Madame Tussaud

Do you ever find that what you read feeds into one another? That something you read a few months ago subconsciously creates a new interest and you start reading related material unintentionally? For instance, I’ve never really read very much about the French Revolution. I’ve read a Marie Antoinette biography (the one by Antonia Fraser – it is terrific) and I get what happened but details, not so much. Then suddenly I got the urge to read A Tale of Two Cities and followed that up with Madame Tussaud. A few months ago I read Catherine the Great’s biography and she sort of makes an appearance in Madame Tussad , so…related.

Does this ever happen to you?

I love when it happens.

This brings me to my latest read. In a very roundabout way, but here we are.

Madame Tussaud by Michelle Moran. Don’t hate me, but I initially dismissed it because of the cover. I know – breaking one of reading’s top commandments: Thou Shalt not judge a book by its cover. But we all do it, and here we are.

For the record, I’ve done the reverse as well. I’ve been seduced by a brilliant cover to find the inside lacking. But it seems much more heinous when you dismiss a great book because the cover art doesn’t do it for you, doesn’t it?

Anyway, Madame Tussaud is excellent. I loved it. Michelle Moran does not mince words. She writes about the brutality and the uncertainty of the French Revolution in no uncertain terms. The cruelty of the guillotine, the Swiss Guard massacre, the spite with which the people treated the royal family and the mercilessness they showed when it came to rooting out anyone that might have ever had anything to do with them are all portrayed honestly in the book.

Madame Tussaud tells the story of the real Madame Tussaud, formerly Anna Maria Grosholtz, the wax sculptor who used her talents to tell the stories of the day. Her tableaus of the wealthy and eventually those political figures that were changing the face of France, attracted thousands of people. Her salon de cire was the only chance that many of these people could ever hope to catch a glimpse of those people featured in the exhibit.

But she paid a price for her success. Madame Tussaud  also explores the romantic relationship that Marie has with her neighbor and fellow exhibitor Henri Charles.

Personally the romantic storyline was secondary for me. The role that Marie played in the politics of the day meant that, as a reader, I got a front row seat to the drama that unfolded. And it was hard to read sometimes, heartbreaking, vicious, and bloody as the tale can be.

I ended up feeling real affinity for this woman whose ambition ruled her throughout one of the most terrifying epochs in our human history. She’s one of those characters that I’m sad to let go of.

If you see it, try not to judge it by its cover. The inside is a real treat. I find myself eagerly anticipating Moran’s next book, The Second Empress, which is due to be released August 14^th. Also, if you’ve visited Michelle Moran’s website you will see that Madame Tussaud has been optioned as a Showtime miniseries, which is seriously exciting news.

Yup, I’m a dork. What are you gonna do?

Famous Women

I’ve finally cracked Catherine the Great: Portait of a Woman and, 150 pages in, it is living up to every single expectation. It is terrific and well written and wonderful and educational and there are pictures! Who doesn’t love shiny pictures?

Exactly.

Anyway starting this book got me reflecting on all the other bios of awesome women that I have read. I have a weakness for bios about fantastic ahead-of-their-time women, as any quick perusal of my bookshelves will tell you. I have an especial weakness for royal women. And we’re not even talking about my girl crush on the new Duchess of Cambridge here (although if you have a few hours and you live near me, maybe you want to watch the Royal Wedding again? I have it on DVD. Apparently I feel like watching it 8 times over the wedding weekend wasn’t enough).

I digress.

I’ve put together a modest collection of my very favourite bios of awesome women in the hopes that at least one will strike a note with you. Because women are awesome and sometimes it behooves us to remember that.

The Reluctant Empress by Brigitte Hamann was a souvenir book I picked up over my weekend in Vienna. I kept seeing pictures of this woman in an incredible gown with diamond stars in her hair and I needed to know more. So when I saw that same picture on the cover of this book – I had to have it. The Reluctant Empress is Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was incredibly beautiful and mysterious and really did not like being the Empress. She wanted to be free and struggled against the rigid formalities of the Austrian court. It was a wonderful, slightly heartbreaking, thoroughly modern read and I loved it.

Another woman struggling against the expectations and conformities of life in the spotlight was Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire. Amanda Foreman’s sympathetic and meticulously researched book about this ancestor of Princess Diana will leave you wanting more. I’m not ashamed to say that I picked this book up after seeing previews for the movie The Duchess with Keira Knightley. The movie is good, the book is better. Even Keira Knightley fails to do justice to this woman who was ahead of her time politically, romantically, even fashionably, and ended up paying a very high price for it all.

If you want to talk about high prices women have paid in history, Marie-Antoinette probably comes to mind, seeing as she lost her life for living a frivolous life at court while the French people starved in the streets. Still, Antonia Fraser’s biography paints a more sympathetic and realistic portrait of the woman who has been wrongly accused of uttering “Let them eat cake.” She was married young to a boy who ignored her for the first years of their marriage and was reviled by the people for the rest of her time. Fraser’s account takes you back through the golden days of Versailles, right through to the ignominious end of the French monarchy.

What’s better than the biography of one royal woman? Julia P. Gelardi’s book that covers five of them. Born to Rule: Five Reigning Consorts, Granddaughters of Queen Victoria ably covers the incredible lives of the 5 granddaughters of Queen Victoria who each became Queens in their own right. Alexandra who married the Russian Tsar and met her tragic end in squalor, her body riddled with bullets; Marie, the beautiful flamboyant Queen of Romania who was the mother of 2 more Balkan Queens; Victoria Eugenie who was almost bombed on the parade route on her wedding day, having married the heir to the Spanish throne, passing on the haemophilia gene that so tormented her grandmother and cousin, Alexandra; Maud, who in becoming independent Norway’s Queen, spent the rest of her days pining for England; and Sophie, Kaiser Wilhelm II’s sister, daughter of an emperor and the mother of three kings and a queen who ended her life in exile. I mean come on,  you can’t make up more incredible lives than that!

My last choice is not a royal woman, but one who had a huge influence on my own young life: L.M. Montgomery. I suspect that she had a pretty important impact on Mary Henley Rubio’s life as well which is probably at least part of the reason for the exquisite Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings. Here’s what I knew about L.M. Montgomery before: she was the brilliant author of the Anne of Green Gables series which I will love for always. After finishing this book, I know that she loved the island she made famous, but hated that her work destroyed the world she loved; that she struggled with mental illness in a marriage based on convenience rather than love or respect; and that having so brilliantly captured childhood in the form of her most enduring heroine, she had nothing but trouble trying to connect with her own young sons.

I could go on but I won’t. This time. If you have another book about a famous woman you think I would love, leave it in the comments!