The death mask of Jean-Paul Marat cast by Tussaud. She feels made up, she seems like a story.
There’s something a little cockroachy about her, too. There’s something mythical about her, as if she were a character from folklore or fairytale. A very small old woman, with a large nose and chin, dressed in suitably chilling Victorian bombazine, stands guard over the rest of the wax populace. This had noise and lights and you felt you were standing on the gun deck of HMS Victory and there - you could almost see him breathing his last - was the bloody, pale body of Horatio Nelson.īut the greatest waxwork in Madame Tussauds is of Tussaud herself. The Chamber of Horrors was certainly upsetting, but not as much as the tableau of the Battle of Trafalgar.
Guy Fawkes crouching by a barrel of gunpowder had terrified me, as had a peculiarly pockmarked waxwork of Hans Christian Andersen. Like countless others, I had been taken to the wax museum as a child and blessed with nightmares from the experience. Some 20 years ago, in a freefall from university and picking up odd jobs in London, I spent a few months working at Madame Tussauds.
