Page:Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands.djvu/378

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MADAME TUSSAUD S WAXWORK. 353

is heightened by the effect of internal machinery. Fiesche rolls his eyes fiercely ; Charlotte Cord ay seems to breathe while she slumbers ; Cobbett, in his usual gray dress, and slouched hat, sitting on a bench, turns his head as if regarding the groups around. Some ladies, about to take a seat near him, carefully left room so as not to incommode the interested observer. Henry the Eighth, with his coarse, bloated form, spreads out amid his six wives; the two repudiated and two decapitated ones looking as serene as the others. Mary, Queen of Scots, is receiving a harsh lecture from the im- courtly John Knox. Cardinal Wolsey towers in his unfallen pride. Voltaire wears his sardonic smile, and Napoleon is stretched mournfully upon the camp-bed, where death found him at St. Helena. The stiffness and angularity of limb which of old used to attend such representations, do not exist here, and it requires no great effort of imagination to think some of the forms are instinct with life.

There is an apartment devoted to terrific representa tions, and called " The Chamber of Horrors," to which, of course, the entrance is optional. Some of these are of the victims who perished by the guillotine during the revolution, and whose likenesses Madame Tussaud took immediately after their death, at the command of the National Assembly. Her reminiscences of France, in its stormiest period, are incorporated with her own Memoir, a recently published volume, where she is represented of highly respectable origin, education, and character. Its perusal will add to the interest with 23

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