Le Musée Grévin

La Salle des Colonnes, Musée Grévin, 9th Arr.

Le Musée Grévin is probably as close as Paris gets to a Pier 39 or Times Square-level cheesy tourist trap. Opened in 1882, it's a wax museum like any other you may have been to. There are some historical figures, current celebrities, and all-time favorite personages. I'm not well-versed on who's currently famous so I can't say whether the likenesses were spot on, but the figures were incredibly lifelike. Maybe it looked like Lady Gaga. Who knows? The dude in the jeep had a DeGaulle-like air about him, especially against a backdrop photo of the Arc de Triomphe. They also throw some curves at you, with figures placed and composed throughout the museum to look like other attendees. I stood for awhile watching a woman sitting on a bench near the entrance reading a museum guide. I was there just long enough that, had she moved, I would have been the creepy one.

Grévin is good for what it is--and since it is a bit off-the-beaten path, there did not seem to be too many tourists among the crowd. Most of what I overheard was in French, and there was not a beret in sight. They did a smart thing by not putting any barriers between the crowds and the "artworks," and encouraging people to snuggle in tight for a picture with their favorite model, actor, athlete, or potentate. On the other hand, there was no Chamber of Horrors--a baffling omission, considering that's the raison d'être of any self-respecting wax museum. Vincent Price even made a documentary about it--in 3D!

You can smell the cheese, but can you resist it?

Wax museums are not really my thing. So what was I doing in this one when I still have barely scratched the surface of actual Parisien museums?

Partly it was due to a slight case of cabin fever. I had been sick with a cold for most of week, and this was the first day for awhile that the weather cooperated with how I felt. Unfortunately, that day fell on a Tuesday, when most of the legit museums are closed, and it was still too cold to just wander outside.

But I was also curious to see the Jean-Paul Marat display, which supposedly includes the actual bathtub in which the revolutionary was stabbed to death by Charlotte Corday in 1793, as well as the blade that done him in (apologies to Audrey Hepburn for ending that sentence with a preposition, but I just don't know the proper sentence construction; "in him that done"?). Apparently, this used to be a much more graphic display, with blood flowing from Marat's mouth and the knife sunk into his chest. For whatever reason, it's been cleaned up considerably, with both blood and blade removed, and is composed closer to Jacques-Louis David's painting from the same year.

The death of Marat, Musée Grévin.

La Mort de Marat, Jacques-Louis David (1793), Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels.

It's not that I have a morbid interest in murder relics or a special fascination with this minor episode of the French Revolution. But the truth is I first learned about Marat from pretty much the exact same scene displayed at San Francisco's Wax Museum at Fisherman's Wharf when I was about 10 years old. So here was a chance to bring the whole issue full circle, for me, anyway.

What stuck with me all these years was not the macabre nature of the scene--that's what a 10 year old goes to a wax museum to see in the first place. But I was lucky to have picked up a book in the gift shop, with a small thumbnail sketch of each the the displays. Each time I flipped to the Chamber of Horrors section to read and re-read the descriptions of "The Pit and Pendulum," the Algerian hook, or Dracula, I must have paused long enough to imprint Marat's death on my memory. In fact, that little wax museum guidebook was where I probably came across several historical icons and oddities for the first time--certainly the first place that I learned about Anton Szandor LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan on California Street in San Francisco. I believe he was placed in the hall of religions, in the neighborhood of Moses and Lao Tzu. In my memory, he (LaVey, not Lao Tzu) was on the verge of plunging a knife into the chest of a nearly naked girl sprawled across an "altar." But then again, that's how LaVey would want to be remembered, so perhaps he still works his dark magic from the infernal realm.

Neither LaVey nor Satan has a display at Musée Grevin. But Mathieu Chedid ("M") does.

I don't know whatever happened to that guidebook--but now that I think about it, the first time I ever saw a reference to Talleyrand was in a Mad magazine. I had to run to the World Book Encyclopedia to figure out who this guy was and why he was worth lampooning. Sadly, in 1979 or so, Monsieur Talleyrand had no entry and remains mysterious to me to this day.

So apparently, all my prior knowledge of the French Revolution came from less than rigorous sources. But they got the ball rolling. The rest I can fill in from the Musée Grévin.

Like when Julius Caesar burned Joan of Arc at the Stake.