Madame Tussaud

Madame Tussaud
Author: Pamela Pilbeam
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2006-08-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781852855116

Tussaud's catered for the public's fascination with monarchy, whether Henry VIII and his wives or Queen Victoria, as well as for their love of history, acting as an accessible and enjoyable museum. This work looks at Madame Tussaud herself and her exhibition as part of the wider history of wax modelling and of popular entertainment.

The Memoirs of Madame Tussaud

The Memoirs of Madame Tussaud
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2005
Genre: France
ISBN:

In her memoirs of 1838, Madame Marie Tussaud recounts how she was forced to take wax impressions of the severed heads of her royal friends Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Then, with her head shaved, she awaited her own execution. Fortunate to survive, she travelled to England with her collection of macabre wax casts which resulted in the famous waxworks museum.

Madame Tussaud

Madame Tussaud
Author: Kate Berridge
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2009-05-21
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0061945129

Kate Berridge’s Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax “celebrates a great pioneer of mass-market illusion, whose illusions eventually included herself.”* Millions have visited the museums that bear her name, yet few know much about Madame Tussaud. A celebrated artist, she had both a ringside seat at and a cameo role in the French Revolution. A victim and survivor of one of the most tumultuous times in history, this intelligent, pragmatic businesswoman has also had an indelible impact on contemporary culture, planting the seed of our obsession with celebrity. Kate Berridge tells this fascinating woman’s complete story for the first time, drawing upon a wealth of sources, including Tussaud’s memoirs and historical archives. It is a grand-scale success story, revealing how with sheer graft and grit a woman born in 1761 to an eighteen-year-old cook overcame extraordinary reversals of fortune to build the first and most enduring worldwide brand identified simply by reference to its founder’s name: Madame Tussaud’s. “A good story, like Berridge’s biography, is a blessing.” —Miami Herald “A rousing good read . . . [Berridge] presents us with a thorough understanding of the beginnings of popular culture.” —Vancouver Sun “Fascinating. . . . A vividly recreated history of an extreme time and the unusually determined woman who capitalized so effectively on it.” —Globe and Mail “Spectacular and spellbinding. . . . Thoughtful, original, never condescending, erudite, and packed with vivid and sometimes horrifying detail, it is a model of how cultural history should be written.” —*Sunday Times (London)

Madame Tussaud's Apprentice

Madame Tussaud's Apprentice
Author: Kathleen Benner Duble
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2014-07-04
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1440581177

In 1789, with the starving French people on the brink of revolution, orphaned Celie Rosseau, an amazing artist and a very clever thief, runs wild with her protector, Algernon, trying to join the idealistic freedom fighters of Paris. But when she is caught stealing from none other than the king's brother and the lady from the waxworks, Celie must use her drawing talent to buy her own freedom or die for her crimes. Forced to work for Madame Tussaud inside the opulent walls that surround Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Celie is shocked to find that the very people she imagined to be monsters actually treat her with kindness. But the thunder of revolution still rolls outside the gates, and Celie is torn between the cause of the poor and the safety of the rich. When the moment of truth arrives, will she turn on Madame Tussaud or betray the boy she loves? From the hidden garrets of the starving poor to the jeweled halls of Versailles, Madame Tussaud's Apprentice is a sweeping story of danger, intrigue, and young love, set against one of the most dramatic moments in history.

Madame Tussaud

Madame Tussaud
Author: Teresa Ransom
Publisher: Sutton Publishing
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2003
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

The story of a woman whose work inspired one of London's greatest attractions. Born in Strasbourg, the young Marie Tussaud learned her skills from her mother's employer, Philippe Curtius. In 1780 she became tutor to King Louis XVI's sister and for eight years prior to the Revolution lived at the court in Versailles. In Paris throughout the Revolution, she was often in extreme danger. Incredibly, she was forced to make death masks from the decapitated heads of her friends who fell to the guillotine. In 1802, she opened her first exhibition at the Lyceum theatre in London. With modelled figures such as Napoleon and Josephine and other notables from the Revolution, her exhibition was very popular. She also had the guillotine blade that severed Marie Antoinette's head. For the next 26 years Madame Tussaud toured England and Scotland with her Waxwork Exhibition, until she established her base in Baker Street in 1835. She had always had a "separate room", for the most gruesome of the models, which in 1846 Punch dubbed "The Chamber of Horrors". The name stuck. She died in 1850 and in 1884, Tussaud's grandsons moved the exhibition to Marylebone Road, where it remains.

Little

Little
Author: Edward Carey
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2018-10-23
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525534342

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD LONGLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE WALTER SCOTT PRIZE FOR HISTORICAL FICTION LONGLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE "An amazing achievement. . . A compulsively readable novel, so canny and weird and surfeited with the reality of human capacity and ingenuity that I am stymied for comparison. Dickens and David Lynch? Defoe meets Margaret Atwood? Judge for yourself." —Gregory Maguire, New York Times-bestselling author of Wicked The wry, macabre, unforgettable tale of an ambitious orphan in Revolutionary Paris, befriended by royalty and radicals, who transforms herself into the legendary Madame Tussaud. In 1761, a tiny, odd-looking girl named Marie is born in a village in Switzerland. After the death of her parents, she is apprenticed to an eccentric wax sculptor and whisked off to the seamy streets of Paris, where they meet a domineering widow and her quiet, pale son. Together, they convert an abandoned monkey house into an exhibition hall for wax heads, and the spectacle becomes a sensation. As word of her artistic talent spreads, Marie is called to Versailles, where she tutors a princess and saves Marie Antoinette in childbirth. But outside the palace walls, Paris is roiling: The revolutionary mob is demanding heads, and . . . at the wax museum, heads are what they do. In the tradition of Gregory Maguire's Wicked and Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, Edward Carey's Little is a darkly endearing cavalcade of a novel—a story of art, class, determination, and how we hold on to what we love.

Some of My Lives

Some of My Lives
Author: Rosamond Bernier
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2011-10-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 142999505X

Rosamond Bernier has lived an unusually full life—remarkable for its vividness and diversity of experience—and she has known many (one is tempted to say all) of the greatest artists and composers of the twentieth century. In Some of My Lives, Bernier has made a kind of literary scrapbook from an extraordinary array of writings, ranging from diary entries to her many contributions to the art journal L'OEIL, which she cofounded in 1955. The result is a multifaceted self-portrait of a life informed and surrounded by the arts. Through the stories of her encounters with some of the twentieth century's great artists and composers—including Pablo Picasso, Leonard Bernstein, Max Ernst, Aaron Copeland, Malcolm Lowry, and Karl Lagerfeld—we come to understand the sheer richness of Bernier's experiences, interactions, and memories. The result is pithy, hilarious, and wise—a richly rewarding chronicle of many lives fully lived.

Cleopatra's Daughter

Cleopatra's Daughter
Author: Michelle Moran
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 438
Release: 2009-09-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307462382

The incredible untold story of the children of Cleopatra, Egypt’s most powerful and notorious ruler—a novel that “brims over with rich details of Roman life, historical personages, and political turmoil” (Romantic Times)—from the internationally bestselling author of Nefertiti “Fast-paced, intriguing, and beautifully written.”—The Boston Globe The marriage of Marc Antony and Cleopatra is one of the greatest love stories of all time. Feared and hunted by the powers in Rome, the lovers choose to die by their own hands as the triumphant armies of Antony’s rival, Octavian, sweep into Egypt. When their orphaned children are taken in chains to Rome, only two—the ten-year-old twins Selene and Alexander—survive the journey. As they come of age, they are buffeted by the personal ambitions of Octavian’s family and court, by the ever-present threat of slave rebellion, and by the longings deep within their own hearts. Recounted in Selene’s youthful and engaging voice, Michelle Moran introduces a compelling cast of historical characters: Octavia, the emperor Octavian’s kind and compassionate sister, abandoned by Marc Antony for Cleopatra; Livia, Octavian’s bitter and jealous wife; Marcellus, Octavian’s handsome, flirtatious nephew and heir apparent; Tiberius, Livia’s sardonic son and Marcellus’s great rival for power; and Juba, Octavian’s watchful aide, whose honored position at court has far-reaching effects on the lives of the young Egyptian royals. Based on meticulous research, Cleopatra’s Daughter is a fascinating portrait of imperial Rome and of the people and events of this most tumultuous period in human history. Emerging from the shadows of the past, Selene must confront the same forces that destroyed her mother and struggle to meet a different fate.