Little by Edward Carey

I forget where I read about this book which led me to put this on my library hold list, but I am grateful that I did.  I read this as I was flying into the eye of a storm last week.  The bomb cyclone blizzard that hit Colorado shook everything up for a lot of people, myself included, but it did allow me time to really relish this book.
It is the retelling of how a penniless Swiss orphan who later became known as Madame Truffaut, founded a London museum full of effigies that still welcomes 2.5 million visitors a year . Early on, she is apprenticed to Dr. Curtius, whose job in Berne is to render diseased body parts in wax and tout them around the city as graphic public health warnings. The subject is Curtius’s boss, a well-known surgeon. But the girl, Marie, notes how, after two straws have been placed up the man’s nose so that he can breathe; after his face has been smoothed with oil, then with plaster, to make a cast, and after the cast is taken away, underneath there is only another human face, “humbled and vulnerable” – and equal. The surgeon understands this; when he sees the success Curtius’s heads are achieving, he cancels his wages, forcing Curtius and Marie to flee to Paris.

Presenting everyone as equal doesn’t sell.  And so Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, Robespierre and Louis XVI are added to the collection. Curtius himself is more interested in the people who are not fine – the murderers and castaways, the criminals and misfits – though, as the Revolution takes hold, it becomes increasingly unclear who’s who. Curtius and Marie cast them all.  And when it is all said and done, she leaves France, which is in ruins, and moves her show on the road to England.