Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution

Prologue

LONDON

1812

WHEN SHE WALKS THROUGH THE DOOR OF MY EXHIBITION, everything disappears: the sound of the rain against the windows, the wax models, the customers, even the children. This is a face I have not seen in twenty-one years, and immediately I step back, wondering whether I have conjured her from my past.

“What is it?” Henri asks. He has seen my eyes widen and follows my gaze to the figure near the door. The woman is in her sixties, but there is something about her—her clothes, her walk, perhaps her French features—that sets her apart. “Do you know her?”

“I—I’m not sure,” I say. But this is a lie. Even after so many years, there is no mistaking those hands. They shaped a queen’s destiny and enraged a nation. At once, my years at the court of Versailles are as near to me as though they had happened yesterday, and I am no longer standing in my London exhibition but in a great mirrored hall watching the courtiers in their fine silk culottes and diamond aigrettes. I can smell the jasmine from the queen’s private gardens and hear the laughter in the king’s marble chambers.

“Who is she?” Henri asks.

This time I whisper, “I believe it is Rose Bertin.”

Henri stares. “Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker?”

I nod at him. “Yes.”

The woman crosses the room, and it is only when she is directly in front of us that I am certain about who she is. She is dressed in a pelisse fashionable among women half her age, and the feather in her hat is an extraordinary shade of blue. Outside, a young man is waiting at her coach. Passersby will suspect that he is her son, but anyone who has ever been acquainted with her will know better.

“Marie, do you remember me?” she asks.

I hesitate, letting the weight of our pasts hang between us for a moment. Then I reply, “You know I never forget a face, Rose.”

“Mon Dieu. You haven’t changed at all! Your voice, your eyes—” She glances down at my dress, cotton in plain black. “Your sense of style.”

“Your unbelievable pretentiousness.”

Rose gives a throaty laugh. “What? Did you think I would lose that with my looks?”

I smile, since Rose was never a beauty.

“And is this—”

“Henri Charles.”

“Henri,” she repeats with real affection, and perhaps she is remembering the first time they met, in the Salon de Cire. “Did Marie ever tell you how she survived our Revolution after you and I left? For twenty years, I have wanted to know that story …”

My breath comes quick, and there’s a tightness in my chest. Who would want to remember that now? We are in London, a world away from Versailles. I look at Henri, who is honest when he says, “I doubt anyone has ever learned the half of it, Madame.”