Kate Berridge by Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax Page B

people, became a one-man Franklin Mint, his likeness made in endless statuettes, engravings and busts. His celebrity status prompted him to write to his daughter, ‘The numbers of medallions sold are incredible. Those with pictures, busts and prints of which copies are spread everywhere have made your father’s face as well known as the moon, so that he durst not do anything that would oblige him to run away, as his phiz would discover him wherever he should venture to show it.’ Madame Campan relates how the market for Franklin medals was so great and trade so brisk that ‘Even in the palace of Versailles, Franklin’s medallion was sold under the King’s eyes.’ A few years later the gun-running dramatist Beaumarchais, in the wake of the phenomenal success of his Figaro plays, became not only wealthy, but the subject of commemorative merchandise. As an English visitor, Mrs Thrale, noted, ‘Beaumarchais possesses so entirely the favour of the public, that women wear fans with verses on them out of his comedy.’ Even the charlatan mystic Cagliostro, before he was exposed in 1787, inspired a range of ribbons– rubans à la Cagliostro .
    Importantly, young Marie absorbed in every fibre of her being the unifying trait that Mercier described as ‘the love of the marvellous’. From the age of six until her late twenties, when a dramatic change of tempo affected the whole of France, Marie was at the heart of a city discovering how to have fun. The myriad entertainments that flourished at this time cemented the reputation of Paris as the capital of hedonism, and the Parisian propensity to play hard became regarded as a national characteristic. Observers from different countries were united in their appraisal of their fun-loving French counterparts. The Earl of Clarendon remarked, ‘In England a man of common rank would condemn himself as extravagant and culpable if he permitted his family to partake of amusements more than once or twice a week. In France, all ranks give themselves up to pleasure indiscriminately every day.’ The Russian traveller Karamzin concurred: ‘Not only the rich people who live only for pleasure and amusement, but even the poorest artisans, Savoyards and peddlers consider it a necessity to go to the theatre two or three times a week.’ GouverneurMorris was struck by the indulgent lifestyle of the women in his circle. He paints a picture of the vacuous lifestyle of a lady of leisure: the few hours ‘when she is not being tended to by the coiffeur she is giving to spectacles [exhibitions]’.
    One of the most striking descriptions of the pleasures of Paris, and the decadence of the inhabitants, as compared to wholesome America, was made by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Mrs Bingham on 7 February 1787. He paints a picture of leisured ennui, a cycle of pleasure-seeking, which he contrasts to his homeland: ‘In America, on the other hand, the society of your husband, the fond chores of the children, the arrangement of the house, the improvements of the grounds, fill every moment with a healthy and useful activity.’ (As if even all that time ago they were a nation of Martha Stewarts!)
    Mrs Thrale was surprised by the round-the-clock, seven-days-a-week availability of amusements. Entertainment was a commodity peddled in forms ranging from the small-scale peep shows that Savoyard girls strapped to their backs to the spectacular displays of equestrian showmanship by Astley and the Franconi brothers in a floodlit hippodrome with twelve hundred jets of flame and a full orchestra. It is little wonder that later on in life Marie stressed her royal patrons, for she had witnessed the impact of Marie Antoinette’s patronage on Astley’s show. Horace Walpole complained in London, ‘I shall not have even Astley. Her Majesty the Queen of France, who has as much taste as Caligula, has sent for the whole of the dramatis personae to