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.
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