Madame Tussaud, waxworker extraordinary

According to Max Beerbohm, it was the proudest day of Bernard Shaw's life when he was asked to give a sitting to Madame Tussaud's. Then, as now, to be modelled in was for Tussaud's was indeed to be famous. Yet oddly enough, though millions have flocked to the Exhibition in Marylebone Road, its founder remains a shadowy figure from the past - a woman somehow connected to the French Revolution who modelled guillotined heads and established a Chamber of Horrors in the wax exhibition she brought to London.

The bare facts of her life offer clues to an intriguing character. From her birth in Strasbourg in 1761 to her death in Victorian London, Marie Tussaud's life was as extraordinary as it was productive. Her earliest surviving portrait, that of Voltaire, was modelled when she was seventeen. She lived at the Court of Versailles, and subsequently knew most of the leading Revolutionaries quite intimately. She was on hand at the Storming of the Bastille and made a death-mask of the incapacitated head of the Governor. Throughout the Terror she and her mentor, Doctor Curtius, were commissioned to mould the heads of the distinguished victims of the guillotine, starting with the King and Queen. She came to England with her travelling exhibition in 1802 and stayed, working during the reigns of four British monarchs. When she was seventy-five Madame Tussaud established a permanent exhibition at Baker Street. She died aged eighty-nine.

A talented sculptress and journalist in wax, Marie Tussaud had both witnessed and recorded history for posterity. Shrewd and independent, she ranks among the first great career women of modern times, for she built up her business unaided in a man's world. No less an achievement, perhaps, was to have experienced horror and yet find the inner resources to become a devoted mother.

In this sensitive and compelling biography, Anita Leslie and Pauline Chapman tell a tale stranger than fiction. Based on twelve years' research into French and English sources, Madame Tussaud, Wax-worker Extraordinary is at once a fascinating insight into the enigmatic founder of a unique institution, and an absorbing account of a turbulent period of European history.