The Queen's Dollmaker (35 page)

Hevington became home to a thriving family. Edward was born in 1797, followed by Rebecca in 1798, and finally Elizabeth, nicknamed Little Bitty, at the turn of the new century. William and Claudette had one of their rare disagreements when naming Little Bitty. Claudette insisted that Lizbit be honored by it, and William was just as insistent that she not be. Little Bitty, though, quickly became her father’s darling, demonstrating none of the tragic flaws of her namesake.

Marguerite and Nicholas married, and rented the Greycliffes’ London residence until they saved enough money to purchase their own home. Marguerite happily accepted Nicholas’s faithful and constant nature, and she returned it in kind. Even strangers on the street were struck by how devoted the young Ashby couple was, walking arm in arm everywhere they went. Maude Ashby, crushed in her game of social ascension, had finally yielded to the fact of their marriage and had even taken some interest in helping them decorate their new home.

Marguerite gradually took over much of the day-to-day operations of the doll shop. Frequently, she and Claudette could be seen together in the Hevington drawing room or in the Greycliffes’ London home, heads bent over a new doll design, or sorting through a trunk of the latest wildly tinted fabrics from Paris. As much as Claudette Greycliffe loved being a mother and wife, she still felt a thrill when Marguerite arrived at the door with a bundle of rolled drawings in her arms.

Upon Claudette’s advice, Marguerite expanded the business to include the sale of baby houses and their accessories. To fund this expansion, Claudette sold the town house she had purchased from Mrs. Jenkins, whose health had forced her to move in with relatives on the balmy, developing shores of Brighton.

Sales of the baby houses also led to the creation of families of dolls to fill them, all of them made from wood and jointed just like the larger fashion dolls. The wealthy women who ordered these dolls’ houses would ask for a set of dolls made to resemble their own families. A purchase of a single dollhouse could represent many sales for the C. Laurent Fashion Doll Shop, in terms of miniature furniture, carpets, silver pieces, linens, and now doll families.

Jack Smythe, as clever as always, had invested most of the money he had made through his association with Claudette’s dollmaking business. When he had saved enough money, he left the Ashby household in the middle of the night, and opened his own tavern. He met and married a girl from Northumberland, and they ran the tavern and its attached inn together quite successfully. Together they raised six boisterous young boys.

Marie Grosholtz remained a good friend, visiting mostly through correspondence. She married François Tussaud in 1795 after her own stint in a prison as a guest of the French revolutionaries. Together they had two boys, Joseph and Francis. By the tone of her letters, it was obvious that the marriage was not a happy one. However, Marie continued her work with wax sculpting, and had in fact developed a traveling show in 1802, which saw her wax figures being shown all over England, Ireland, and Scotland. Marie’s letters were always peppered with amusing stories of People of Quality who would visit her showcase, gawping open-mouthed in astonishment.

William and Claudette took a trip to London once to visit Madame Tussaud at her waxworks exhibition, which had made a stop in England’s capital. They were intrigued by the realistic work she was doing with the life-sized figures. Most fascinating was a figure of a woman that lay on a reclining couch, her arm across her forehead in repose. Upon closer examination, they could see that the woman appeared to be breathing. Claudette uttered a spontaneous “Oh my!” and Marie laughed in her sharp, bird-like way.

“Do you like it? This is Madame du Barry, favorite of King Louis XV. She may have met her end at the blade like so many others—oh, sorry, my dear—but she lives on here in wax.”

Marie offered to do a wax model of Claudette, promising to add it to her special exhibit on the Revolution, which already contained the death masks of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Jean-Paul Marat, and Robespierre. Claudette politely declined. She had enough unspeakable memories of that interlude without a permanent reminder of her horror set up as a public spectacle.

They had no communication from anyone else surrounding the Revolutionary period except for Roger Wickham, the La Force guard that had helped William save Claudette. As a gesture of respect toward his patron, Roger and his wife Simone settled in Kent near the town of Sittingbourne, and each Christmastide he would send the Greycliffes containers of high-grade cream.

Claudette kept the de Lamballe doll in the room at Hevington where William had proposed to her. She had a special locking case made for it to keep light and dust off it. She rarely went into the room.

For Claudette, life became an endless series of joyful and contented moments. Only when she was seated alone in Hevington’s gazebo with a book or a piece of embroidery in hand would she allow the memories of Jean-Philippe, La Force, and poor Queen Marie Antoinette to seep into her consciousness. How quickly her body became rigid, reliving that period of death and destruction. She would just as quickly forget the past when one of her children came to show Mama what interesting trick the pet spaniel had just learned, or when her beloved William came looking for her, always seeking a kiss and a gentle caress of her cheek. Life for the orphaned little French dollmaker had turned out gratifyingly well.

Although most of the characters in this novel are of my own creation, quite a few are also historical personages. I have attempted to place them in my story in ways that are believable, and within the context of true historical events, but to my knowledge there was never an actual plot to get Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette out of France by means of a doll conspiracy!

Marie Grosholtz
, later Madame Tussaud, was a protégé of Dr. Philippe Curtius, a doctor skilled at modeling wax to create anatomical figures. These subjects led to portraiture, which soon became more lucrative than his medical career. Dr. Curtius taught Marie the techniques of wax sculpting from an early age, and she became so proficient in wax portraiture that she was soon making figures of many of the prominent people of the era, such as the writer Voltaire and the U.S. statesman Benjamin Franklin. In those days, wax portrait figures were rather like the movies and TV of today—people knew the names of the famous and infamous people of the time, but didn’t know how they looked, so were intrigued enough to pay to see their wax portrait figures. Soon Dr. Curtius had a traveling exhibition.

It wasn’t long before Marie’s skills came to the attention of Louis XVI’s sister, Madame Elisabeth, and Marie was invited to live at Versailles to help in Madame Elisabeth’s artistic education. Marie spent nine years at court and while there she created figures of Louis XVI and his family.

Marie was in fact forced to dress the newly piked head of the Princesse de Lamballe, and to create death masks for Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. She also made death masks for Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat and other prominent figures, including the Bastille’s governor, de Launay. Like so many others, Marie spent time in prison during the Revolution, but was released just before her scheduled execution. Dr. Curtius died shortly after the Revolution, and she took over the exhibition they had established. After marrying François Tussaud, she took her exhibition on tour for thirty years across Great Britain, eventually settling her growing wax collection in a spot near where it is presently located.

You can still see the death masks for King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, and Robespierre at the Madame Tussaud’s exhibition on Marylebone Road in London. The oldest piece in the collection is an animatronic of Jeanne du Barry, a favorite mistress of France’s King Louis XV. Really, it is well worth a trip to London just to go to this museum.

Count Axel Fersen was indeed a special friend of Marie Antoinette’s. Were they actual lovers? Many historians think so, but I am not certain Marie Antoinette was of a temperament to engage in an actual illicit affair. She was well aware of her position in life as mother to the heir of the throne. However, it is certainly possible that an affair occurred, and there are incriminating letters left behind that suggest it was a physical relationship. Fersen did travel to England during the time I placed him, and he was goggled at by the smart English, who nicknamed him “The Picture” for his handsome looks. In 1810, seventeen years after the death of the queen, Fersen was torn to bits by a mob. The count had incurred the wrath of the Swedish crowd at the funeral procession of Christian, heir to the throne of Denmark. The mob was incited to believe that he had poisoned Christian. It was a fate he had often predicted for Marie Antoinette.

The Princesse de Lamballe
was one of the queen’s dearest friends, and most certainly was not her lover, much as the harsh royal critics of the time wanted to portray her as such. I consider her one of the most tragic figures of the time, because she truly was without guile, and her devotion and loyalty to her king and queen are unquestioned. Her fate with the mob at La Force prison was as described in the story. On the day of her death, there were general massacres in prisons across Paris. Around 1,300 prisoners were killed, not including similar killings that went on at Versailles and Rheims.

Marie-Jeanne Rose Bertin
was Marie Antoinette’s chief dressmaker, and became the first celebrated French fashion designer. Under the queen’s generous patronage, Bertin was able to charge very high prices for her fashions: her gowns and headdresses would easily cost twenty times what a skilled worker of the time earned in a year. During the French Revolution, with many of her noble customers fleeing abroad, Bertin moved her business to London. She eventually returned to France, where Josephine de Beauharnais became a customer, but there was little demand for Bertin’s excessive fashions of the
ancien régime
. She died in 1813.

As opposed to many others in the Revolution, who sought rebellion for their own personal gain, Maximilien Robespierre was a true believer in the cause. He saw the Terror impersonally, as a method of implementing “Virtue.” In an ironic moment of justice, he experienced the same fate as so many he had condemned. He was dragged to the guillotine in July 1794, in a drunken stupor and in acute pain from a shattered jaw resulting from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. It was he who wrote into law “Any individual who usurps the nation’s sovereignty shall be immediately put to death by free men,” and it was on this basis that he was executed.

Cordelier leader Jean-Paul Marat was a vicious journalist who used his extremist newspaper,
L’Ami du Peuple
, to fan the flames of hatred against anyone he deemed to hold too much power, whether they be royalists, the courts, or Girondists. He was stabbed to death in July 1793 by Charlotte Corday, a Girondist sympathizer.

The locksmith François Gamain, Governor de Launay, Madame de Tourzel, her daughter Pauline, Jeanne de la Motte, Cardinal Rohan, the jewelers Boehmer and Bassenge, and the dollmaker Pierotti were also real persons. John Sackville, the third Duke of Dorset, his mistress, Giovanna Baccelli, and her subsequent protector, Henry Herbert, the tenth Earl of Pembroke, were quite the scandal of late-eighteenth-century Kent.

The guillotine was first proposed as a preferred execution device by Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. A physician and humanitarian, he was disturbed by the vulgarity of public executions and petitioned for a single method of capital punishment to be used for all crimes demanding the death sentence. The device was viewed as dispatching its victims with “swiftness and decency.” It wasn’t until after 1792 that it was adopted and nicknamed “Madame Guillotine” for its sponsor. During the Terror, it is estimated that an astonishing 40,000 people were killed: 17,000 with trial, 12,000 without a trial, and thousands more perished in prisons. The guillotine was used until 1981, when France abolished capital punishment.

The Terror came quickly to a close with Robespierre’s death. Riots in the spring of 1795 were now easily crushed by the National Guard, which gained control of the Convention. A new constitution was drafted, which placed the executive in the hands of a directory of five men. Before the directory was even in place, thousands of royalists marched on the Tuileries Palace to protest the new constitution. The regular army was called in for protection, and a young Corsican artillery captain named Napoleon Bonaparte was summoned to lead them. Bonaparte’s quick handling of the rebellion would propel him into the limelight, and begin yet another chapter of French and English history.

I am indebted to a great number of historical references I have read over the years pertaining to Marie Antoinette and the era spanning her reign and that of the Terror. Listed below are the books that became permanent fixtures on my desk while writing this book.

Dobson, Austin.
Four Frenchwomen
. London: Chatto and Windus, 1890.

Editors.
Horizon Magazine. The French Revolution
. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

Fraser, Antonia.
Marie Antoinette: The Journey
. New York: Doubleday, 2001.

Genet, Jeanne Louise Henriette (Madame Campan).
Memoirs of Marie Antoinette
. New York: P. F. Collier and Son, 1910.

Hearsey, John E. N.
Marie Antoinette
. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1973.

Hyde, Catherine (Ed.).
Secret Memoirs of Princesse Lamballe: Her Confidential Relations with Marie Antoinette
. 1901.

Loomis, Stanley.
The Fatal Friendship
. New York: Doubleday, 1972.

Pilkington, Iain D. B.
Queen of the Trianon
. London: Jarrolds; Akron: St. Dunstan Society, 1955.

Schama, Simon.
Citizens
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.