Author Q&A: Michelle Moran on Madame Tussaud

With Nerfititi, The Heretic Queen, and Cleopatra's Daughter, Michelle Moran established herself a premier chronicler of the ancient world. Her fourth historical novel, the just-released Madame Tussaud, transports us to the original ancien régime. Revolution is in the air, and the glittering court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette is on the brink of collapse. Capturing the dramatic events and personages of the day through her wax sculptures is Marie Grosholtz (1761—1850), better known to the world as Madame Tussaud.

In an email interview, Moran discusses why she chose to write about this complicated and fascinating woman who survived the French Revolution by making death masks of the beheaded victims of the Reign of Terror and who later established the famous London wax museum, which now has branches in cities all over the world.

WW: After publishing three novels about queens of the ancient world, why did you decide to write about a commoner, Marie Tussaud, and a new historical period, the French Revolution?

MM: My interest in Marie Tussaud began on my very first trip to London when I decided that I wanted to visit the famous wax museum, Madame Tussauds. At the time, I knew almost nothing about the woman behind the name, but as I passed through the exhibition, I began to piece together what would ultimately prove to be a fascinating story. In the first wax tableau I came across, Marie Tussaud had modeled Queen Marie Antoinette with her husband and children. They looked young and happy, dressed in lavish court gowns and silk culottes. In another tableau, the mistress of King Louis XV lay sprawled on a couch, her blonde hair tumbling down her shoulders. Clearly, Marie Tussaud had been interested in modeling the celebrities of her day. Some she would have sculpted from memory, while many she would have met and modeled in person. Marie’s art had obviously gained her access to some of the highest circles in French society.

But in a third tableau, a different part of Marie Tussaud’s life emerged. Dressed in a black gown and dirtied apron, a young Marie could be seen holding up a lantern in the Madeleine Cemetery. The Revolution had begun, and she was searching through a pile of severed heads—all victims of Madame Guillotine. Immediately, I wanted to know what she was doing in that cemetery. Whose heads were they, and did she know those people? When I learned what Marie Tussaud went through during the French Revolution—who she’d met, where she’d gone, and what she’d seen—I knew I would someday tell her story.

WW: Madame Tussaud's life is so dramatic as to be almost unbelievable. She straddled two worlds—the court of Versailles and revolutionary Paris—and survived both. As you researched her life and wrote the novel, what kind of insights into her personality did you get?

MM: Marie was a tremendously challenging character to research. Her memoirs are mostly fabricated (for political as well as personal reasons), and so discovering who she was required looking closely at her actions, versus her words. As an artist, Marie changed with the times. When the royal family was popular, her exhibit featured all things royal. But as soon as the royal family fell from power, she quickly transformed herself into an ardent revolutionary. As I write in the book, I believe Marie and her family were survivalists. Her sympathies may have started off with the common people who wanted a voice in their own government, but as the desire for political reform turned into a political witch hunt (anyone wearing royalist colors, for example, could find themselves sentenced to the guillotine), she began to have doubts about the Revolution. Certainly, by the end, she wished she had never heard the name of Robespierre.

WW: As you acknowledge in your historical note, you changed some details to serve your story better. When you write historical fiction, how do you maintain a balance between sticking to the historical facts and drawing on your creative imagination as a novelist?

MM: I really do my best to stay as close to the facts as possible. On the rare occasions when it becomes necessary to alter something that happened in history, I always admit to it. As a historical fiction reader, I find there’s nothing more frustrating than getting to the end of a novel and wondering, “So how much of that was real and how much was made up?” I want to know where the author took shortcuts, since part of the pleasure in reading this genre is learning new facts and exploring new time periods. As a writer, I find it’s less of a balancing act than it is an exercise in restraint. After years of research, you're enormously tempted to throw everything into a book—all of the neat little facts you’ve learned, every major event, and all of the minor ones. But readers become bored with too much detail, so I find myself having to pick and choose which events are too important to skip over and which can simply be mentioned as having been glossed over once it’s time to write the Author’s Note.

WW: Readers may be surprised to learn that Versailles was not always the spotless palace tourists see today. What kind of research did you to do to uncover these fascinating details about life in 18th-century France?

MM: Isn’t that shocking! Most people probably imagine Marie Antoinette’s Versailles to be a place where privacy ruled and invites were terribly hard to come by. But nothing could be further from the truth. While an invite to a party held by the queen might have been difficult to attain, virtually anyone could visit the palace itself. Most of my research was done using primary documents—firsthand accounts about what life was like during the French Revolution for actors, courtesans, wealthy women, poor women, writers, noblewomen. And, again and again, one of the most common topics to come up was how dirty Versailles had become.

WW: What is your next project? Are you returning to the ancient world? Are you going to continue to write about remarkable but less well-known women of history?

MM: Actually, it will be the latter. My fifth book, which recently sold to my fabulous editor, Heather Lazare, at Crown, will be about the women who surrounded Napoléon Bonaparte. The book will be called Empress Joséphine's Crown and will focus on Napoléon’s second wife, young Marie-Louise, who came from Austria at 18 years old and was asked (or told, rather) that her destiny was to fill Empress Joséphine’s shoes. It was a tall order, and one she bitterly resented. But in the end, it very much worked out in her favor.

WW: When I started reading your novel, the protests in Egypt had just broken out. I couldn’t help but notice some similarities in the economic, political, and social conditions between 18th-century France and the Egypt of today. What lessons are still to be learned from the French Revolution?

MM: It’s funny you should ask this, because I was just thinking about it the other day. The similarities between the two countries prerevolution are numerous: an elite whose special privileges created widespread resentment, a muzzling of the press, and—perhaps most important—rising unemployment. There are definitely lessons about extremism to be learned from the French Revolution. But I think the most important lesson to be taken from the fall of the French monarchy is that even if a form of democracy follows, it matters who the people vote into power. Just because democracy has flowered doesn’t mean that it will continue to flourish and grow. It takes careful tending.

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