Some people build model ships...

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

But this man.... http://boisdejustice.com/Home/Home.html
Hmm...!
If you can lightly skip over his take on the Revolution (he knows a lot about guillotines, but evidently not much about the 1790's!) the history page has a pre-1925 fire photo of the Paris guillotine blade and lunette. There was a fire in 1925 that destroyed Madame Tussauds in London, including, sadly, most of the Revolution and Napoleon artefacts, but the blade survived, though damaged - I don't know what became of the lunette (I last went when I was 5 or 6!). I suppose you have to take their word for it that it's the one: it's now billed as 'the blade that killed Marie-Antoinette' (and I bet they were tempted to add 'like in the movie'?), but if that's the case parts, if not all of it, must also have been used to kill - well, pretty well everyone that everyone here is interested in...which is a weird and horrible thought...
http://boisdejustice.com/History/History.html
(btw in case you didn't know, Tussaud also allegedly took Robespierre's 'death mask' -the Parisian place that makes copies believes it was actually taken in life, which is plausible - Washington had his cast in life, as did many politicians, poets etc. - but billing it as taken at the foot of the guillotine sounds more dramatic! http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/dec/01/france.art )
Gosh, I'm morbid today!

Comments

[marieclaire08.livejournal.com]

Hair turning white when exposed to sun. Hmmm. I had no idea.
You're on top of art in a way I'm not. It just seems that the best argument for the mask being authentic is still "it's not impossible" and that leaves me very cold. If there were any contemporary (i.e., 1794) account of a mask being made, that would be intriguing. Without it, it sounds like someone selling tickets to her waxworks. I don't blame them, I just don't trust them.

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting subject (it's where a lot of my interests in art, history, politics and the macabre meet!) - but Tussaud was in showbiz and they're notorious for embellishing their stories to make them as grisly as possible! She says, for example, she took the cast of Marat's face while he was still warm! But, then again, she was local, and it's not impossible - she also says Robespierre actually gave her his clothes for their figure of him, which doesn't tally with the Robespierre-had-very-few-clothes story, but then, the 'he only had two coats' may be a myth, too! That's actually one of the things I love about this whole period, and has kept me interested for years: the inexhaustible supply of alternative and often contradictory accounts that you have to sift through - other periods are interesting, too, but people didn't write memoirs in earier centuries and little survives except archaology - and of course that the politics of the period are still a live issue in a way the politics of the 15thc are not!