TUSSAUD, MARIE

ne Grosholtz born Dec. 1, 1761, Strasbourg, France died April 16, 1850, London, Eng. French-born founder of Madame Tussaud's museum of wax figures, in central London. Her early life was spent first in Bern and then in Paris, where she learned the art of wax modeling from her uncle, Philippe Curtius, whose two wax museums she inherited upon his death in 1794. From 1780 until the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, she served as art tutor at Versailles to Louis XVI's sister, Madame lisabeth, and she was later imprisoned as a royalist. During the Reign of Terror she had the gruesome responsibility of making death masks from headsfrequently those of her friendsfreshly severed by the guillotine. Her marriage in 1795 to Franois Tussaud, an engineer from Mcon, was not a success; and in 1802 she took her two sons and her collection of wax models to England. She toured the British Isles for 33 years before finally establishing a permanent home in Baker Street, London, where she worked until eight years before her death. (In 1884 Madame Tussaud's moved to the Marylebone Road, London.) Madame Tussaud's museum is topical as well as historical and includes both the famous and the infamous. Notorious characters and the relics of famous crimes are segregated in the Chamber of Horrors, a name coined jokingly by a contributor to Punch in 1845. Many of the original models made by Marie Tussaud of her great contemporaries, such as Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Horatio Nelson, and Sir Walter Scott, are still preserved.