Kate Berridge by Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax

on Paris. Under the Ancien Régime , Church and state kept tight control of people’s pleasures through a regime of suppression, censorship and vigilance. Certain information and ideas were treated like cultural contraband, confiscated from the public and impounded in the Bastille, although it was not only dangerous paper that was imprisoned: spells of incarceration or exile were almost badges of honour for Enlightenment writers. There were tight restrictions on the number of printers working in the city at any one time, and the majority of the most influential books in this period were published abroad. In a city where even a lost-dog poster required a signature from the lieutenant of police, Mercier wryly observed, ‘There are in Paris only two documents which may be printed without leave from the police, the wedding invitation and the funeral card.’ But, for all the attempts to control people’s pleasures and to restrict their reading matter, restraint only made popular culture more lively, as Madame Campan sagely observed: ‘Public opinion may be compared to an eel: the tighter one holds it the sooner it escapes.’ The freeing of public opinion was the backcloth to Marie’s life.
    First as a vivacious little girl, then as a dependable and conscientious teenage assistant to Curtius, she saw him both monitor and profit from this trend. Growing up in the pre-Revolutionary period, she witnessed dramatic social change that gradually started to assume a political bent. In many respects Paris in the 1770s and ’80s was like London in the 1960s: a heady mix of sex and shopping, with an anti-Establishment undercurrent. Beneath a shiny surface of fashion and frivolity a sense of social injustice was simmering. Marie witnessed the celebrity hairdresser and the fashion designer emerge as the new social heroes, and the clash between generations as the young kicked over the Establishment traces, rebelling with the height rather than the length of their hair. (Echoing every disgruntled parent, Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, once wrote to her daughter Marie Antoinette, ‘I must touch on a subject that I hear mentioned on all sides. It is a question of your headgear. I have heard that it risesthirty-six inches from the roots of the hair and it is built up in a tower with countless feathers and ribbons.’) The young, including the Queen, also caused shock waves by rejecting hooped underskirts in favour of see-through loose-fitting clothes–a liberation that at the time represented as signal a protest as bra-burning. One of the ‘in’ hairdressers, Beaulard, devised the perfect solution to following the new fashions without offending the oldies: a three-foot-high hair-do with a spring to adjust the height in an instant as soon as you encountered disapproving glares.

    Hair-raising fashions
    As a teenage girl Marie was probably familiar with Rose Bertin’s famous boutique, La Grand Mogul, but she is unlikely to have been a customer. Although Curtius was wealthy, Bertin’s creations were fabulously expensive and remained out of reach of all but a tiny seam of high society, of which the Queen was the most prestigious customer. With a business brain as sharp as her pins, Bertin came to be regarded as the most powerful woman in France, and was nicknamed Minister of Fashion. In her memoir Marie remembers Bertin as a ‘first-rate celebrity, and person of large property’. (She also relates that the great stylist lost her assets, and died in poverty in London. This is incorrect. Rose died in France, and was still supplying the courts of Europe with couture creations until shortly before her death.)
    As the Ancien Régime lurched precariously from one public-relations disaster to the next (famously damaging was the Queen’s association with the fraudulent purchase of a fabulously expensive diamond necklace in 1786), Marie observed at close quarters the establishment of a