![]() People could be arrested just for sympathising with a victim of the guillotine. Here she remained until recalled by Curtius on the eve of the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.ĭanger struck suddenly, at a time when Curtius was away Marie, her mother and her aunt were all arrested and taken to prison. By 1778 she was competent enough to model both Voltaire and Rousseau and two years later she entered the household of Louis XIV’s sister, Madame Elizabeth, at Versailles, as a tutor in art. From an early age Marie acted firstly as studio assistant and subsequently as pupil and collaborator with her ‘uncle’. In 1767 Marie joined Curtius, the man she was to call ‘Uncle’, in Paris where, he was to run two highly successful exhibitions of wax figures and tableaux’s, which were to attract not only Parisians but also visiting Royalty. Her father died before her birth and her widowed mother became the housekeeper to Philippe Curtius, a Swiss doctor who had abandoned his medical career in order to model in wax. ![]() Madame Tussaud was born Marie Grosholtz, in Strasbourg. Here she displayed life-size and life-like figures of the famous and infamous of history, including, together in the same room Sir Charles Warren and Prince ‘Eddy’, Albert Victor. ![]() It included a half-hearted attempt to depict one of Jack’s victims in order to make a few quick pennies from the morbid curiosity of the East End population.Īt the same time, in the fashionable West End Madame Tussaud was running her famous Wax Museum in the Marylebone Road. I’m not sure whether it is an enviable or unenviable task to walk in the early morning each day along smelly, cobbled streets, past the ‘Ten Bells’ on one side and the ‘unfortunate’ Mary Kelly on the other, only to be greeted in the murky shadows ahead by the eviscerated body of Catharine Eddowes.Īround each corner I stumble across serial killers and murderers like Christie and Crippen and finally pass the severed and spiked heads of Marie Antoinette, Robespierre, and Louis XVI, originally plaster cast and created by the founder of my present employer, the famous wax modeller Madame Tussaud.Īt the height of the Ripper murders in 1888 a travelling waxworks had set up in the Whitechapel Road opposite the London Hospital, in the same building that had earlier displayed the Elephant Man. Our thanks to the editor of Ripperologist for permission to reprint this article.įew people know more about the portrayal of Jack in the arts than Andy Aliffe, who here provides a fascinating overview of Jack, waxworks and the movies. For more information, view our Ripperologist page. Ripperologist is the most respected Ripper periodical on the market and has garnered our highest recommendation for serious students of the case. This article originally appeared in Ripperologist No.
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