

and Marie is belittled and ignored. There is, however, a picaresque

element to Marie’s life and she won’t be shunted aside. She is witness

to great historical upheavals, most notably the French Revolution. She

is locked up during the Terror, then released to make a cast of the

guillotined head of Robespierre. The name Tussaud, incidentally, is

from a botched marriage to an engineer.

Carey reproduces, or invents, all of this with relentless energy,

giving Marie an appropriate sense of history as spectacle. Whatever

the real truth of Anne Marie Grosholtz’s life, she lived up to a

feminized version of Herodotus’ dictum: a woman’s character is her

fate. With determination, intelligence, artistic nous and luck, she

became one of the great people of history she aspired to be. Now

someone has even written a novel about her. That’s not a bad way to be

memorialised: the facts and untruths of your life laid down on paper

with flair and finesse.