Blood & Wax

I, MADAME TUSSAUD (370 pp.)--Sylvia Martin--Harper ($3.95).

No sooner had the guillotine decapitated King Louis XVI than an official seized the head by the hair and hurried it to Anne Marie Grosholtz who. after signing a receipt for it, laid it in her lap and began covering the warm features with plaster. In this way, Anne Marie (better known by her married name of Madame Tussaud) made death masks of many an old acquaintance and patron, including Marie Antoinette, Princess Elizabeth of France (whose lady attendant she had been), Danton and Robespierre. She was an artist to her fingertips.

Anne Marie was born in Strasbourg in 1760. Her uncle, Philip Curtius, was a former medical student whose flair for modeling human limbs in wax led to the creation in Paris of ''Dr. Curtius' Cabinet," a showroom filled with wax-and-wood dummies of famous men and women. Anne Marie became Philip's adopted daughter and learned the tricks of his trade from childhood--how to insert strands of hair into artificial skulls, how to tint and warm the cold wax. When she was 19, Uncle Philip wangled her into the bedchambers of Versailles, where she doubled as sculptress to the court and agent for the "Cabinet," which she kept supplied with dummy heads of the great.

Posthumous Record. Nine years at Versailles gave Anne Marie ample opportunity to model and sketch the French nobility from life. When the Revolution came, she turned to death masks of the same nobles --and when the revolutionaries started using the guillotine on one another, Anne Marie was still right there, modeling away.

She did the living Danton one day, the guillotined Danton a little later; when Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat, his body was later put back in the bath tub and the knife back into Marat, so that "Citizenness Grosholtz" could make a true posthumous record for the people of Paris. Anyone who wanted to know which faction was "in" and which "out" had only to stroll to the "Cabinet," where dummies rose and fell precisely in accordance with their living models.

The Undefiled. This Enlightened Age highly valued art, and the great revolutionary painter, Louis David, highly valued Anne Marie. He called her "The Undefiled," because (as he saw it) she was surrounded by corruption but was never smirched by it. She was middle-aged when the legend of her "pure" artistry reached England, and she traveled to London with her grisly masks and busts. One of her last waxworks--a self-portrait done at the age of 82, seven years before she died--may still be seen in the famous institution she founded in London.

I, Madame Tussaud would have been a better book if U.S. Author Sylvia Martin had written a straight biography instead of a romanticized piece of fiction. Nonetheless, Author Martin does suggest--and all the more clearly for not meaning to--that Heroine Tussaud may have been a forerunner of the "undefiled" women who whiled away the Hitler war making artistic lampshades out of human skins.

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